Chinese music therapy to treat depression in children and adolescents: The BARIT-Model

Depression is broadly considered a global epidemic. In China it ranks among the most prevalent mental disorders and is seriously affecting the younger generation (prevalence between 4% and 41%), hence the necessity to foster health education and sustainable resilience. Meta-synthetic construction resulted in a music-based model of educational therapy comprising five principles, beauty, activation, responsiveness, immersion and transformation, hence the name ‘BARIT-model’: (i) referring to anthropological, psychological and neuroscientific aesthetics, the approach benefits from the healing power of aesthetic experience, (ii) behavioural activation is widely regarded as an efficient approach to treat depression. Different from conventional cognitive behavioural therapy, the BARIT-model involves artistic activities such as music improvisation, sound scene improvisation, vocal experiments or creative variations of Chinese martial arts, (iii) responsiveness concerns the qualitative similarity of emotion and music, alongside the patients’ feeling of being ‘understood’ by what they are listening to, (iv) while depressive mood tends to occupy the whole person, music immersion can help to escape that ‘pathological cage’, (v) finally, traumatic roots of depression need therapeutic processing, such as artistic symbolisation, intermodal transformation and relabelling of traumata as potential source of creative performance. The BARIT-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 depression ‒ attention deficit hyperactivity disorders, oppositional defiant disorders, anxiety disorders, stress-related disorders and burnout syndromes, eating disorders such as anorexia nervosa or binge eating, as well as disorders related to the COVID-19 pandemic, e.g. developmental syndromes caused by lockdown and social distancing.