Global Family Doctor

Music and Mental Health: Tone of Mind

July 2021 Working Party News

July, 2021

Discover the new “Music and Mental Health Project”, an effort of the WONCA Working Party for Mental Health led by Alfredo de Oliveira Neto (Brazil), Arnab Bishnu Chowdhury (India) and Moisés Nunes (Brazil) that seeks to mitigate through music the psychosocial effects posed by the COVID19.

Alfredo de Oliveira Neto writes about the creation of this project below.

The Music and Mental Health Project emerged from conversations at the WONCA Working Party for Mental Health from the challenges posed by the COVID19 pandemic and the production of virtual projects.

My experience as a musician includes 13 years in a band that brings together mental health patients and health professionals called Harmonia Enlouquece (Harmony gets Crazy) in Rio de Janeiro / Brazil. Therefore, with the help of Chris Dorwick, Chair of WPMH - WONCA, I designed the project aiming to map similar musical groups around the world.

Starting on Google Forms, we were able to map 30 projects in 14 different countries worldwide in October 2020.

After setting a WhatsApp group, we held some meetings and set up a Live with three music and mental health experiences and compose one distance music about psychosocial suffering in the pandemic, a hopeful song.

Arnab Bishnu Chowdhury (India), Moisés Nunes (Brazil), and I composed and recorded remotely "Tone of Mind". We also produced a teaser for the event with WPMH members singing verses from The Beatles' Here Comes the Sun.

The event's teaser and Tone of Mind video were produced by Media East Productions Company in the Philippines, with the support of Helen Sigua, family physician, WPMH member, who was essential for the project's realization.

We hope to continue our efforts and unify through music in upcoming projects at WONCA Working Party on Mental Health to alleviate some of this excess of psychosocial suffering globally.

On June 26, the project presented three music and mental health experiences (Brazil, Australia and India) and the official launch of their music video "Tone of Mind".