History
One of the earliest recorded explorations of VRIT was done by Dr. Ralph Lamson a USC graduate and now retired clinical psychologist then at Kaiser Permanente Psychiatry Group, San Rafael, CA in the early 1990s as a means to solve his own acrophobia or fear of heights. About the same time, Dr. Larry Hodges, then a computer scientist at Georgia Tech active in VR and Dr. Barbara Rothbaum, a psychologist at Emory University, began studying VRT in cooperation with Dr. Max North, who had reported anomalous behavior in flying carpet simulation VR studies and attributed such to phobic response of unknown nature.
More recently, Dr. Skip Rizzo of USC's Institute for Creative Technologies, who had, with DOD funding, created a war simulation called Full Spectrum Warrior, with funding from ONR (Office of Naval Research ) created an adaptation of that game for the treatment of Posttraumatic Stress Disorder ("PTSD"). Virtual Iraq was subsequently developed under ONR funding and is supported by Virtually Better, Inc. VBI also supports applications of VR-based therapy for fear-of-flying, fear-of-heights, fear-of-public-speaking, and substance abuse. Virtual Iraq proved successful in normalization of over 70% of PTSD sufferers, and that has now become a standard accepted treatment by the Anxiety and Depression Association of America. However, the VA has continued to emphasize traditional PET (Prolonged exposure therapy)as the treatment of choice, and VR-based therapies have gained only limited adoption, despite active promotion by DOD. This is interesting in view of VRT having much lower cost and apparently higher success rates, and a $12MM ONR funded study is currently underway to definitively compare the efficacy of the two methods, PET and VRT . Military labs have subsequently set up dozens of VRIT labs and treatment centers for treating both PTSD and a variety of other medical conditions. The use of VRT has thus become a mainstream psychiatric treatment for anxiety disorders and is finding increasing use in the treatment of other cognitive disorders associated with various medical conditions such as addiction, depression and insomnia.
Read more about this topic: Virtual Reality Therapy
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