Inclusive Music Therapy.

As always, obligatory "sorry it's been so long since the last post" at the top. I just really don't use this blog much any more 😅 but I had something that I wanted to ramble for a bit on that's going to go longer than a social media post can take, so here we are!

For those who aren't aware, to provide some backstory before we get into the meat of it - for the past two years (that is, 2024/25) I've been studying music therapy. It's something that I decided to study for a few reasons - partly because I'd been looking for work for quite some time already without success, and so I looked into what options there were for training up in various areas, and ended up settling on music therapy. I already have the music skills and experience, plus a couple of units of psychology; and listening, caring and empathy are all pretty second nature to me. It seemed like there was certainly demand for this sort of thing, if the trend of psychiatrists, psychologists and the like having massive waiting lists was anything to go by.

But now it's done, and five months post-study and......no job. During the course, there were multiple suggestions that this was indeed a growing field, with people having long waitlists of clients. Unfortunately, it seems like many RMTs (registered music therapists) are working solo, either setting up their own thing or working by themselves in a multi-disciplinary team. Centres with multiple RMTs do exist, but they're few and far between - and not many hiring opportunities have popped up (unless I wanted to have a commute down to Wollongong, or a move up to Newcastle or interstate; there's also been some jobs that are just kids, but I'm not really wanting to do that).

As part of the course, we were encouraged to think about the sort of practice that we'd like to do. I had a pretty solid idea from the start, and it only solidified further over the course of learning and developing more. You see, there's lots of neurodivergent RMTs out there, and plenty that are working with autistic and ADHD clients. A large percentage of those are working more with kids than adults, so there is still some room and demand there for a more adult-focussed neurodivergent RMT I think - but that's not as much what I was interested in. Because you see, there's almost no trans RMTs in Australia. I can name a couple off the top of my head? But to the best of my knowledge there aren't any operating in NSW or the Greater Sydney area that are focussed on trans and queer clients. And so I decided that's what I wanted to do - as a queer and trans RMT, work with queer and trans clients. Not, like, exclusively? Like I could still see people that didn't fall into those buckets. But I wanted that to be my focus, my main target audience as such.

Because I really wanted songwriting to be a key part of the work that I do, and I wanted to be able to have conversation and discussion with my clients, work through issues, that sort of thing - I wasn't as interested in working with kids. I really wanted to be working with teens and young adults for the most part, from a more mental/emotional health standpoint. Like, still trying to work from a holistic standpoint and thinking about how other aspects of health are affected, because that's something that's really important. Towards the end of the course, I also did a project looking at using music therapy for religious trauma, and I would be interested in incorporating that as well.

The dream would be that this would eventually be a centre itself, employing multiple RMTs, each with their own area of inclusivity that they're passionate about - perhaps particular forms of disability, or working with migrants or First Nations people - this is what I would love to see happen. And I came up with a simple name for it: Inclusive Music Therapy.

But I didn't want to start here. Partly because I wanted to get some more experience; for various reasons the placements that I ended up doing meant that I didn't really work with many teen or young adult clients, and if that's what I wanted to be the core of who I was working with, I wanted more experience there. And partly because that would mean both starting in a new industry, and starting a new business, both at the same time. When I'm someone who has zero business sense. So I was hoping to start off in a centre, get some experience, some mentoring, before starting up my own thing.

While I started looking for that, I was on JobSeeker, and started a Self-Employment Assistance course to satisfy the mutual obligation requirements. It was just a couple of days a week online, but it walked you through setting up your own business. And of course, I was using Inclusive Music Therapy as the idea for it; so it meant that the idea got developed a fair bit more. The course involved doing things like putting a budget together, a website, social media page, a business plan - it was fairly comprehensive. To be fair, I had already been working on a website, so much of that part was already done! But putting together the other bits and pieces helped me to get an idea of how doable it might be. The answer - sort of.

Money is always the tricky bit. The rough budget I drafted up (using a fair bit of guesswork, but it gives me a ballpark) suggested that if I started off doing 16 sessions a month, and most months was able to increase the number of sessions I was doing by two, and had about $1000 there saved as an initial investment into the business, I'd be breaking even about a year or so after I started. I'm going by number of sessions, by the way, rather than number of clients, because clients won't necessarily have the same regularity of sessions. Some might do weekly, others fortnightly, or monthly, or even every three weeks. So I'm measuring off number of sessions per month. The figure that I'm using for cost is based off the current NDIA price measure for music therapy - the maximum that an RMT can charge for a one-hour session for an NDIS participant is $156.16, so I did some rounding to make things simpler and put it at $155.

And now the course is finished - and I still don't have work. I've been applying to things (both music therapy and otherwise), but nothing that's gotten me an interview. It's hard to know if being autistic, ADHD, queer, non-binary and trans are part of that (I always include that in my cover letter), because most of the time you hear nothing back at all, and never really any specific feedback. But it's starting to feel that way at points. That I'm getting lumped into the too-hard basket. But I want to be working somewhere where they see these things as a plus, not a liability. But yeah. Not having work kinda sucks sometimes.

So now, I'm more seriously considering the possibility of starting up my own music therapy business. I've gotten more of the tools to be able to do it from a business perspective, so it feels somewhat less daunting in that sense. And encouragement from others has led me to be less worried about not having as much experience as I would like with teens/young adults specifically in this area, since I can apply it across from other areas. But the thing that's going to make it doable is having enough clients to start.

I think that the demand is there. There just aren't a lot of mental health services for queer and trans people available, and many of them are already struggling with the amount of people trying to access them. And there isn't an RMT in the Greater Sydney area working in this space currently; so theoretically at least, there's quite a large number of potential clients. It's just a question of whether I can actually reach them. I don't really have a lot of money that I can put into advertising and marketing before I even get things started; but perhaps I have enough to start getting the word out, and seeing if I garner enough interest.

One thing I can do is make the website that I've been working on public. It still definitely needs a bit of fine-tuning, but perhaps it will help me to get some potential clients and be able to see if this is something that could actually work. Also just like, feel free to comment if you know people (or are people!) who would be interested, or share this with those who might be.

Before I finish up, if you hadn't figured out, that's the logo at the top! Yes, I designed a logo for it. It's pretty simple - it's a piano that's using the colours from the progress pride flag for the different keys. It just works out with how the different keys and letters and colours line up, and I'm quite happy with it, for a logo done by someone who is not a graphic designer 😅 I'm sure someone else could make it a bit neater or cleaner or crisper, but it's fit for purpose at this point.

But yes! Inclusive Music Therapy. If there's enough interest - maybe I could actually make this happen. It will be a lot of work to get off the ground, and there's probably still a bunch of business stuff that I'll need to wrap my head around; but I'd love to have the opportunity to try.