Jingle Bells

Student nurses, with dark capes billowing behind their white uniforms, pranced into a back ward at Central Oklahoma State Hospital at Norman one day last week. Their exaggerated steps kept time with the firm beat of The Stars and Stripes Forever, played fortissimo over the public-address system. In their hands, accenting the rhythm still more, they held tambourines, clappers, castanets, maracas, and even bongo drums. Other nurses, also armed with noisemakers, stood around among the patients.

Despite the determined assault on their senses of sight and sound, many of the patients seemed not to notice. They were long-term cases of the type once despairingly classified as hopeless. They had withdrawn from the world about them into impenetrable fantasies. Some catatonics stood in statuesque poses, as they had for hours. Others remained curled up, catlike. in a protective ball.

A nurse spotted a woman patient who was watching the dance with childlike wonder as she squatted cross-legged in the shadows. The nurse talked soothingly to her for a while, pushed the hair back from her face, then put the tambourine in her open hand. The patient's fingers closed around it. With more coaxing, she shook it so that it tinkled. She smiled faintly. She shook it again, harder, and the nurse asked, "Isn't that fun?" The patient murmured, "Yes, I believe it is."

That was the first intelligible sentence the woman had uttered in four years. Nothing else that the overworked psychiatrists had been able to devise had ever drawn this patient even that far out of her shell. Soon she will stand with others in a ring around the dancers, jangling her tambourine. At first she will not keep time, but gradually she will pick up the beat. She will be in touch once more with those who want to help her.

To Superintendent Harold Witten's way of thinking, this will be the patient's first move toward getting back into step with society. Though music has been used for centuries to calm patients in many kinds of hospitals, only recently has it been used to break through the icy calm of schizophrenics. At Central State, Dr. Witten has introduced one of the most vigorous programs of music therapy in the U.S.

He tries to match the music to the patients. For the elderly and conservative, there are Gay Nineties tunes; for the young, bop. Except for deliberately sedative programs, strong rhythm is essential to get attention. After contact with the patient has been regained, the doctors can go to work with occupational and recreational therapy. Music itself is no cure, but it has helped so many patients that Dr. Witten says: "We don't talk in terms of hopeless cases; we don't believe there are any." Now 30 of the patients are so far recovered that they turned the tables on the staff, put on their own music program for Christmas.

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