Suffer from social anxiety? How VR therapy can help with everyday situations like shopping and dealing with clients
- Participants with social anxiety reported feeling less anxious during social interactions after taking part in a Hong Kong virtual reality therapy trial
- Potential benefits of VR therapy involve it being a more affordable and accessible treatment, and avoiding possible awkwardness in talking to a real therapist
Virtual reality (VR) technology allows a user to enter simulations of real-world situations or completely imaginary environments with ease. Once the reserve of specialist research labs, it is now much more accessible and presents numerous possible applications, not least of all for health care.
“VR has extraordinary potential to help people overcome mental health problems because it gets to the heart of successful treatment: making people feel better in everyday life,” says Daniel Freeman, professor of clinical psychology at Oxford University in the UK, who pioneered the use of VR to assess and treat paranoia.
In VR, people can repeatedly enter simulations of the everyday situations that trouble them and be guided in the best ways to think, feel and behave. The conscious awareness that these are simulations allows people to try things that they would be wary of in real life, but the learning leads to major benefits in day-to-day activities.
“The potential is that VR treatment can be faster, more powerful and have a greater appeal for patients than traditional mental health approaches,” says Freeman, who has led work designing and testing new automated VR psychological therapies for mental health disorders.
When a team at the Chinese University of Hong Kong (CUHK) met with Freeman and insurers AXA Hong Kong, they came up with a plan to trial VR to support working adults with severe anxious social avoidance.