Drum Therapy

Drumming in ritual and healing contexts

A 2025 narrative review of drumming and altered states of consciousness states that percussion instruments have been found from the Paleolithic, with one line of evidence suggesting use from the Magdalenian period, as old as about 14,000 years ago. It also states that unconnected cultures around the world use repetitive auditory stimulation to facilitate altered states. These are broad statements from a review, and they do not show an unbroken line from any past practice to modern drum therapy.

Sámi drums and the noaidi

Scholarship on Sámi drums rests on a limited set of sources. Joy's 2018 doctoral study focuses on divination drums of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries that were collected during colonialism, and describes the noaidi as a tradition bearer. Rydving's 2010 study of western Sámi religion treats missionary accounts of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries as key sources and stresses that drum imagery should be interpreted through explanations given by the drums' original owners.

Joy argues that noaidi drum imagery correlates with prehistoric rock art and that Sámi shamanism did not disappear, a position set against claims of its suppression. The pages reviewed treat the drums as objects of divination and as historical sources, not as a therapy, and ritual knowledge is not presented here.

Jembe drumming in Mali and Guinea

The ethnomusicologist Rainer Polak describes jembe (djembe) music and dance entering the programmes of state-sponsored folkloric ensembles in the 1960s, becoming national symbols in Guinea and Mali, moving into urban popular culture and spreading internationally from the 1980s. His fieldwork in Bamako in 1997 and 1998 covered about 400 performances by around 25 musicians and treated jembe playing as a service and as work. The page does not date the drum's origin, so no origin date is given here.

Group drumming in health settings

The earliest health-related group-drumming study in the sources reviewed is a 2001 trial from an outpatient centre in Meadville, Pennsylvania, which measured hormone and immune markers. A 2016 UK study notes that growing numbers of mental health organisations were by then developing community music-making interventions for service users. The sources reviewed do not trace who first used the term drum therapy, so no origin is given for it.

Overlapping labels

The sources reviewed use several labels for similar activities, including group drumming, drum circle, drumming classes and recreational music-making. The Pennsylvania team used recreational music-making for a six-session protocol built on group drumming with keyboard accompaniment. Drum therapy is not defined in any source reviewed, so what a given programme involves has to be read from its description and not inferred from its name.

Drumming and music therapy

The World Federation of Music Therapy, in a definition announced in July 2026, describes music therapy as a professional discipline delivered by trained professionals within a therapeutic relationship, using music-based experiences that include playing instruments. By that definition a drum circle led by a drummer is not automatically music therapy. In a UK study the facilitator was a professional drummer with no specific therapeutic aims, and in a South African study an occupational therapist led the group. Music therapy has its own page.

Ritual, shamanic and trance terms

Aparicio-Terrés and colleagues define altered states of consciousness as states with subjective deviations from ordinary wakefulness, and note wide cross-cultural variation in how possession trance is explained. Gingras and colleagues describe core shamanism, a contemporary Western method associated with Harner that uses rapid drumming at about 4 Hz. It should not be treated as interchangeable with specific Indigenous traditions such as the Sámi noaidi drum.

Facilitated group classes

In a 2016 UK study, groups met weekly for 90 minutes for ten weeks, using call-and-response exercises, taught rhythmic patterns and improvised drumming, with talking taking about a fifth of the time. A professional drummer led, supported by three music students, and was not told participants' diagnoses. A US pilot for Parkinson's disease ran West African drum circle classes twice weekly for six weeks, 45 to 60 minutes each, led by local drumming instructors, with each person given a drum and rhythmic complexity increased gradually.

Adapted and seated formats

Parkinson's Beats, a UK cardio-drumming programme, uses a ball in a bucket and two sticks, was delivered in person and online, and let people use one or both arms, sit or stand, and halve the rhythm speed. A Korean pilot series of three adults with Parkinson's disease used a seated drum set programme of ten 30-minute sessions over six weeks within music therapy.

What participants may experience

In one laboratory study, people lay down for 15 minutes listening to repetitive drumming, and those given shamanic instructions reported heaviness, a slower heart rate and dreamlike experiences more often than those given relaxation instructions. A study of 40-minute djembe sessions found low-to-moderate intensity exercise, and participants in cardio-drumming reported muscle tiredness. The sources reviewed identify no training standard or professional register for drum circle facilitators or for drum therapy.

Uses investigated in the sources

Studies in the sources reviewed have examined group drumming for self-rated depression, anxiety and wellbeing among mental health service users, mood in psychiatric inpatients, burnout in care workers, quality of life in Parkinson's disease, and mood and cognition in adolescents living with HIV. An integrative review of music interventions for trauma-exposed children and adolescents reported encouraging results for group drumming on antisocial behaviour in adolescent males, while describing the school-based evidence as limited with methodological concerns.

Proposed mechanisms and unsupported claims

A 2025 review proposes that rhythmic sounds may produce altered states through entrainment of thalamocortical pathways to low-frequency activity, and reports that findings on neural activity were diverse. It describes this as a proposal, and a proposed mechanism is not evidence of clinical benefit. Popular claims that drumming releases stored emotion or processes trauma were not supported by any source reviewed for this draft.

State of the evidence

PubMed searches run for this draft found no systematic review or meta-analysis of group drumming for mental health or for Parkinson's disease. The closest are a narrative review of rhythm and altered states and an integrative review of trauma-informed music interventions in schools. A second literature-search service reached its usage limit, so these searches were not repeated there, and trial registries were not searched.

Mental health and wellbeing

A 2016 quasi-experimental study of 45 adults completing ten weeks of group drumming or a non-musical social activity (30 versus 15) reported lower depression and higher social resilience in the drumming group, with anxiety and wellbeing improving by week ten and changes maintained at three months. Groups were allocated by location, not randomly, controls had different baseline depression, and immune samples came from the drumming group only.

An uncontrolled pilot of 13 inpatients with mood disorders reported improved mood after drumming sessions. A South African feasibility trial of 68 adolescents living with HIV, randomised to eight sessions or no intervention, reported a positive effect on depressed mood but no significant effect on executive function or social scales.

Parkinson's disease

A 2015 US pilot compared eight completers of a six-week drum circle with ten matched controls receiving usual care. Quality of life improved at six weeks (PDQ-39, p=0.042) but the gain faded by twelve weeks, and motor and cognitive scores did not change significantly. The authors note the small, single-centre, non-randomised design. Qualitative work on cardio-drumming and a three-person case series report enjoyment and perceived benefit but cannot show effect.

Stress physiology and immune measures

The 2001 Pennsylvania study of 111 volunteers reported a higher DHEA-to-cortisol ratio and natural killer cell activity after composite group drumming, with no change in anxiety or depression scores, but the composite protocol was chosen after preliminary analysis of earlier groups. A later laboratory study found cortisol fell after 15 minutes of either drumming or meditation music, with no difference between them, so the fall cannot be attributed to drumming specifically. A 2003 trial of 112 care workers reported reduced burnout after six sessions.

Adverse events reported in studies

The trials of group drumming in mental health and Parkinson's disease reviewed here reported no adverse events, although 14 of 59 enrolled participants dropped out of the 2016 UK study and two of ten drummers left the US pilot. A qualitative study reported no serious adverse events and some muscle ache. Small samples and unsystematic harm reporting mean absence of reports is not evidence that none occur. One case report describes compulsive drumming after a dopamine agonist was started for Parkinson's disease, and it cannot indicate how often this occurs.

Hearing

In an Argentine and Chilean study of 18 drummers, a 20-minute rehearsal produced an average level of 103 dBA, over 60 percent used no hearing protection, and otoacoustic emissions changed after playing; the authors note the small sample and no long-term follow-up. A 2025 meta-analysis of 67 studies found tinnitus, hearing loss and hyperacusis more prevalent in musicians than in controls. Neither source measured community hand-drumming circles.

Repetitive strain and vibration

A survey of 831 drum set players reported a lifetime history of playing-related musculoskeletal disorders in 68 percent and a current disorder in 23 percent, most often in the upper limb. A study of 12 male drummers measured hand-arm vibration above occupational action limits. These findings concern regular drum kit players and do not show the frequency of such problems among occasional group participants.

Suitability and care boundaries

The review of altered states notes that low-frequency entrainment also characterises psychotic and psychedelic experiences. The sources reviewed do not report how drumming affects people with psychosis or trauma histories, so no suitability statement is made. Drumming is not a replacement for assessment or prescribed treatment, and distress, chest pain or new hearing symptoms warrant medical advice.