Dr. George Musgrave is a lecturer in Cultural Sociology and Entrepreneurship at the University of Westminster. He is also an MC who raps under the name Context. Musgrave has been at the heart of groundbreaking academic research looking into musicians and mental health, published through Help Musicians UK.

2013 was particularly emotionally turbulent.

When I look back at the lyrics I have saved in hundreds of small Notes on my phone, they remind me of how my days were spent. Waking up at 3pm, scraping pennies from behind the sofa to get enough for a bag of chips, and flitting constantly between elation at having created ‘that song’ which might save me from despondency at yet another email telling me ‘no’. I would drink in the day to accompany my sadness and I would drink in the night to accompany my lairyness. In many respects it felt like what I imagined being ‘a musician’ might be – perennial emotional tension. I remember being unable to sleep with anxiety and waking up shouting at nothing in particular. Or when I did have something to shout at it was, usually, an email from either a manager, or a lawyer, or a producer, or a DJ, or a promoter. There are no shortages of people to be pissed off at in the world of music. I remember when I signed my publishing deal with Sony in that year; when the money hit my bank account I cried. I threw out the Argos basic range clutter which was scattered around the flat which I told myself no self respecting ‘man’ in his late 20’s should own. I booked a Eurostar to Paris and paid my missus back the thousands of pounds she had been paying on our rent for the last few years. Yep. 2013 was particularly turbulent.

Between then and now much has happened. I completed my PhD in Politics and am now an academic researching the links between creativity, economics and psychology. There was a strange teleology to the process, but the first research project myself and my colleague Sally Gross (University of Westminster) worked on together bought all those feelings from 2013 sharply into focus once again. We wanted to look at the links between music and mental health. Sally had been approaching people for years, but no one seemed to want to talk about it. Of course, we, like many, knew the stories about this relationship well, and they go like this: “All musicians are a bit mad”, “artists are nuts”, “they should try getting a real job”. Whether it was Kurt Cobain shooting himself, or seeing the tragic and public downward spiral of Amy Winehouse, this tension between creativity and ‘madness’ was, and is, cloaked in a kind of dismissive pathologisation of creative “types”. We also knew of the other side of the argumentative coin surrounding the ways in which music can help with mental trauma; be it in self-expression or in coping with stress. That is, musicians might be mad, but the music was all that helped them – or at least some abridgement of that. However, we kept returning to one question over and over again; what if music itself was making people sick?