Mental Health and Choral Music

We are looking back at the October 2021 issue of Choral Journal in this week’s post. That issue was a focus on mental health, and it featured several articles related to mental health and choral music, including “Remember You: Mental Health in a Life Dedicated to Choral Music” by Stephanie and Troy Robertson. You can read it in its entirety at acda.org/choraljournal. Following is a portion from the article.

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Albert Bandura’s social learning theory highlights the importance of models in shaping our behavior. He identifies that “most behaviors that people display are learned, either deliberately or inadvertently, through the influence of example.”1

His contemporaries, Latane and Darley, tested the influence of the presence of others in emergency conditions.2 When people were left alone in a room that slowly began to fill with smoke, they reported the “fi re in the next room” within two minutes. However, introducing others significantly reduced the rate of reporting. When multiple study participants were in the room together, only 38% of participants ever reported the room filling with smoke (74% of individuals by themselves reported), and when participants were placed in a room with passive confederates (people who knew about the experiment and who acted like it was normal for the room to fill with smoke), only 10% reported the apparent fire in the next room! How often do we sit in a “room on fire,” look to our colleagues to see if anyone else recognizes the problem, then assume we are the ones who are wrong?

Social work researcher Brené Brown says, “It takes courage to say yes to rest and play in a culture where exhaustion is seen as a status symbol.” Exhaustion, depression, lethargy, lack of creativity, even if only intermittent problems, can be signs that it is time to reassess our lives and prioritize health.

In preparing for presentations and this article, we spoke to choral directors in a variety of stages in their lives and their careers. They come to the subject of mental health with very different perspectives, often contradictory. Among them was a director who expressed fear of a room-on-fire situation as we prepare for a new season:
“I know teachers who are simply burned out right now because of the difficulties of this past year, but they’re also eager to get started again. I’m worried that they want to get started again so badly, they’ll just say yes to everything.”

One director in his twenty-fifth year of work spoke of the stigma surrounding therapy. Another spoke with relief of the decreased risk of stigma when seeking help. One director a few years into retirement has sought to be as busy as possible and loved every minute of it. Another spoke of the cycle of commitment, overcommitment, and pruning back in order to maintain sanity. One young mother spoke of leaving the profession and what a relief it was to focus on family. Another reminisced about a life dedicated to music, happy knowing that they had spent so many years giving the gift of song away, that they had not changed their path when it was difficult.

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Read the full article in the October 2021 issue of Choral Journal at acda.org/choraljournal