Effect of Music Therapy on Modulation of Attention among Schizophrenic patients

BACKGROUND: Attention is an important aspect of personality & activity of brain, but can be highly disrupted and disorganized in schizophrenic patients. Musiccan have the power to increase the attention at task and work memory. AIM: To investigate the impact of receptive musical interventions on attention modulation in patients diagnosed with schizophrenia.. METHODOLOGY: A true experimental research design with quantitative approach was used .Through simple random sampling 40 schizophrenic clients (20 each in control & experimental) admitted in selected psychiatry hospital were selected as study sample. Study was done at CIIMHANS, Chhattisgarh. Outcome measures included Attention by Letter Cancellation Test & Digit Span Test ,Sociodemographic tool based on age, gender, occupation, socioeconomic status, educational qualification and type of schizophrenia .Receptive Music therapy was given for 1 hour/2 weeks .The ragas included were ;Raag Desh, Raag Brindavana Sarang ,Raag Neelam Bari, Raag Bhopali, Raag Hamsadhwani. Post test was collected. RESULT : Music therapy appeared to modulate the attention span of patients, as indicated by the differences between pre- and post-test scores in the experimental group. On the Digit Symbol Test (DST), the mean score increased to 17.05 ± 3.10 (t = 1.71, df = 38, p = 0.094), suggesting a trend toward improvement. On the Letter Cancellation Test (LCT), the improvement was statistically significant, with a mean post-test score of 26.45 ± 2.47 (t = 16.7, df = 38, p = 0.00001). Additionally, attention span was found to be associated with several demographic variables: marital status (χ² = 5.15, df = 2, p = 0.07), gender (χ² = 4.414, df = 1, p = 0.035), and religion (χ² = 5.0, df = 1, p = 0.02). Overall, these findings suggest that music therapy may significantly modulate the attention span of clients with schizophrenia, particularly as seen in the LCT results, despite the DST not reaching conventional levels of significance (p > 0.05). CONCLUSION: Therapeutic music intervention successfully increased attention span in the given study.Nursing professionals could offer Indian classical music therapy to regulate attention and alleviatenegative thoughts and mental illnesses.