Abstract Background Patients with schizophrenia often have emotional symptoms such as anxiety and depression. These symptoms not only aggravate the psychological pain of patients but also reduce their treatment compliance and the quality of social function recovery. At present, most studies focus on passive music listening, while systematic research on active music education intervention is relatively scarce. Therefore, this study takes active participatory music education as the core intervention form to explore its improvement effect on the emotional symptoms of schizophrenia patients, providing new practical paths and data support for clinical emotional symptom intervention. Methods The study adopted a randomized controlled trial design. A total of 86 patients from a certain mental health center who met the diagnostic criteria for schizophrenia in the 11th Edition of the International Classification of Diseases were selected as the research subjects and randomly divided into an intervention group of 43 cases and a control group of 43 cases in a 1:1 ratio. Both groups received conventional drug treatment and basic care. The intervention group received an additional 12-week music education intervention, three times a week, for 45 minutes each time. The research takes the Hamilton Anxiety Rating Scale (HAMA) and the Hamilton Depression Rating Scale (HAMD) as the main assessment tools. The scores of the two groups of patients were evaluated respectively before the intervention (T0), at 6 weeks of intervention (T1), and at 12 weeks of intervention (T2). Results After 6 weeks of intervention, the HAMA and HAMD scores of the intervention group decreased to 15.62 ± 2.83 points and 14.89 ± 2.75 points respectively, while those of the control group were 19.21 ± 3.01 points and 18.53 ± 2.89 points respectively. The difference between the two groups was significant (p.001). After 12 weeks of intervention, the HAMA and HAMD scores of the intervention group further decreased to 10.34 ± 2.15 points and 9.76 ± 2.03 points, respectively, while those of the control group were 16.87 ± 2.95 points and 15.92 ± 2.78 points, and the differences between the groups further widened. The comparison of T2 and T0 scores within the intervention group showed statistically significant differences (p.001), while the difference in T2 and T0 scores within the control group was significantly smaller than that in the intervention group (p.001). Discussion The research results confirm that music education intervention can significantly improve the anxiety and depression symptoms of patients with schizophrenia, and the longer the intervention time, the more significant the effect. Active music participation activates the patient's emotional center, enhances the patient's ability to perceive and express emotions, and at the same time increases the patient's willingness for social interaction, indirectly improving the treatment enthusiasm. This intervention program is easy to operate and has a high acceptance rate among patients. It can be promoted and applied as a supplementary means to conventional treatment in mental health institutions. Future research can incorporate patients of different disease courses and age groups for stratified analysis to further optimize the duration and content modules of intervention.
Xu et al. (Sun,) studied this question.