Healing notes> Music program at Acadia Hospital helping youngsters recover from traumatic experiences

Stan Freeman, a board member for both Acadia Hospital and the Bangor Symphony Orchestra, wasn’t the first person ever to glimpse the connective thread between music and mental health.

But he was the starting point for music therapy now being practiced among Bangor’s own troubled youngsters.

Freeman, a retired education professor with a counseling background, had a vision of musicians playing live at Acadia, a psychiatric hospital. He imagined related research to find out if patients were helped by the exposure. He proposed his scheme to the hospital staff, and they were interested.

So he shared his bright idea with Susan Wesley, a counselor and former music teacher who was already exploring the link between human psychology and the arts.

Music has made its way to Acadia, though not quite in the way that Freeman imagined it. Wesley investigated the children’s unit at the hospital and found the kids weren’t ready for a full-on symphony visit.

Instead, she visited the unit twice a week last fall, laying the groundwork by introducing small groups of youngsters to music and imagery.

The idea, she said, was “to bring children to a place they could trust” and remind them how to “find good things to imagine.”

In her third year of private practice in Bangor, Wesley uses the arts, especially music, to help her adult clients work through stress, midlife changes and relationship issues. Accompanied by music, she guides them on imagined journeys through the woods or fields of the natural world.

At Acadia, it took some time to coax her young travelers to open the door to such adventures.

“It’s very different with children who have had traumatic experiences,” she said. “They don’t just kick back.”

Her patients range from 6 to 12 years old, and some of their brief resumes include abuse, depression or suicidal thoughts. For them, imagination can be a friend or an enemy: a way to leave a hurtful experience — and a means to conjure it up again later, in memory.

When Wesley asked the kids to join her on an imaginary walk in the woods, some of them opted to keep their eyes open. Some said, afterward, that they “didn’t see anything,” but enjoyed the experience anyhow. Others engaged completely.

The children sang American Indian songs about night and dawn, complete with hand gestures, and drew pictures of fall and winter trees. They played instruments and sang carols accompanied by a guitar.

“It’s expression outside the verbal frame,” said Wesley. “A lot of children won’t talk about trauma, but they’ll express it in sound, or drawing … It’s another dimension when words haven’t been able to help yet.”

Sometimes words did help. Guided by Wesley, the children described the sound of rainbows and the taste of sun dancing on water.

“I hear the Rainbow — its hum is a smooth crackle,” goes one group poem. “Its touch is like nothing — no Thing.”

Wesley is now working with a half dozen patients one-on-one, to assess their auditory skills and move toward more active music-making.

“Playing an instrument can be a way to express excitement, agitation, the telling of something heavy or weighted,” she explained.

The project has already achieved community support. Mike Crowley, vice president of Eastern Maine Charities, said a BSO concert raised several hundred dollars for the therapy, and donors in a wider fund drive last year gave $3,000 for therapy with music.

Brandi Buteau, a nursing supervisor on the children’s floor, said the one-on-one therapy is especially effective. Wesley has been popular with boys ages 9, 10 and 11, but “boys that age tend to feed off each other,” she said. “Once they get in a one-on-one situation, they’re able to focus.”

She said Wesley has shown an impressive ability to communicate with the children.

“She looks at them, and it seems to settle them,” she said.

In England in April, Wesley will describe the local program to an international audience, at a world symposium on culture, health and the arts.

As for a symphony performance at the hospital, Stan Freeman is still hopeful that day will come. He believes every symphony performance has the power, calming or energizing, to help listeners process experiences.

“There’s music therapy, which is something very specific, and there’s something else I call therapeutic music, which doesn’t require a license,” he said. “Live music is very therapeutic.”