The only option near me is music therapy over video. Is that a real session or a compromise?

#1Marion K.(Joined Jul 2024 · 38 posts)July 27, 2026, 10:41 am

Rural, an hour and a half from the nearest town with anything in it, and I have spent three months trying to find music therapy for my brother, who is 44 and had a brain injury in 2023.

Nothing within travelling distance. Two therapists I contacted work online only. One of them was completely upfront that she has never worked with brain injury over video and would want to talk to his rehabilitation team first, which I thought was a good sign rather than a bad one.

What I cannot judge is whether an online session is the actual thing or a watered down version being sold at the same price. He has some processing delay and gets tired quickly, and half of what I have read about music therapy seems to be about being in a room with somebody and instruments. You cannot pass somebody a drum through a laptop.

Has anybody done this either as a participant or a family member. Did it work. And did the price come down.

#2linkworker_sam(Joined Oct 2025 · 14 posts)July 28, 2026, 9:03 am

Only a partial answer and it is from the community end rather than the clinical one.

Online has made a real difference to the referrals I make for people who cannot get out, and the honest pattern I see is that it works better for the talking and writing based groups than for anything where the point is doing a thing together in a room. Our online creative writing group is thriving. The movement one never really took, and people drifted off it within about six weeks.

No idea whether that transfers to one to one work with a therapist. Different animal.

#3mikeatthepiano(Joined Feb 2025 · 19 posts)July 29, 2026, 4:22 pm

Technical point that nobody warned me about and it wasted two months.

I tried running an online singalong during a period when I could not get into the homes. You cannot sing together over a video call. There is a lag of a fraction of a second in both directions and it is enough that everybody ends up chasing each other. I only worked out afterwards that this is a known limitation of ordinary video software rather than something wrong with my broadband.

What worked was me playing and everybody else singing muted, which is a different activity and I stopped calling it the same thing. For one to one it may matter much less, and if a therapist is improvising with your brother in real time I would want to know how they handle it, because that is the one thing the medium genuinely cannot do.

#4Miriam HalsteadModerator(Joined Mar 2024 · 208 posts)August 3, 2026, 11:30 am

Mike has identified the real constraint and I want to build on it rather than repeat it, and then say what I think you should actually ask.

Take the honest position on evidence first, because it is the question underneath yours. I have no figure to give you. No comparison of online against in person arts therapy is locked in this site's source document, so nothing is printed here, and that is a statement about what has been traced rather than a verdict in either direction. On this site that is a Tier 3 label of the nobody-has-looked-properly kind. It would be very easy for me to tell you a comfortable thing here and I am not going to.

What can be said without a study. Online does not change what makes it therapy. Assessment, goals for a named person, notes, clinical supervision, a planned ending, and in the UK a title protected in law. A therapist working over video is doing all of those or none of them, and the medium is not what decides it. What happens in a music therapy session describes the work itself, and the parts that are about relationship and attention do not obviously live in the room rather than in the screen.

What the medium does change, on the evidence of everyone I know who has tried it. Anything requiring two people to make sound at the same instant is out, for the reason Mike gave. Sharing instruments is out. Reading somebody's body from the chest up is much harder, and for a person with a brain injury, fatigue and processing delay, that reading is a large part of the therapist's job. Against that: no travel, which for your brother may be the difference between doing it and not, and being at home, which some people find easier and some find much harder because home is where they are least like a patient.

Five questions I would ask both therapists, and I would ask them in the same email so you can compare the answers.

How much of your work is online, and how much of it has been with people with a brain injury. What do you do about the timing lag, since improvising together in real time is the thing video handles worst. Who is with him during the session, and what do you want them doing. How will you and I know whether it is working, in what timeframe, and what happens if the answer is no. And what is the fee, is it different from your in person fee, and is there a reduced rate for a block.

On the fee, so you have a floor to compare against. The British Association for Music Therapy gives a recommended figure of from £52.00 upwards for an individual session in the UK, and it is a floor rather than a typical price, so do not be shocked if the quotes come in above it. How to find a music therapist covers the register check, which I would do before any of this and which takes about a minute.

The thing I would hold onto from your own post. One of them told you she has not worked with brain injury over video and wants to speak to his rehabilitation team. That is the most useful sentence anybody has said to you in three months, and it is worth more than a confident answer.

#5stillpainting62(Joined Nov 2024 · 26 posts)August 5, 2026, 7:58 am

Agree about the fatigue. My father tires after twenty minutes of anything and a screen seems to speed that up rather than slow it down. Whether that is the screen or the concentrating I could not tell you.

#6Marion K.(Joined Jul 2024 · 38 posts)August 26, 2026, 6:14 pm

Where this has got to, though it is not a resolution.

Both are registered, I checked. The one who mentioned the rehabilitation team has spoken to his physiotherapist and has suggested starting with four sessions of half an hour rather than the usual hour, specifically because of the fatigue, and reviewing after the four. Her fee is the same as her in person fee, which she explained is because the preparation and the notes take the same time. I had assumed online would be cheaper and I am not sure my assumption was reasonable.

First one is next Thursday. My brother is not enthusiastic, which I am trying to treat as information rather than as an obstacle. I will come back and say what happened either way, including if it is a washout.