Huge rise in musicians’ mental health issues
NewsThe British Association for Performing Arts Medicine has issued new data on mental health in the arts.
In 2023 there was a 396% surge in mental health consultations and a 357% increase since 2019 in patients who contacted BAPAM for mental health reasons. Musculoskeletal injuries also dominated BAPAM’s services.
Mental health accounted for 32% of consultations. Musculoskeletal injuries accounted for over 40%.
Vocal problems comprised 15% of BAPAM’s casework in 2023 compared to 6% in 2019
I know of one thing that has impacted my mental health as a musician: The comments section of Slippedisc.
Did it really impact your mental health, or did it merely leave you feeling a bit angry and disdainful?
… and how does that make you feel?
The roll of dishonour who/that directly contributes to the epidemic of stress, anxiety, loss, dispossession and depression amongst musicians:
1) Arts Council England.
2) Cynical executives building their own careers on ‘efficiency savings’
..they know who they are.
3) Brexit’s disastrous consequences for the arts.
4) 14 years of Conservative neglect of the arts, whilst tanking the economy.
5) National defenestration of funding for music in schools.
It’s time for change, or there’ll be very little left.
LSO shall be assessing players to keep the standard up. Mental health issues right there.
Those who actually go ahead and have the courage to seek professional help are actually the wiser ones, and perhaps the luckier ones in a sense — not to minimize the impact of what they’re going through, as both mental and physical injuries can truly be debilitating.
As a professional musician for over 30 years, it has become clear to me over time that mental illness truly is prevalent among classical music professionals. These numbers, in my opinion, are just the tip of the iceberg. I see in this the result of several factors coming together to create a perfect storm.
Start with a childhood and an adolescence essentially stunted, due to the imperative of starting to learn an instrument early — thereby often missing out on experiences essential to any human being’s development. Add to that the impact of certain teachers — some of them quite known — who cannot help but perpetuate a destructive, critical attitude that their students end up internalizing. Then comes the cutthroat, competitive environment one has to navigate in order to get a respectable position and then, once on the job, the inevitable criticism of colleagues who somehow can never seem to be satisfied with one’s playing, expressing both an intense form of scrutiny as well as a form of snobbery emanating from hugely inflated egos. Add to that finally the enormous impact on one’s personal life of performing on a schedule opposite to most of the population — evenings and weekends.
All of this is somehow a little ridiculous and futile, especially when one takes into account that most of these individuals, unless they happen to be a composer, are essentially spending a lifetime performing scores written by someone else, scores which have already been performed literally thousands of times by millions of performers throughout history, and yet few classical musicians achieve enough critical distance to appreciate the relative importance (or perhaps unimportance) of what they do, in a world where others actually perform life-saving surgeries, do research that benefits most of humanity, invent technologies that literally transform our way of life, or create works from scratch that help us better understand ourselves and which contribute to our common cultural heritage.
The over-specialization that inevitably comes with the territory of becoming a viable classical musician comes with an enormous psychological toll, and very few musicians develop enough self-knowledge to properly address it during their lifetimes — paradoxically living somehow on automatic pilot, despite the fact that the training of a classical musician demands, in fact, developing a level of self-awareness that very few can actually achieve.
Allow me to offer the opposite viewpoint….as a child from a miserably dysfunctional family background, the chance to study classical music came relatively late. At 11yrs old I discovered the magical soundscapes of Ravel, Debussy, Stravinsky, Rimsky Korsakov, Mussorgsky etc. and I was hooked. My previously chaotic world suddenly began to make some sense….I practiced my instrument methodically for one hour every day, joining a good Friday night youth orchestra age 14, ( and always making sure I was up early next morning in time for my various Saturday supermarket cashier jobs to help pay for lessons.) After 40 yrs in the music profession I would refute any suggestion that classical music is a specific breeding ground for mental illness, snobbery or for class divides. Classical music absolutely demands and requires your full attention but that is it’s virtue. It has offered me the chance to tour the world see places play great music, make lifelong friends and it gave my life meaning, saving me from myself as a youngster.
Therefore the parents of musicians-to-be, as it is them who make the first decision to choose music as a way of life for their children, should early enough ask themselves this question: will my child be willing to work the hours that are leisure time for most of people? Chopin insisted that his pupils practice 3 hours a day at the maximum. And he meant advanced students, not small children.
The notion of mental health has been stretched in recent years so that ordinary anxiety and distress in response to life-events tend to be treated as cases of mental ill health. Schoolchildren worried about their exams seem now to be classified as having mental health problems–I think I heard the BBC refer to these as *disorders*.
To say this is not to be dismissive of the poor conditions under which many musicianshave to work or of the various factors that contribute to those conditions. They are understandably worried and anxious, and the circumstances which naturally give rise to these concerns need to be remedied. But is it really right to say that these musicians are mentally ill?
Indeed it often seems as if the entire classical music world is being medicalized – ‘normal’ conditions of musicians being classified as disorders, which is incorrect, since music life is in itself one large disorder.
Does not surprise me at all!
Sally
You can also get mental health issues by proxy if you work for a musician and not being a musician yourself. I think of poor wives or children of players, or PA’s who get all the crap of the profession bang! on their table and have to work through it all.
Sally