Babyshambles’ Dr Adam Ficek shares report on music and mental health: “It’s business, but the product is a human being”

nme.com:

Babyshambles drummer and psychotherapist Adam Ficek has shared his new report into music and mental health – telling NME that “musicians keep falling between the cracks of formal structured support systems”.“It’s business, but the product is a human being,” read one quote from a musician in the report.

Another: “I was asking myself, ‘OK, am I here because I’m good enough for this? Or am I here because I’m a Black woman and now it’s a trend to have a black woman in a band?'”A third voice from Ficek’s research ultimately concluded that “It might look like I’m just shouting down a microphone.

It might look like they’re just playing a guitar, but with that comes all the stress. You do it one night; fantastic! You’ve got to do it 10 more times now, and with that, comes exhaustion.

Do I want to be doing it anymore?”Ficek – songwriter, solo artist, Roses Kings Castles, Babyshambles member, trained psychotherapist, and consultant and lead facilitator at music and mental health charity TONIC – has this month published his latest research into “professional popular musicians’ experiences of objectification, under-representation, and personal incongruity in the occupational musicking environment”.“The research was undertaken as a direct result of my own experience in the music industry and the musicians I work with in my clinical practice,” Ficek told NME. “I wanted to provide a platform for other musicians to tell their own stories about mental health and how this is helped or hindered by their various music industry experiences.”Ficek’s research identifies three main areas of concern: the reluctant need to compromise integrity, being misunderstood by the public, and the difficulties of being viewed as a commercial, tokenistic or.