Healing through a computer screen!
Role Play and virtual reality can help patients with phobias or schizophrenia. Bring on Therapy 2.0!
Psychiatry has been gradually using computer monitors to treat phobias and even schizophrenia. The screen makes it possible to stage a situation and help some patients perform perilous exercises.
Here’s an example: how do you get an agoraphobic take a walkabout? If the doctor and the patient go to a mall on a Saturday afternoon, you cannot control the movement of the crowd or suspend and resume the exercise in case of panic; in short you cannot "train" serenely.
The solution is technology: you gradually and gently implement a situation without getting the patient to leave his chair. All he needs is a virtual reality helmet in front of his eyes. The patient will typically be confronted with a situation that causes him to lose his means only to discover that he has the resources to control his irrational fear – whether of people, spiders or aircrafts ...
More impressive still, sitting in front of a screen can also be used in case of heavy mental illness. The experience of a London psychiatrist, Professor Julian Leff, has shown that people with schizophrenia - especially in situations where drugs have failed – can also be helped by the computer!
The exercise here was to put the patient face to face with the "voice" that only he could hear and which in turn makes his life unbearable.
Once a sketch is drawn to give a "face" to the voice, the confrontations begin. Orchestrated by Dr. Leff , he guides his patient from another room and lends his voice (processed by software) to the virtual character. A clever role play in the space of only six weeks gave encouraging results and the auditory hallucinations of the volunteer patients have become less invasive. In three of these patients, they have even disappeared altogether!
For these promising results, Dr. Leff’s protocol will be conducted again, this time on 142 patients and constituting a further step in the invention of screen therapies.
Welcome to the future!
Mathieu Rached
