Virtual Real Psychotherapy

2024 Author: Harry Day | [email protected]. Last modified: 2023-12-17 15:43

Back in the 30s of the last century, science fiction writer Stanley Weinbaum described the virtual reality device in his book Pygmalion's Glasses. After that, researchers over the next decades began to look for ways to implement this idea.

The development of technology has never stopped, and in 90 there was a major "boom", including in VR devices.

Now there are already many virtual reality glasses from Sony, NTS, Oculus. The possibilities of VR technology are almost limitless in many areas such as education, video game development, military training, medicine, visual arts and more.

I think they are quite useful and ready to be introduced into the psychotherapeutic environment. But what is really missing is a virtual therapy environment.

Virtual reality replaces the real world with an imitation of the surrounding space, it creates an environment that can simulate real places or an imaginary world.

VR technology is already being used to treat people with anxiety disorders and phobias such as fear of heights. Often, an exposition of the world is created for the patient, guided by the therapist, through the retelling of traumatic experiences associated with the disorder or phobia. In the course of virtual therapy, the psychotherapist acts not only with images of the world, but also with the usual method of psychotherapeutic counseling, since the ability to independently influence what is happening in the virtual world is completely under the control of the psychotherapist, sounds, images, surroundings.

To be honest, I myself could not find a virtual environment that would be specifically designed for psychotherapy, only sketches, demo versions.

Now I have at my disposal a rather interesting constructor, which is half drawn, half written in code.

I cannot say that I am at the final stage of the environment, but the space that I have already managed to create gives me the opportunity to dare and claim that soon it will be possible to use this product in my sessions.

Now in the possibilities of my VR world there is a safe environment in which a person feels very calm, and depending on the client's request, I can already include some negative or painful images for him so that the client can get closer to his problem, learn to interact with it on a more real level, so that I could find a place in my space for this “image”, where it would be comfortable for them together.

Also the second version of the environment, which I create on the basis of a psychodiagnostic test with a non-existent animal or just an arbitrary drawing. Let me remind you how it works in everyday life - A person is given pencils, felt-tip pens, etc. and asked to draw a picture. On the basis of the picture, a lot can be said about the state of a person.

And if you transfer this drawing to a virtual environment and start working with it. What would you change in it? To add and what to remove?

At the moment, foreign colleagues are already quite effectively using VR therapy, which has become one of the main methods of treating PTSD and addiction rehabilitation.

As a practicing psychologist, I see tremendous benefits in being able to interact with the virtual environment, and to combine my psychotherapeutic methods and methods of the virtual space.

I hope scientists and programmers will continue to develop the technology at the same speed and in the future, in the near future, we will become even more effective for our patients.