Clinical Research Directory

Can the Affects Conveyed by Baroque Music Reduce Anxiety in Patients With Major Depressive Disorder ?

Sponsor: Centre Hospitalier Intercommunal de Toulon La Seyne sur Mer

Summary

Major depressive disorder, or characterized depressive episode, is a common illness that limits psychosocial functioning and impairs quality of life. The initial goal of treatment for a major depressive episode is complete remission of depressive symptoms. The most commonly used treatments are antidepressants, psychotherapy or a combination of medication and psychotherapy. Music therapy can be considered as one of the complementary therapies in the treatment of the characterized depressive episode and many studies have shown a beneficial effect of musical interventions, even of short duration, on depression and anxiety. In depressive disorders, therapies such as hypnosis or phenomenological psychotherapies lead to modifications of consciousness during which the subject finds the means, notably non-reflexive and in the realm of the imaginary, to overcome anxiety. Generally speaking, in the field of musical cognition, it is considered that music affects the emotions. Unfortunately this approach is often insufficiently refined in cognitive psychology since it is most generally interested in the 6 fundamental emotions: joy, anger, fear, sadness, surprise, disgust. However, during the Baroque period (end of the 16th and 17th centuries), various philosophers and musicians analyzed with great finesse not these fundamental emotions, but more precisely the passions, or "shocks of the soul", that is to say the affects in their great diversity. These affects or passions are thus at the center of Baroque musical composition. In the Barhepsy project, it is suggested that listening to Baroque music, thanks to the rhetoric of the passions included in it, would allow the mobilization of the patients' affects and thus reduce their state of anxiety. During a follow-up consultation, the effects of a 30-minute "musical path" of baroque pieces will be evaluated, exemplifying the reduction of anxiety and the subsequent appeasement, on the conscious experience of subjects suffering from a characterized depressive state associated with anxious symptoms.

Official title: Can the Affects Conveyed by Baroque Music and Its Rhetoric Reduce Anxiety in Patients With Major Depressive Disorder Associated With Anxiety Symptoms?

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