Music and Mental Health

To mark World Mental Health Day, Tom Service presents a special programme in collaboration with Professor Sally Marlow, a mental health specialist at King’s College London and BBC Radio 3’s first ever Researcher in Residence. Composer Gavin Higgins talks to Tom about how his early musical life in brass bands helped him to deal with his symptoms of Obsessive Compulsive Disorder. We visit Bethlem Gallery to meet composer and artist Gawain Hewitt and Fiona Lambert from City of London Sinfonia's 'Sound Young Minds' project, a music-making programme with young people under the care of psychiatric hospitals. Daisy Fancourt talks about a large-scale study looking at how singing can be used to treat postnatal depression, and James Sanderson from NHS England sets out what he sees as music's role in social prescribing. We explore mental health among musicians with writer, musician and mental health advocate Tabby Kerwin reflecting on the situation in the brass band movement, and James Ainscough from the charity Help Musicians discusses the recent increase in the number of musicians from across the industry seeking help from their new charity Music Minds Matter. Plus we talk to soprano Patricia Auchterlonie, composer Oliver Leith and director Anna Morrissey about their new opera Last Days at the Linbury Theatre and how the mental health and wellbeing of the cast is being supported. And we're in Crook in County Durham to catch up with the community arts organisation Jack Drum Arts, which provides music sessions to help support the mental health of children and young people in the local area.