Chinese Music Therapy and Clinical Music Education to treat Anxiety Disorders: The PLUS-Model

Abstract

Anxiety disorders are broadly considered a global epidemic. In China, they rank among the most prevalent mental disorders and are seriously affecting the younger generation, hence the necessity to foster health education and sustainable resilience. Meta-synthetic construction resulted in a music-based therapeutic framework involving psycho-education, abbreviated as ‘P’, learning conditions ‘L’, underlying mechanisms ‘U’ and self-regulation ‘S’, hence the name ‘PLUS-model’. Interactive psycho-education includes information about anxiety disorders as well as interactive anxiety-management and adequate feedback about learning conditions and teaching styles, e.g. deficiency versus resource-oriented education. Relevant topics also concern underlying mechanisms such as genetic and epigenetic, as well as neurophysiological and psychological processes. In this model self-regulation comprises five domains, according to their initials the so-called ‘A-E-I-O-U-areas’, (i) Aesthetics and the healing power of beauty, (ii) Exposure training based on music-guided trance and imagination techniques, (iii) Immersion in music to enhance self-awareness and cope with obsessive-compulsive cognition, (iv) Organ-rebalancing through methods of Sound Focusing and (v) music-guided access to the unconscious alongside the exploration of one’s individual sources of anxiety. The PLUS-model is part of a comprehensive project to improve mental health in Chinese children and adolescents through arts-based methods for classroom education, which encompasses ‒ in addition to anxiety disorders ‒ attention deficit hyperactivity disorders, oppositional defiant disorders, depression and depressive traits, stress-related disorders and burnout syndromes, eating disorders such as anorexia nervosa or binge eating disorder, as well as disorders related to the COVID-19 pandemic, e.g. syndromes caused by lockdown and social distancing experiences.