Post Traumatic Amnesia and Music: Managing Behaviour through Song

Observing highly agitated, disoriented and distressed young adults experiencing posttraumatic amnesia is emotionally difficult for the family to witness, and problematic for staff managing them in acute hospital wards. Neurorehabilitation practitioners consider management of posttraumatic amnesia is best achieved by limiting the amount of stimuli they are exposed to. Consequently music during posttraumatic amnesia is considered contraindicated. This book offers an alternative perspective by showing how familiar and stylistically simple music reduces agitation and can improve orientation in 22 people during this phase of recovery. The effects are explained in terms of how patient preferred music creates a more familiar environment, which encourages interaction with reality. The findings are discussed in the context of arousal theory and provide new evidence that music is not contraindicated if used appropriately. In fact, the results of the study show that highly agitated people in posttraumatic amnesia can display reduced levels of agitation when their preferred music is played to them.