Chris was fourteen, and a visitor at Demelza House when Jane, a 'Jessie's Fund' music therapist was first appointed there. Now a young adult, he has written a chapter in our book, Music Therapy in Children's Hospices - Jessie's Fund in Action, (pub. Jessica Kingsley, and available here). He was an ordinary youth - a rebel, in many ways - with an extraordinary difference. Chris has a life-limiting condition and has out-lived his life expectancy by many years. He began to write 'as a kind of self-therapy to deal with the depression I was going through '.

Meeting Jane had a huge impact on him. In our book he writes 'Jane and I have a good conversationalist relationship and I've worked some things out - that's the reason I can get the styles of music that I see in my vision out through her. When I've worked with friends attempting to produce an avant-garde 'masterpiece', it has always turned out dissolving because although they may understand my lyrics (which are weird, twisted and deep), unless you understand me mentally the music won't get completed. Jane and I share the same sense of humour, which helps because on my first session I brought my electric guitar and we sang a song I wrote called 'Strangers When We Meet'. As soon as I translated (vocally) the chord structure, she immediately understood the rest of the rhythm, which is complex'.

Chris has used song-writing to deal with the stress of relationships and illness, and for expressing his feelings about loss and isolation.