okay we are live from the backstage and you are at the states hello adam hello hello hello everybody it's time to continue our second day and we are in the afternoon and it's time to have a another very interesting keynote we are very honored to have uh adam christopherson as our next keynote speaker uh adam was with us in in northern ireland last year and they with with in collaboration with his friends and colleagues they made an amazing uh journey to music and you had this wonderful workshop and you actually made two beautiful songs during the conference days and you can see the story of of this musical intervention in our expo area please check it out it's it's amazing story yes in our youtube site where is a link from expo area there are those videos of the of the musical intervention in belfast fantastic okay so adam you are warmly welcome enjoy your speech and just relax and take it easy thank you so much thank you so much to the european conference on mental health uh really excited about this presentation i want to get right into it with song there's no better way hey guys how was your day [Music] [Music] so i hope you were able to hear that i know i turned the volume down a little but i really want to start out where we are now before we get into the history and the exciting journey that it's been to get to this point i want to introduce to you dr philip corlett a partner in this research grant to talk a little bit about what we've been up to with regards to studying music and the brain please welcome philip thanks so much um i'm delighted to be able to join you um from uh adam's downtown center for musical intervention so adam and i have been working together now uh for just over a year trying to bring the power of his musical intervention and its impact on recovery in serious mental illness together with my work on how the brain makes predictions about the world and how that prediction process is disrupted in people with serious mental illnesses and how music might realign people's prediction-making mechanisms and help them learn to trust other people and to interact with them more fruitfully when i think about music i think about it as a sort of golden road toward brain activation and social connectivity and those are two things that the people that we serve in our mental health communities are often sadly really very lacking from my own point of view i'm an academic i've been at yale for the past 10 years i love what i do but sometimes it can feel somewhat like intellectual navel gazing and i'd really like the work that we've been doing to have some real practical benefit and so i was really excited and inspired to meet adam and to observe some of his sessions where he brings groups of people together who don't often find the time or the convenience or maybe don't even have the motivation maybe they're a little bit frightened to join together with strangers and to really sort of let go some of their inhibitions and perform music together and what i saw in those early sessions when we were starting to think through whether there might be some seed of a collaboration here it's just the sort of transformative impact of music and particularly music making and songwriting in a group these people would go from being folks who i would see sitting around our connecticut mental health center often completely disconnected from others and they would be totally transformed in this session and it's not just adam's energy and animacy that's so infectious it becomes this sort of contagious process where as one person starts to come out of their shell a little bit everybody sort of joins in uh and becomes excited and enthused and really that was what happened with putting the grant proposal together and winning the grant we managed to infuse something that's quite a rigid and clinical process grant writing with the excitement and the enthusiasm and the energy that adam and musical intervention brings to the table but more than that i think what we're trying to do is to put some empirical bones and some data on what it is that works about musical intervention and that's i think the part that my lab brings to the collaboration so as i mentioned don't just passively receive information from our environment we're constantly trying to make predictions about what's going to come next and as i alluded to people with serious mental illnesses particularly people with schizophrenia who i work with seem to find it rather difficult to make accurate predictions about the world and other people in the world the same can be true with music right music is an inherently predictive process it has a structure that our brains are really tuned to and when we hear a piece of music or a song that we're really familiar with we can't help but fill in the rest of the song i think about sweet caroline for example right what we're hoping to do with this project is track exactly how music making constrains and sort of reorients people's brain mechanisms for making predictions and the idea would be that there would be a trickle-down effect so learning and experiencing in the group that it's okay to make mistakes and to embarrass yourself and that you can trust other people somewhat might trickle out and and permeate uh the rest of people's lives and so what we're hoping is that this musical experience this musical intervention procedure will change people's brains change their abilities to make predictions about the world and that those things will generalize outside of the study context and into the real world and hopefully they'll enrich not just the people who've been part of our studies but also adam and i and the rest of our research team as we work going forward to try and sort of deconstruct exactly what the active ingredients are to this process interesting thank you thank you dr corlett and we hope to maybe get an invite to dr corlet to uh our our next ecmh uh in portugal um so thank you so much uh now how in the world did we get to this point uh and this is one i wanna encourage uh folks uh with my story um that they can follow their dreams and their passions and make an impact in this world so join me as we walk this road so music was always there this is actually a picture of me as a child um playing harmonica and what had occurred i i'd come into this world to two amazing parents both struggling and and struggling and struggling with paranoid schizophrenia my mother has paranoid schizophrenia my father has schizoaffective disorder and it made things pretty complicated uh in the get-go i was put into foster care uh because things were just not safe at that time and the shining light was my grandmother bertha florence wichstrom christopherson a swedish immigrant to the u.s and she was amazing but there was a strange other element in the mix and that is michael bolton how in the world does michael bolton play into this well he's my uncle and we would go to concerts um and it was quite an amazing scene um just remember them saying that's your uncle up there and there was thousands of people just dancing and celebrating his music and it had a huge impact not only uh for the extremeness of that but also um we had vip treatment and so going from you know section 8 housing to vip treatment in the music industry was an incredible experience so back to living with my grandmother she'd make me swedish pancakes and read me her poetry and when she passed on it was an incredible loss i she was really a staple and somebody that that gave me some solace in my life at a very young age and so we begin to live my father and and i began to live in that home in the suburbs away from some of the gang activity that was going on where my mother was living and as time went on it was nothing but music in the house my father bought me a drum set at eight years old and people came through and you know in the beginning there was a lot of drugs and a lot of chaos but it was a beautiful chaos we were getting together in unique ways and making music and and doing harmless things however those harmless things began to get out of control and the drugs began to spin out of control and i started to worry about my own mental health and it was in 2001 when i decided to stop using drugs and begin to focus on a vision but it was very complicated special education and our uh because of the way i was raised um made it very complicated for me to receive education in a rewarding way it was always uh kind of correcting my behaviors and it was always frustrating but i was able to break through uh and find my purpose and and attend higher education and go to southern connecticut state university i actually had to sneak my way and i knew the vice president at the time and he allowed me and even though my grades and my s.a.t scores were not good enough it was there that i found recreation and leisure studies i it was right up my alley as you can see i founded the ultimate frisbee team in southern connecticut so it's all about community team building leisure education flow and all kinds of fun and um positive fun and within the degree of recreational leisure studies i found recreation therapy and it was a very small department but all about what i was into using leisure and music to help people and i got a job and an internship working at yale child psychiatric inpatient hospital and within the first week i asked my supervisor if i could bring my recording equipment in and she obliged and it was you know studio in-patient hospital day one and people were just just knocking down doors to record music with us and and it was very very special so special that the medical director really encouraged me to start doing this outside of the hospital and find other facilities that might be interested in it and that was the birth of musical intervention believe in me the first musical intervention song i want you to take a listen [Music] love me [Music] i'm guessing you heard that song um i cannot hear the audio on this end so if i cut it off prematurely i do apologize um but that song in particular was so special i was working with individuals who are struggling with intellectual disabilities and it was um one of the most joyous experiences of my life going in there writing music with them and seeing the pure joy come out of those sessions and then be able to record them get copies to them and their family here's another group that i worked with and this this song actually it was so fantastic it was invited to perform on stage in a major performing venue and this is tyler enjoy [Music] i can change my world i am [Music] [Music] am [Applause] [Music] [Applause] [Music] oh i remember that as if it was yesterday it was such a phenomenal experience to see thousands of people just rise to their feet and celebrate this young man who had gone through so many challenges and get a chance to perform his song in front of everyone and really wow the audience with his voice this is another very inspiring young man jeremiah and for some of you that were in belfast last year you might remember jeremiah he and uh a few others were uh brought along to to belfast and and to join in on some of the music we were making there and jeremiah's story is is amazing inspiring uh story uh here's a little bit of um just a few years after we met uh we started meeting in in in public and really doing life together because i knew there was something super special about this guy and here's jeremiah performing in times square new york applause jeremiah brown would you come up and join me and currently jeremiah volunteers at the yale new haven hospital playing piano and singing to patients and visitors jeremiah has unfortunately witnessed a lot of violence and gang activity in his life but for him music has taken away a lot of the stress and pain and from his your own words here music is my life it's who i am and i want to change the world with music i think that's a beautiful sentiment jeremiah is going to sing a song called keep the peace with me he'll be accompanied by adam christopherson who is the founder of musical intervention jeremiah and adam [Applause] the song keep the peace to me is fine many of you remember that song keep the peace we we did a music beyond all borders uh rendition and we'll talk about that in a little bit so from all of these experience after i left working at yale um i began to subcontract and go out with different facilities and what i ended up finding was there was a lot of work that needed to be done in the community and i i got a small grant from the arts council of greater new haven to run open mics at soup kitchens and work with a few homeless programs shelters and day programs and this is a clip from some of the work that we we did there schools you sleep every anywhere that you could try to keep with [Music] [Music] me and so much of musical intervention was born out of necessity as the mother of invention as it is for me because of all of the trials that have gone in life for me music was always there for me and so doing this work with the community i realized there were a lot of people that had nowhere to go and no space to be that's safe and productive and so after our program working on in the streets um i had an amazing opportunity to open up the musical intervention headquarters in downtown new haven originally it was oh it still is 2300 square foot which is a pretty large building here in the downtown new haven connecticut area this is in the east coast for those of you don't know we are in between new york and boston and the first line of duty was to build a stage as you could imagine so important so important that they had us take this stage down because when you deal with building permits it couldn't be built out of wood so we had to get creative and we found cinder blocks instead and we put a slab of wood on top of it and that met the building codes and we were able to put on performances all kinds of performances opening the door to this space was the most amazing experience ever by far i mean i always envisioned a space that i wanted you know a performance space that was available to people i had no idea who would come and the doors busted down and people began to do life there here is our outdoor this is what it looks like uh outside when you walk in it immediately catches your eye most of this art well i'd say yeah but all of this art was done by aman a man who has done life with me in a major way we met he was doing art at starbucks and sleeping at dunkin donuts and he was so inspirational and so talented i said man you've got to be part of this and and we have been inseparable ever since here's another photo of what it looks like outdoors at night when things are going on you can see actually if you look straight ahead you can see somebody on on stage there and this is indoors this is i'm proud of this photo for one particular reason as i told you i was raised in special education and the university of southern connecticut state university i actually um invited me to be on the cover of their alumni magazine and that was pretty inspirational for me and this was the photo they used these this is my band here for thunder diggins if those of you don't know amina and we got freddy we got lockdown louie on drums and this is giovanni on guitar enjoy this video this is kind of what it looks like on a regular day [Music] i'm having the day of my life everything's going right now but everything's going wrong [Music] ah i love that video so many of you are probably wondering as everybody wonders uh when they walk in the door how does this work and i have a bunch of money signs there uh because before i had the studio i was basically going to different locations driving there and doing my work on site which had almost no overhead now with the space downtown it's quite expensive so the door open simply because project storefront offered the opportunity to open up this space downtown at a thousand dollars a month that was for a six month period and i had to get business going or else i would ask be asked to be asked to leave and that would be it um but i didn't want to believe that that was possible so i built this place to last and it was on a shoestring budget there was no investors there's no it was all miraculous no doubt about it and just a ton of work and so the way that it worked was a few articles came out in the paper talking about this space and i got a call from bob cole from the connecticut mental health center with interest in bringing musical intervention to cmhc as well as finding a space for their young adult services to come in weekly and take part in group sessions and so that really helped uh financially make this place run along with hall rentals we had a church that was renting from us on sundays paid studio time certain individuals would want to record at night and so we we would charge for that some folks would drop off small donations and that would help pay for utilities lights things like that and the most special of them all were the volunteers that would come in and take part in all of the activities some people said they wanted to be volunteers but they really just didn't know how else to be part of this place uh it being so free that they felt like they needed to contribute in some capacity and uh and that's a beautiful element that makes this place shine so much so many people want to take part in the experience here and the best way is to be part of it by being a volunteer and so we had people cleaning taking tickets at the door signing people in we have volunteer open mic people that m.c geez we've had so many at one point we had 30 volunteers at one point and it was a full-time job just managing all of that now you might wonder what in the world goes on in a place where you have your doors open to the homeless at-risk youth veterans people in recovery like it must be chaotic it must be crazy there must be problems well the actual opposite has been true uh once you walk through the door it seems most people are on their best behavior and it's so inspiring to watch even though when you see certain individuals outdoors they might be doing things that might not you know be healthy but when they they respect the rules that this space is a drug and alcohol free zone and that other people are trying to do their best in recovery and it's very special to watch folks come in and really respect the space and respect each other so one of the beautiful things about having a storefront in downtown all kinds of people walk in you never know who's going to walk in that you don't even need to have any of the any issues going on you're just curious why are there vinyl records outside or what's this music going on and one of the people that came in um had a storefront in new york city greenwich village and invited us to come to greenwich village and set up a musical intervention satellite location and this is what came of it this little light of mine absolutely and every single day from the moment we opened people were coming in and connecting children playing piano behind avant-garde like beat poets it was the most beautiful collaborations happening on a regular basis in the new york city streets from that point we actually got some corporate involvement and they invited us to come to bonnaroo music festival in manchester tennessee and open up a musical intervention 10 where people can come in during the festival and jam out [Music] i'll let you see the rest of what we were looking at on a regular basis just great vibes all together and so for moving on into more community involvement make music day is a celebration all over the world and we decided to celebrate by getting people together on top of the roof where we're located uh it's a parking garage actually we're the biggest parking uh the biggest garage band in town and uh this is a clip of just strangers getting together and singing a line of lean on me [Music] just call on me brother when you need a hand we all need somebody to lean on i just might [Music] [Music] incredibly special uh experience for me and watching that entire video that's on our youtube channel musical intervention youtube channel is quite a scene i mean i feel like every diverse group was uh in that video represented and singing together lean on me the great bill withers uh and please if you get a chance check out that video it's it's so cool it's like one of my prized little projects it's ah it's amazing i love it so a lot of this work that i've i've been doing here downtown got the attention of the yale program for recovering community health perch and they invited me to do a presentation at the international recovery and citizenship conference and that's where i met the amazing frank riley who i hope is watching right now um man this guy is so inspiring he loved what was going on he would come to the open mics what was going on here and he was determined to find people all over the world that are doing similar work and he did he brought us together under the name music beyond all borders a collaboration with finland and marcus valhalla and and i mean just so many great and amazing people uh we all got a chance like i said to to go to belfast together and finally link up in person and run our music groups and this is a some video uh of of some of the songwriting workshops that we were doing and it was so much fun to see everybody you know from all over the world have similar experiences to the ones that we have on a regular basis in an impatient psychiatric hospital just come out of their shells get an opportunity to make music together there's peter and um and anna and it's i i love this group so much and it's such a shame that kovid came along uh and you know we were all supposed to be in portugal doing this again and it was so much fun and and like it was said earlier like lisa was saying earlier um there are some videos on their youtube on your youtube and if you want to watch um the songs the music videos and how it all came out at ecmh uh 8th ecmh please check that out you'll be you'll be inspired and we look forward to the 10th so speaking of covid 19 challenges and adjustments we're not alone in this right so um we've had to do our open mics outdoors and obviously here in the east coast it's starting to get chillier so we're hoping something comes of something soon that we can uh have these special moments because our open mics are really the most beautiful thing because it brings in all kinds of people that want to showcase their talent and when they find out more about musical intervention they want to get involved we've done online group songwriting sessions so a lot of the sessions that i that i run with organizations are now run online and so much is missing out of it but certain elements are still there and um the collaborative element and that opportunity to see something come of nothing a song that's generated right there on the spot still happens but we have had limited to no contact with inpatient and outpatient hospitals we haven't been able to go into the hospitals as of yet they are getting more creative in doing outdoor sessions and we are like like dr corlet was talking earlier we're looking to see if we could do some of these sessions outdoor outdoors but it has been challenging and what we've been doing with the headquarters is one-on-one recording sessions so we had built this uh isolation booth and inside the isolation booth is a as a high quality air purifier and uh you know that's where people uh can remove their masks and sing as loud as they would like and be in these isolation booths with a window and get direction from the producers outside let's talk a little bit about vision uh so what we are looking to do now is an addiction treatment center an exclusive addiction treatment center that would house individuals and their main involvement would be to volunteer with musical intervention and partake in community service activities as well as uh treatment traditional treatment therapy uh if medication is needed and all that stuff we were so inspired by the new york location that we we believe that we are building a model that could be replicated and we have a few individuals that are interested in bringing musical intervention all over the world and so we are looking for sustainable models that can deliver on this along with all of this there are so many amazing moments and inspiring moments that that are really for our eyes but we believe that it could be for a broader eye and broader minds and we are really looking into getting docu-series and reality tv that kind of highlights some of the work of music but also look at mental health in general we can try to destigmatize a lot of what's going on by showing the good that's inside of people and the struggle that is addiction and and mental health we're looking at publishing licensing intellectual properties to potentially get uh revenue into people that might not have had any opportunity at all um and now all of a sudden their music and their minds are financial value uh and we really look forward to continued research uh with with dr corlet and and others that are interested in seeing uh musical intervention and what uh what we can do to help people obviously you know my parents struggle with schizophrenia and so it is very very very important to me um that we begin to find new ways in looking at mental health and i'm going to leave you with a quick uh i can change the world and then we'll get to some questions this is a music video shot at musical intervention [Music] stepped outside on the sunny summer day went to the sky said something's gotta [Music] change [Music] is [Music] [Music] oh [Music] nothing at all [Music] i can't change the world someday every single day [Music] [Music] me [Music] [Music] realized yeah connect with us check out our uh and subscribe to our musical intervention youtube channel visit musicalintervention.com visit our facebook and instagram thank you guys so much that was exciting [Music] thank you so much and your ukulele how oh fantastic you were playing it last year in a conference also many times let's jam let's jam again in portugal in portugal absolutely you're so welcome i just was reading the the chat and uh reading about uh laura falconer from scotland so inspiring adam gave me goosebumps hopefully see everyone next year and i couldn't think more as well as her you gave a goosebumps with your presentation thank you so much fantastic yeah there are lots of comments here and and people are thanking you and this is inspiring speech and people thank you for you telling your story and and sharing your experiences and it people are feeling and really saying that you are doing wonderful wonderful job in in your community and this way of working should spread all over the world like you are doing now i want to say that dr corlet is here also if there are any questions for dr corlett uh he is available to take uh i think some yeah but thank you thank you for all those beautiful comments i i appreciate it i i i could maybe make one question myself to to dr cormino how does uh academic world and your university has reacted when you build up this uh research project well um yeah we have a sort of long history uh and infrastructure for combining qualitative and quantitative research so i consider myself a quantitative researcher we measure behavior we measure brain responses um and some people that can seem that it robs things like music and artistic performance of its meaning or its magic i feel differently i feel that when we combine the qualitative with the quantitative it actually inspires all in me um getting nearer to an understanding of what it is that adam does and how it helps people means that we can only sort of work harder and optimize it and deliver it more broadly and that's the hope uh yale have been incredibly supportive my own institution the connecticut mental health center adam was already embedded in before i was sort of introduced to the idea um in some senses i'm the newcomer here um and as i said both at the institutional level at yale uh more broadly with the nih and francis collins who's the director of the nih um they've been immensely supported particularly through these difficult times right so we we've been funded in advance of covid we were just about to get started in january when this whole situation started to to take off the way that it has and they've been extremely understanding uh with regards to us not meeting our recruitment targets yet and trying to figure out the best ways of of delivering this in in a manner that gives us the data that we were hoping to to gather my worry is and i know adam mentioned that he's able to run some of these things remotely but as you know there's nothing like being together in the same room and that's uh sort of been somewhat challenging um we're trying to figure out ways to do that now um we're trying to do some small pilot studies to compare online versus in person um and hopefully that'll be useful data too but just to answer your question directly you know everyone loves the project everyone loves musical intervention everyone loves adam and i'm just riding on his coattails yeah i'm i'm i'm happy to hear this that you your university is uh having this kind of positive and and uh creative attitude to study this kind of intervention which sometimes can be really difficult to find so-called evidence on on how effective they are this is very good there's a question from frank riley are there any early results or when can we expect some results from your study well we're just working through getting the the approvals to reopen um our plan at the moment is to run things outside but as as adam mentioned uh it's gonna get rather cold here um very soon so we're hoping to get some in-person data in the next month or two and then we'll revert to online sessions and the idea would be to compare and contrast the changes that we see in person compared to online i hope that we would read out some very very preliminary comparisons by the end of the year um but obviously that depends on how things happen um with uh with the second wave uh that we're sort of all living in fear of at the moment wonderful thank you very much once again adam good to see you good to hear you good to hear your music and your ukulele i really hope to see you next year in lisbon looking forward to it we say thank you for listeners also you have been very active in the chat thank you very much uh lisa what do you we need to say something on the last uh parts of the yeah so there is one hour to go still and and actually in one minute we're gonna meet in a social program which is dialogic session uh together it will be taking place in session discussion and reflection room and after that that takes about half an hour what is free there to reflect and discuss and then we have the speed dates again starting 5 30 when you can meet another person for three minutes so let's meet in ecmh speech states and then one more thing in expo area there is a new booth which is showing pictures during this conference you might find something what you have been presenting and then you can see what's happening here in backstage what you can't see all the time okay yes see you soon bye bye adam bye bye for now lauren i feel thank you