There has been an increasing emphasis on recovery as the expectation for people with mental health conditions. Within acute care mental health settings, music therapists can facilitate recovery by motivating service users to identify self-directed goals that increase their ability to remain in communities of their choice and have lives of hope, meaning, and purpose. The purpose of this cluster-randomized pilot effectiveness study was to determine if a single group songwriting session can impact quantitative measures of recovery in adults on an acute care mental health unit. Participants (N = 59) were cluster-randomized to one of two conditions: (1) An educational songwriting condition addressing motivations for and pathways to recovery or (2) a control condition. Because of the temporal limitations of the acute care unit, songwriting participants only completed a posttest and control participants only completed a pretest in this single-session study. Results indicated no significant between-group difference. However, the songwriting condition tended to have slightly more favorable recovery mean subscale scores than the control condition. Although not statistically significant, results support that songwriting may have an immediate clinical impact on recovery for people in an acute care mental health setting despite the challenges associated with a single session. Highly structured educational songwriting may constitute an ideal way to address motivations for and pathways to recovery in acute care settings. Implications for clinical practice, limitations, and suggestions for future research are provided.
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