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Happy New Year! Hope you had a wonderful, joyful, and peaceful beginning of 2017.The year 2016 encompassed unique and exciting developments in the Music Therapy field around the Latin America region. As we reached the end of the year, an additional significant achievement has been made. Congratulations to Chile on having received official acknowledgement about the discipline of Music Therapy!To learn further details about this significant milestone in Chile, I got in touch with Silvia Andreu from Santiago de Chile city, music therapist at the Facultad De Artes, Universidad De Chile.When asked about the current situation she said: “During this year, there has been a significant achievement, consisting in beginning the process of official acknowledgement of Music Therapy by the Ministry of Public Health. This means that there will be politics indicating that music therapy is a relevant therapy that contributes to human health. Furthermore, a national register of music therapists will be released and written material will be offered to the users of public health services, aiming to promote the benefits of music therapy. This means for us one enormous first step towards the final goal of being formally integrated in the health teams. Within this context, in 2017, we will continue this phase of consolidation of music therapy in Chile, strengthening the relationship with the Health Ministry, widening the offer of training programmes for music therapists in Chile, and offering diverse activities promoting music therapy in Chile.”I took the opportunity to gather more information about the history of music therapy in Chile. Here, I list some crucial information that Silvia shared:
- Music therapy officially started in 1999, with the creation of the Postgraduate Specialization Course in Music Therapy in the Faculty of Arts of Universidad de Chile.
- The first document that made reference to the use of music as a means of support in professional therapeutic processes was published in 1977, with a complete edition of the Chilean Music Journal (Revista Musical Chilena) dedicated to therapeutic uses of music. In this journal edition, the musicologist María Ester Grebe systematized the work existing in those days related with research and experimental approaches that showed interest in knowing about the contributions of music to human wellbeing, finding the first national reference in 1955.
- Currently, there are around 130 trained music therapists in Chile. Some of them were trained in an undergraduate programme that existed for a brief period of time at a private university; others were trained in foreign universities, such as the University of Melbourne and the University of Buenos Aires. At present there is only one training program, the Postgraduate Specialization Course in Music Therapy in the Faculty of Arts of Universidad de Chile.
- The Chilean Association of Music Therapy (Asociación Chilena de Musicoterapia – ACHIM) was created in 2005, bringing together music therapists who trained in different national or foreign training programmes. Currently, ACHIM is a full organizational member of the WFMT. Based on ACHIM’s records, there is an emerging field of music therapy work, mainly in the health field and educational institutions for people with special needs.
- The significant official acknowledgement that our music therapy colleagues in Chile achieved this year has its roots in the first published books written by music therapists in 2008 and the first Chilean Congress of Music Therapy, which took place in November 2015.
Congratulations Chile! To learn more about ACHIM I invite you to visit their website (click here).Marcela Lichtensztejn, Buenos Aires, ArgentinaWFMT Regional Liaison, Latin AmericaSave
