The Benefit of Music on Young People’s Mental Health

By Natasha Wood, Workshop Facilitator & Safeguarding Lead (DSL)

"Music helps me relax and enjoy my life"

At Hybrid 3, we believe it’s incredibly important for young people to have access to the arts. Young people increasingly have to seek creative facilitation on their own, especially since some schools have taken away the options to pursue creative avenues. 

Accessing creative spaces can be extremely difficult for a multitude of different reasons and barriers. This includes economic deprivation, special educational needs and mental health struggles. Hybrid 3 strives to break those barriers to ensure that our Youth Provision is completely accessible to anyone who would benefit from what we do. 

Here, I'd like to highlight the ways we do this, and discuss why it is so important to have accessible sessions for the benefit of young people's mental health.  

Protected Characteristics 

Upon signing up to our programmes, young people and parents have an opportunity to tell us about any protected characteristics the young person may have. I will be using stats taken from this data to help discuss the different barriers, however because this is an optional question, statistics for each category are likely to be higher in reality.  

‘Mental health struggles’ is a broad umbrella term for many different conditions and forms 

of mental ill health. Many people will experience a form of mental ill health for varying 

time frames and severity. There are a plethora of causes of mental ill health and it is important that we understand that everyone experiences and deals with it differently. 

When working with youth groups we keep this in mind in order for us to effectively safeguard our young people and to help pave the way for improved wellbeing.    

40.6% of young people who attend the sessions say they experience mental health struggles. This is quite a large number, with a lot of young people disclosing they 

experience anxiety and/or depression. 

One young person on our programme said: “I go through slight depressive periods which massively affect my confidence and drive”. Another said that they are, “struggling with some level of stress, anxiety and low mood”. 

Economic Deprivation

Economic deprivation is a barrier relating to the lack of financial resources and essential assets necessary for a basic standard of living. 

This unfortunately leads to reduced opportunities due to families needing to use the small amount of resources they have to just live daily. If a child has an interest in the arts or music, economic deprivation may lead to exclusion from certain resources, materials or clubs.

This is why we ensure all of our youth sessions are free with an option for families in the financial position to donate to help fund positions for those who may be from disadvantaged backgrounds.

3.1% of our young people, who chose to disclose, come from a background of economic deprivation. This is only what has been reported, and we know that for a variety of reasons, a family could become economically deprived. We want to ensure that those families and their young people still have access to the arts/music no matter the reason.

How we help

Although it is upsetting that such a large number of our young people experience mental ill health, there is a huge positive that they have in common and that’s their love for music. 

One person said: “Music helps me relax and enjoy my life.” Music is one of the most beneficial tools for our young people to use to express themselves. Whether it's the writing process, the live performing or just connecting with other artists around them, it can be life changing. 

To make this tool the most effective it can be, we have a team of fantastic, talented and kind-hearted band coaches. These coaches are here to support and guide our young people on their musical journey towards greatness. 

On a basic level, bands come to the sessions to play their instruments, practice and 

create songs but it goes so much deeper than that. Our sessions help to promote 

confidence, discipline and self discovery. 

It's “a safe space” to practice that allows young people to discover and grow in both themselves and as artists. 

“We feel more confident performing and songwriting feels more natural.” We have had young people who were extremely anxious to participate go on to play with other young musicians and are now gearing up to perform on a stage. 

We have seen young people experience breakthrough moments where everything has clicked and fallen into place for them. From all of these little wins comes some fearless young musicians ready to take over the music scene.  

Our sessions are completely accessible, meaning that people with SEN can join in, too. In fact, 9.4% of our young people have SEN. We support these young people by having staff who have both personal and professional experiences with autism and other conditions, as well as having continuous teamwide training to find new ways to connect and facilitate anyone with additional needs.