Miriam Halstead

My father lived with vascular dementia for six years. Language went first and went slowly, so we had a long time to notice what was left. Near the end of it a musician came to his care home on a Thursday afternoon and started something he had known since he was a boy, and he sang two verses without stumbling, then looked at me as if I were the one who had been away. Twenty minutes later he could not tell me my name. I have thought about that afternoon more than I have thought about almost anything else, and I want to be careful about what I say it meant.

What it made me do was go looking. I expected to find either a clear body of research or nothing at all, and instead I found a field that talks in two registers at once. There are randomised trials in it, some of them large and carefully done. There is also a circuit of reports, conference slides and funding bids in which a percentage nobody can source sits in the same paragraph as a Cochrane review, and a guideline gets cited for a recommendation it does not contain. The two get quoted with equal confidence, usually by people with entirely good intentions, and a family trying to decide whether something is worth their hope cannot tell them apart.

I am not a therapist and this site is careful never to imply otherwise. I did a postgraduate certificate in arts and health, which is real training and is not a protected qualification, and I say that plainly rather than dressing it into something it is not. In the UK, music therapist and art therapist are titles you have to be registered to use, and I am not registered to use either. What I do is the other thing: I run weekly singing and songwriting sessions in two care homes and on a stroke rehabilitation unit, as a community practitioner, which puts me on the unregulated side of a line this whole site is about. That turns out to be a useful place to write from, because I am describing a distinction I sit on the wrong side of rather than one I am defending.

Rhian Vaughan and Anna Bergström pull apart what I write before any of it goes up: Rhian on whether I have described the work of a registered therapist correctly, Anna on whether the numbers say what I have claimed they say. Between the three of us the aim is narrow and I would rather state it small than large. Not to persuade anybody that the arts heal. Only to make it possible to tell, on any given page, which claims are carrying evidence and which are carrying stories, and to be told plainly which of the two you are being offered.

I did not set out to change what I do for a living. I went looking for a reading list and ended up with a keyboard in the boot of my car and a Tuesday morning in a day room.