How virtual reality is helping young people with their mental health

I walk into a crowded virtual cafe. At a nearby table, a man in a navy shirt looks up and peers at me over the top of his sunglasses. I feel the hairs prickle on the back of my neck – this man’s stare feels malevolent, and he is making me a bit paranoid. I realise I have frozen on the spot.

Virtual reality exposure therapy has allowed people to first face things they find traumatic – such as social situations, flying or going to the top of a high-rise building – in the simulated world with the guidance of a psychologist.Virtual reality exposure therapy has been shown to successfully treat people with anxiety, phobias and post-traumatic stress disorder. This type of therapy was, 16 of whom ended up no longer meeting the diagnostic criteria for post-traumatic stress disorder.

In most scenarios, Pot-Kolder will make the avatars in the cafe behave in a friendly or neutral way, which she says replicates most real-world experiences. It could turn out, for example, that sunglasses dude is a nice guy with an eye infection, which is why he is wearing sunglasses. “So if you are afraid of a person, it is probably not necessary,” she says.

Pot-Kolder and the woman rehearsed how she would respond to the insult. They then recreated the scenario in a virtual supermarket. “She ended up going for ‘Well, have you looked in the mirror?’ We had a laugh about it. She felt him doing this said something about her, but actually this is saying something about this man. Like, who the hell does that?”She says the lessons learned from the simulated world are then transferred to the real world.

She will guide participants through social situations in realistic virtual environments – such as the cafe – to help them recognise psychosis triggers and symptoms and learn how to better manage them.“If social stress goes up a bit, for example, in the busy cafe, we often have people say their hallucinations increase as well,” Pot-Kolder says. “Now we can practise managing hallucinations together.

Source: Healthcare Press (healthcarepress.net)

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