Name your fear. A sense of dread strikes you at the thought of having to hop onto a crowded train. You squirm as the doctor approaches you with a needle. You tremble and tuck your head between your legs as the plane warms up its engine. You freeze as your secret crush walks past you. The fear feels raw, instinctive, and no amount of clever argument can liberate you from its clutches, or so you think.
But as Bernard said in Westworld, “A little trauma can be illuminating.”
Over the past couple of decades we’ve seen the healthcare industry adopt virtual reality as part of exposure therapy, in which patients afflicted with psychological disorders that prevent them from living out their normal lives can confront their fears and phobias in a safe, controlled environment that isn’t subject to real-world consequences.
VR can address post traumatic stress and anxiety disorders with customized programs that can be repeated so there is a gradual desensitization to the psychological triggers.
"In the past, the way therapists would do therapy is they would get someone to imagine they were in the scenario. Here we can really bring that situation to life," Peter Rossouw, manager at the Sydney Phobia Clinic, told Stuff last month. "If you put on that headset, you're a patient sitting in the dentist chair, and the dentist is coming at you with the drill. And you can hear the noise. Everyone always pulls their head back."
A paper released last February by the British Journal of Psychiatry found that VR simulations could help treat cases of depression by using the technique of “embodiment.” The participant role-plays in a scenario where an adult comforts a child, swapping between the two roles in order to experience what it feels like both to give and receive compassion. The technique kills two birds with one stone: It reduces the patient’s tendency to be self-critical and increases their capacity to be compassionate towards themselves.
“The results indicate that interventions using immersive virtual reality may have considerable clinical potential and that further development of these methods preparatory to a controlled trial is now warranted,” the study concluded.
So far this technology has mostly been benefiting those with more or less severe cases of mental illness that significantly disrupt their lives and have a real cost to society, particularly when left untreated.
Thanks to the surge of innovation in the VR industry over the past few years, which has made headsets increasingly affordable for consumers, this type of therapeutic experience is now available to anyone who wants to confront their personal fears, at their own pace and in total privacy.
Enter Tim Suzman, who decided last year to develop a VR app, Fearless, to free himself of his fear of spiders.
“Fear limits our actions and experiences. We evolved fear to protect us from danger, but often our fears are out of whack with our current reality.” Suzman told me. “If unwanted fears were eliminated, I think people could lead more fulfilling lives.”
The app is designed to gradually desensitize a perceived fear, level by level. Apparently after just two hours of immersion in the trigger-infested simulation, Tim was free of the phobia. Here’s the proof.
In fact, we see this happening quite naturally in the industry, as in the case of the VR rehearsal simulations developed by VirtualSpeech, which I reported on back in July. Professionals in the area of Cognitive Behavioral Therapy were some of the first to contact the creators and lobby to extend the application of the technology to managing social anxiety disorders commonly triggered by simulating social settings like parties.
Amir-Esmaeil Bozorgzadeh is the co-founder at Virtuleap, a sandbox for creative developers to showcase their VR concepts to the world, which is currently running the world’s biggest WebVR Hackathon. He is also the Amsterdam Chapter Lead at the VR/AR Association and the European Partner at Edoramedia, a games publisher and digital agency with its headquarters in Dubai.