No abstract

Molloy College, a private liberal arts college in New York, founded by the Dominican sisters of Amityville, partnered with PRN (Physicians, Residents, Nurses) Relief International and the Dominican Sisters in Jamaica to organize a twice-annual service trip providing primary care, speech-language pathology, psychiatric-mental health care, and medical/surgical teams in rural and urban Jamaica. During the week-long trips, medical staff and speech pathologists move in teams from clinic to clinic, while mental health professionals, along with midwives and psychiatric nurses, work exclusively with the residents and staff at Homestead Place of Safety in Stony Hill, St. Andrew in the northern outskirts of Kingston, Jamaica. The state-operated facility, established as a home away from home, houses girls between the ages of 12 and 18 who experienced neglect or abuse, victimization, and sexual assault, or those in conflict with the law. Music Therapy services were included as part of the mental health team for the first time in October 2016 and provided an outlet for self-expression, an opportunity to foster resilience, a strengthened sense of community, and a supportive response to trauma. In past years, the mental health team found that the girls engaged freely in creative outlets such as art [therapy], and that music was an integral part of their culture and daily routine. Music therapy was therefore recommended to help normalize the therapeutic process, increase engagement, and develop therapeutic rapport.

My presentation is about my work with multiply handicapped children. When I speak of multiply handicapped children, I am referring to children with severe disabilities who have neurological problems in combination with mental retardation. They may also have sensory problems. These children are sometimes also labeled profoundly multiply disabled or severely impaired.These children present unique problems in music therapy and other treatment settings. Two of them stand out to me. One is that the level of functioning for many is extremely low, leading in my experience to many instances where, even in the best circumstances, they spend a great deal of time with no discernible responses. The other is that their responses are extremely inconsistent so that it is difficult to either predict what will help them to respond at any particular time or with more consistency. I believe that this latter problem is due to their severe neurological involvement. As I have worked with these children and read of other music therapists' work, I have frequently wondered if there is something that I am not doing or that I could be doing differently to remediate these problems. Of course, I always work to do what I can to help them respond and to improve the consistency of their responses, but I believe that the problems that I have mentioned are due to their particular neurological make-up and level of functioning rather than to me not doing something correctly.