400 Young People Have Undergone Sessions : Therapists Tune in to Rock ‘n’ Roll in an Effort to Help Psychotic Teens

Art therapy sessions with a rock ‘n’ roll beat are helping psychotic teen-agers “break on through to the other side,” as the late rock singer Jim Morrison once put it.

Parents can get a glimpse into the often-troubled minds of adolescents by listening to their music, says John Sappington, an art historian and therapist, and Dr. L. Donald Tashjian, medical director of the Horsham Clinic, a psychiatric hospital.

Their work is the flip side of the recent controversy over the possible harmful effects of some rock music lyrics, criticized as being too sexually explicit, excessively violent and glorifying drugs and alcohol.

For five years Sappington has invited young patients to bring their favorite records into his art therapy sessions. He asks them to draw a picture illustrating what the song means to them.

Cuts Through Defenses

The teen-agers, often withdrawn and sometimes suicidal, come out of their isolation at an encouraging rate, Sappington says.

“This music, combined with the pictures, can cut through a lot of defenses that this kid has put up,” he says. “It can cut through a lot of the avoidance and get right to the core of some problem areas that up to this point the kid may not have wanted to look at or deal with.”

In art therapy, patients draw pictures and a therapist leads a group discussion on what the picture may say about the person’s state of mind. Sappington hit upon his musical variation about five years ago.

“Adolescents come into the groups with a lot of defenses, and it can be very tricky to get them to open up,” he says.

Rock ‘n’ Roll Doodling

“I found that during the sessions the kids would doodle. And about 95% of the doodling had to do with rock ‘n’ roll. Insignias of rock groups, names of rock stars, that sort of thing. So I thought, why not use this? Because I found that a lot of that was more revealing than the art therapy.”

The idea clicked with Tashjian, 50, a father of three whose specialty is adolescent psychiatry and cultural aspects of mental illness.

“There is nothing in the psychiatric literature and nothing in the sociologic literature that addresses itself to the most important cultural phenomenon in adolescents for the last 20 years--rock ‘n’ roll,” Tashjian says.

“The kid will often express his own inner conflicts, turmoils, concerns, in the kinds of stuff he listens to.”

Severely Disturbed

Most of the nearly 400 teen-agers who have gone through the rock-art psychotherapy have severe psychiatric disturbances requiring hospitalization, Tashjian says. Many are severely depressed, do not interact with others and have a history of problems with drugs or physical and sexual abuse.

He cites as an example a 16-year-old girl in one of Sappington’s sessions.

“She was psychotic when she came in; she was extremely withdrawn; she was very uncommunicative,” Tashjian says. “When she walked into the group setting, she looked like she had stepped out of the 1960s. She had the headband, the long hair, the granny dress with the flowers all over it, the beads around her neck. It was weird. It was just very eerie.

“Everything she talked about was the same way: ‘I want to be be back in the ‘60s. If only I were at Woodstock. All I want is peace in the world.’ It was incredible. Her pictures were nothing but flowers and hearts and pretty things. No substance at all. No content that we could really grab hold of.”

Started Talking

The record she chose was “The Soft Parade,” a 1969 song by the Doors. The pertinent lyrics: “Can you give me sanctuary? I must find a place to hide, a place for me to hide. Can you find me soft asylum? I can’t make it anymore. The man is at the door.”

Her drawing showed herself, heavy-footed and short-armed, standing outside large stone walls of red and black, her boyfriend waiting in a doorway. The group, guided by Sappington, saw in the drawing ambivalence, fear, isolation, helplessness. The girl started to talk.

Her father had sexually abused her for years. She ran away. On the streets, she could find refuge only with men who used her sexually. Psychosis followed.

‘Finally Able to Share’

“She never talked about it before,” Sappington says. “It was this setting, talking with her peers, that allowed some of this to come up.

“In fact, she broke down in tears during the session recalling a lot of this and finally being able to share it.”

Most of the teen-agers favored music of the late 1960s and early 1970s and dressed accordingly, says Sappington, who was at Woodstock in 1969.

Jim Morrison, the Doors’ singer who died in 1971, is a hero of many of the patients, as were other casualties of that era--Janis Joplin and Jimi Hendrix, both of whom died in 1970.

“There is a cult around these people, who did not deliberately kill themselves but who were tragic figures who overdosed, who burned out,” Tashjian says. “Somehow there’s an aura of being undone by the freneticism of modern society. At least that’s the romance of it.”

Patterns Emerged

Other patterns emerged during the sessions. Teen-agers who chose folk-rock music drew pictures suggesting lack of communication with parents and concern about self-image. Those leaning toward hard rock and acid-rock displayed suppressed anger and deep depression.

And then there are the “metalheads”--lovers of the thundering heavy-metal music that has received most attention from groups seeking warning labels on record albums.

“They’re extremely isolated, they have a very hard time interacting with their peers and there is a real negative sense to everything happening in their lives,” Sappington says. “There’s a real palpable sense of hopelessness that comes through.”

But the music does not cause psychosis or lead to violent or suicidal behavior, he says.

‘Can Be a Warning Sign’

“The music in some way resonates through this kid. It reflects something that’s going on inside,” Sappington says. “That resonance can be a warning sign for us. If a kid does isolate himself, if this kid is listening to one song obsessively over and over again, maybe this kid is giving us a message and we can use that to focus on that problem area.”

Other pictures that have come out of Sappington’s sessions: a lone bird gliding over a barren landscape (“Freebird,” by Lynyrd Skynyrd); an empty room, table and chairs (“You Can’t Always Get What You Want,” by the Rolling Stones), and plenty of beastly, bloody creatures from the metalheads.

“Those are the kids that we find are quite pathological, kids that are having extreme problems,” Sappington says.

The drawings and discussions “give us a very clear window into what is going on with this kid,” he says. “They are only very peripherally aware of how intensely the music and the image they have produced can touch very deep-seated issues.”

‘Appeals to Emotions’

It’s also a window for the teen-ager, Tashjian says.

“You take an art form, music, that is basically nonverbal, it appeals to the emotions,” he says. “You then have the intermediate step of making a visual rendering of that aural emotion. You then have the group process--it’s not just the kid, but the kid’s peers, helping to give shape to this emotion in a supportive way.

“The end point then is that the individual has the capacity to put the predicament into words, words that make dynamic sense.”