MUMBAI: We often wonder why someone has taken a step as drastic as suicide. And every time you open the newspaper you come across umpteen such cases across the globe every single day. The question is what is it that leads to this tragedy?  The answer is unstable mental health. A subject mostly ignored takes many lives across the globe. This also highlights the need for people to seek help on mental health issues and music is of great help here. 

With the rising cases of illnesses especially terminal illnesses, suffering patients tend to go through various mental health issues such as depression and need a lot of support and care. They need professional help to deal with their anxiety and depression. And a guide to this happens to be Mpower, a mental health movement founded by Neerja Birla.

 Mpower endeavours to be the movement to affect change and have held many workshops to create awareness on mental health issues and the ways to deal with them. The organisation would soon be coming up with a workshop on 19 May, it would be a Music Therapy session for children with special needs, to help them learn, accept and express themselves and build bonds with others.  The workshop is mainly for children with mental health concerns like autistic spectrum disorder, down syndrome, development delay and learning difficulties.

To get to an insight about how music really helps benefit your state of mind, we spoke to Psychologist Juhi Parmar, working at Mpower, “Music is found as a very helpful kit. Different music sounds tend to calm you and have a varied kind of an impact. To use a guitar, you have to be very specific about where you place your fingers. Or if you want to hit with a heel of your hand or with your fingers, this helps you focus on your motor activity, coordination and attention focus. This helps you pay attention to different sounds that go to your brain when you’re working on these skills through music. This helps you with different activities. Also, the workshop happening on 19 May would be an hour long multiple activity session with instruments which would aim at specific functions.”