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Virtual Reality Used to Treat
Traumatized Vets
By Jacob
Goldstein |
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If a person has post-traumatic stress disorder
after a car accident, a therapist might have him
sit in a car for a while, then start the engine
without going anywhere and, finally, start
driving again. But what do you do for a soldier
traumatized by a tour of duty in Iraq?
Academic researchers and military docs are
developing virtual reality simulators with the
hope of treating PTSD by exposing veterans to
video game-like recreations of the kind of
horrors they experienced in the war.
You can wear a head-mounted display and drive in
a Humvee through the desert, or go on foot
patrol through an Iraqi city,” Skip Rizzo, a
psychologist at the University of Southern
California’s Institute for Creative
Technologies, told the Health Blog.
The notion that exposing someone to the sort of
thing that traumatized them in the first place
is counterintuitive — wouldn’t you just be
traumatizing them all over again? But it turns
out that so-called “exposure therapy” has proved
effective for PTSD, Deane Aikins a Yale-based
psychologist who’s an expert in PTSD, told us.
The big problem is a high dropout rate, because
the therapy can be so difficult for patients to
endure.
“I think a lot of these people have no idea of
what they’re getting into,” Aikins said. “They
don’t have an emotional vocabulary.”
The Iraq simulation was designed so that the
therapist controls the level of exposure the vet
is exposed to. “They can sit by the side of the
road with no sound. They can drive like they’re
going through Arizona,” Rizzo said. “Once they
habituate to that, the clinician can add a
gunshot in the distance, or an IED goes off, or
the guy in the seat next to you gets shot and
dies.”
The Iraq project came to the Health Blog’s
attention because of a presentation Rizzo gave
at the recent Medicine Meets Virtual Reality
conference in Long Beach, Calif. The project is
in its early phases and has seen a high dropout
rate, even in preliminary therapy sessions
before donning the virtual reality headset.
Still, Rizzo says the early experience is
promising for those who finish the program,
though some vets aren’t quite clear on the
concept. “Some people get in there, they say, ‘I
want to fire back,’ ” Rizzo said, noting that
soldiers can look around in the simulation, but
can’t fire a weapon. “That”s not what the goal
of this is. It’s not a cathartic experience of
getting revenge and taking out people. It’s
about dealing with the trauma you were exposed
to.” |
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