 Katrina McFerran (aka Dr Kat) completed her music therapy training at the University of Melbourne in 1993 under the tutelage of some of the professions senior academics and clinicians - Denise Grocke, Clare O'Callaghan, Jane Edwards and Helen Shoemark. She re-entered the academic arena in 1998 with the commencement of her postgraduate research training, again under the supervision of Associate Professor Grocke this time combined with the guidance of Prof Tony Wigram in Denmark. She has since embarked on a research and clinical career focused on music therapy work with adolescents across a range of clinical arenas.
Katrina firmly believes that the role of music in the lives of young people has the potential to have a profound effect in both prevention and support of psychological distress. This is based on her clinical work with teenagers who have a disability, chronic illness, eating or anxiety disorder, depression as well as those that are bereaved, dying, misuse substances and/or are bullied. Her doctoral research investigated the value of group music therapy for younger adolescents who gathered on a weekly basis to jam (improvise) and chat (process) and play stuff (music contributions). The chance to investigate this experience in depth led her to conclusions such ‘opportunities for fun, freedom and control were essential' and that ‘the music therapist learned to listen to the group's music and respond with changing creative strategies that facilitated both musical development and personal expression'. Learning to listen to, and value, the perspectives of young people was a significant moment that has led to a commitment to empowering research methods such as Action Research, where participants are given the opportunity to direct the process of the research as they do their own therapeutic journey. To this end, her research has listened to:
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- the voices of young women with eating disorders as they express their experience in song lyrics;
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- the opinions of teenagers in schools about whether their song choices make them feel better or worse (or both);
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- the stories of rehabilitating substance abusers who find the prospect of therapeutic encounter overwhelming but love to sing songs like ‘The Rose'; and
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- the words of young people with attention deficits who just want to get on with playing to feel better and don't want to talk about it very much
- as well as numerous other music therapy clients and supportive professionals.
This focus on valuing the perspectives of young people has recently been balanced with a battle over evidence based practice. Katrina has attempted to crunch numbers in order to ‘prove' that the significant encounters experienced by music therapists and multiply disabled young people have value. She has used video analysis and undertaken a systematic review of the literature as well as argued for multiple levels of understanding for this complex work. She is committed to communicating with professionals who desire evidence, whilst maintaining that it is a limited view of the music therapy encounter.
Katrina's intention as National Keynote for this year's conference is to draw together these ideas, particularly utilizing her most significant post-doctoral research - a project funded by the Australian Research Council that investigated the role of music therapy in a secondary school working with grieving students. The theme of gender, age and ethnicity is pertinent to music therapy practice in the Australian context and provides a wonderful theoretical framework for discussion and debate. As ‘Phantom' once said in response to music therapy:
" The best thing was that there were different beats, everyone actually told what happened to them and it made me feel good. People should just do what they want to do and be true to themselves".
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