Musical therapy benefits Borderland residents afflicted with illnesses

An unconventional form of therapy is helping dozens of patients across the Borderland.

Richards Music Therapy Service has been providing music therapy services to El Paso, Las Cruces and surrounding communities since 2012.

“Music therapy is a form of therapy that uses music as a means to achieve a goal, whether those goals are musical or nonmusical, emotional or physical,” board-certified music therapist Corinne Richards said. “We use music as a tool to get to the goal.”

Richards is the owner of the music therapy service which serves around 110 clients on a weekly basis.

“The clientele we primarily work with, the majority of our caseloads, has a condition called cerebral palsy, which often impairs their gross motor skills, their fine motor skills, coordination and as well as their speech skills,” Richards said.

The company also serves clients with dementia, Alzheimer’s disease, autism, post-traumatic stress disorder and traumatic brain injuries.

“The clientele is limitless,” Richards said. “Music therapists across the country work in all sorts of different places and you don’t have to have anything wrong with you to be in music therapy.”

“People come to music therapy for their own wellness,” Richards said. “We all think about how much we work on a daily basis and the stress in our daily lives and we all use music inherently, someway, in our day-to-day lives.”

Richards Music Therapy currently employees four full-time board-certified music therapists, a part-time board-certified therapist and two interns.

“Therapy is hard, Therapy is really hard,” Richards said. “People often forget that therapy is a task that has to be performed and sometimes it’s hard to motivate people who want to engage in that, but I always tell people as music therapists, we have inside access because music is inherently motivated.”

If you want to learn more on the therapy, click here.