Virtual reality therapy has moved out of the lab and into therapists' offices
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Date posted: 28/08/2006
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 Theraputic Worlds

Eleven years ago, academics Barbara Rothbaum and Larry Hodges published a paper about using VR to help people overcome a fear of heights. Since then, the number of psychologists and psychiatrists using virtual reality as a tool to treat anxiety has exploded.

More than 25 clinics in the United States offer it. So do practices in Colombia, Indonesia, Israel, Japan, Argentina and England. Canada has four places you can get it, including a Hamilton hospital.

Many therapists use the technology to treat phobias.

That's partly because the literature backs it up. But it's also because software for treating phobias is more widely available. In the past, only researchers had access to it.

Virtually Better Inc., the company Rothbaum and Hodges founded, now licenses the software to clinics for up to $400 U.S. a month.

It's hard to believe computer-generated images can help people overcome their fears.

But it works partly because people with phobias are exceptionally arousable, says Hunter Hoffman, director of the University of Washington's virtual reality research centre.

Hoffman helped design SpiderWorld, a program for people who are scared of spiders. Patients stand in a virtual kitchen while a computer-generated spider on the other side of the room gradually moves closer to them.

For someone afraid of creepy crawlers, the virtual spider is enough to trigger anxiety, he says.

"You take a non-phobic and put them in the kitchen and they're like, `This is kind of cartoonish.'"

Waterloo resident Katherine Sage Hayes sat on a virtual aeroplane to confront her fear of flying. She was shocked by how real it felt.

"My heart started pounding, my palms started sweating and my knees went weak," she says.

Virtual reality therapy works by giving patients the tools to manage their anxiety and then gradually exposing them to their fear so they learn to overcome it.

For fear of flying, patients might first sit on a plane that stays on the runway, says Charles Pierce, a psychologist who treated Sage Hayes at his Kitchener practice. "You're putting them in the shallow end of the pool."

Once a patient learns to control her anxiety, a therapist can introduce more challenges. If the patient is fine flying in beautiful weather, "we could add thunder and lightning ..."

Scared of heights? Ride a 46-storey virtual glass elevator. "Our elevator is probably the least smooth elevator you'll ever ride in your life because the goal is to make the person experience the emotion associated with the fear," says Virtually Better president Ken Graap.

It can be embarrassing for patients to become anxious while practising in an actual elevator, Choudhry says. With virtual reality, patients can practise in the privacy of a therapist's office.

Another benefit is cost-effectiveness. "You couldn't easily say, `Hey, let's go rent a 747 for the afternoon and just go taxi around Pearson for awhile," Pierce says.

But it doesn't work for everyone, notes Martin Antony, director of research for the anxiety treatment and research centre at St. Joseph's Healthcare.

"Some people, it just doesn't feel real enough to them," Antony says. But it has been beneficial for more than half of the 20 patients he's treated with it.

"It does live up to what the research is saying."

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