Using Virtual Reality to Create Therapeutic Experiences
Virtual reality (VR) has become increasingly popular for creating immersive and realistic experiences for gamers. While VR has brought fictitious universes to life, it has also developed realistic environments to aid with various business applications. In particular, one area of medicine, the field of mental health, has applied virtual reality to therapy and rehabilitation.
One case study from the U.S. Naval Medical Center in San Diego, California shows the success of using VR for therapy. In 2012, the Center treated soldiers with post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) by putting them in combat simulations so they could work through their traumas and triggers. For this study, two groups were created: one group of soldiers experienced traditional exposure therapy, while the other group was treated through immersive VR simulations. After nine weeks, both groups showed great improvements in their mental states. But, after three months, the improvements in the standard exposure therapy group had largely disappeared, while the VR treatment group had continuously improved.
As a treatment for individuals experiencing PTSD, virtual reality finds success in exposing patients to triggers through a controlled, virtual environment. Once the patient’s needs have been assessed, a VR environment is created specifically to help the patient work through traumatic events from their past. As one such example, research has shown that there’s a significant reduction in anxiety when virtual reality is used to treat people who’ve lived through terror attacks (Difede, Hoffman, & Jaysinghe, 2002; Difede & Cukor, 2007). Additionally, a recent study published in JMIR Mental Health found that VR can be useful in the treatment of anxiety and depression.
Virtual reality can also help treat phobias by placing patients in the environments they are afraid of. This treatment typically begins with a patient imagining their fears and gradually builds up the presence of what scares them. As the patient grows more accustomed to the exposure, they can better control their fears (Bohil et al., 2011). An example of this would be placing someone who is afraid of heights on a high balcony and incrementally increasing their distance off the ground as they become more comfortable.
VR environments can feel very real — that’s part of what makes them effective. The digitally created sensory feedback from the artificial environment replaces one’s normal senses. VR makes participants feel present, and this increased presence is linked to multiple brain areas that are crucial to navigation and integrating sensory information. Our brains become so linked to the artificial environment that we believe what we see is the real world.
The most common VR intervention is VR Exposure Therapy (VRET). VRET works like the VR environments that are used to help treat PTSD: patients are exposed to anxiety-provoking experiences, and this gradual exposure can help reduce anxiety as time goes on. Some of the most popular platforms and apps that have been used to help treat mental health conditions are Psious, Virtually Better, Applied VR, and Virtue Health. Several research studies have supported Psious, a platform with ~70 environments available that adapt to the client’s feedback in real-time.
The mental health space considers VR treatments to be favorable interventions in certain cases, such as in treating PTSD and some acute phobias, as it doesn’t place patients in danger by reconstructing real environments. Further, it allows professionals a great deal of control over the stimuli. For example, a therapist can control an environment used to help treat the fear of spiders by increasing or reducing the number of spiders as needed.
As discussed in this blog, mental health professionals have been able to use virtual reality to improve therapeutic experiences and provide great results for their patients. While this blog has focused exclusively on those use cases, in the future, virtual reality has the potential to do much more — not just in the mental health space, but in other spheres of medicine and other industries too.
- JoAnn Difede (Nov 2007). Virtual reality exposure therapy for the treatment of posttraumatic stress disorder following September 11, 2001. https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/18052556/
- CJ Bohil (Nov 3 2011). Virtual reality in neuroscience research and therapy. https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/22048061/
