Mum's new care home brochure says arts therapies are "proven" for dementia. Should we be asking for music therapy or art therapy, and which one actually works better?

#1Lorna T.(Joined Oct 2026 · 3 posts)October 20, 2026, 10:26 am

Mum moves into a care home at the start of November. Alzheimer's, diagnosed three years ago, and it has got to the point where Dad cannot manage at home even with carers twice a day.

The home we have chosen is good on everything we can check. The brochure has a page on "therapeutic arts" which says that music and art therapies are "clinically proven to improve wellbeing in people living with dementia". There is a list of what they offer: a weekly singing group, an art club, and "access to music therapy and art therapy by arrangement".

By arrangement means we pay, I assume. My brother and I can probably manage one, not both. So which one? Is there research that says music is better than art for dementia, or the other way round? Mum was never musical but she drew all her life, she did the illustrations for the parish magazine for twenty years. My brother says music is the one everyone talks about for dementia so we should do that.

#2Yusuf A.(Joined Aug 2025 · 17 posts)October 20, 2026, 6:44 pm

We went through almost exactly this with my father last year, and paid privately for a music therapist in the end. So I am biased, but here is the one thing I would do before choosing anything: check that whoever "by arrangement" turns out to be is actually on the register. Our home had a woman they called the music therapist for two years and she was a community musician. Lovely, and not a therapist.

#3Lorna T.(Joined Oct 2026 · 3 posts)October 21, 2026, 7:58 am

That had not occurred to me at all. Which register?

#4linkworker_sam(Joined Oct 2025 · 14 posts)October 21, 2026, 1:12 pm

HCPC, if you are in the UK. You search the name and it tells you. Takes a minute.

Also, "clinically proven to improve wellbeing" is a sentence I see on a lot of brochures and I would ask the home what they are pointing to. Not as a trap, they probably copied it from somewhere. But it tells you something about how they think about the singing group versus the therapy.

#5Miriam HalsteadModerator(Joined Mar 2024 · 208 posts)October 24, 2026, 9:37 am

I moderate here and I run singing sessions in two care homes, so you are asking a community musician which art form to pick, and you should discount my answer accordingly. Rhian, who reviews the clinical side of this site, has been over the version below.

The short answer is that the research does not tell you music beats art or art beats music for dementia, because it has not been set up to compare them. What exists is evidence for each, on particular outcomes. For music, the 2025 Cochrane review of music based therapeutic interventions in dementia found a small improvement in depressive symptoms at moderate certainty, and moderate certainty evidence of no effect on agitation, and no evidence that any benefit lasts once the sessions stop. That is the reason music gets talked about: there is more of it to talk about, not that it has won a head to head. For art therapy in dementia this site does not hold a comparable figure at all. So "proven" is doing a lot of work in that brochure, and "which works better" has no honest answer from the trials.

Which means the choice comes back to your mother, and you have already told us the most useful fact. Twenty years of parish magazine illustrations is not nothing. People who have a lifelong relationship with an art form often still respond to it late in dementia, and some find it frustrating when their hands no longer do what they used to; an art therapist would be looking for both at assessment. Equally, many people who were never musical respond to singing. A good therapist of either kind will tell you after assessing her if they think the other would suit her better.

I wrote up how to think through this choice, including the registers for each profession and what the evidence does and does not say, in choosing between the arts therapies. And I would not let the paid option crowd out the free ones. The weekly singing group and the art club are not therapy, and they do not need to be, to be worth her going to.

#6Lorna T.(Joined Oct 2026 · 3 posts)October 24, 2026, 8:15 pm

That is a much more useful answer than the one I asked for. Thank you.

My brother has conceded the point about the magazine. We are going to wait until she has settled, ask the home who exactly "by arrangement" is, check them on the register as everyone has said, and ask for an art therapist to assess her first. And make sure she goes to the art club in the meantime, which will cost nothing and which she would have run herself, given half a chance.

#7stillpainting62(Joined Nov 2024 · 26 posts)October 30, 2026, 9:47 pm

Late to this. My dad goes to a Tuesday art group in his home, run by an artist, not a therapist, and it has been mostly good for him with one very bad afternoon, which is a thread of its own further down this board. If your mum ends up at the art club, ask what is written down after it and who reads it. That one question would have saved us a lot.