The flood of behavioral-health problems in the military seems to have peaked. Fortunately, things stayed far from the degeneracy of the late 1960s and early 1970s described by Colonel Robert Heinl Jr. in his 1971 Armed Forces Journal article. Things are definitely changing for the better. It is now over two years since the publication of General Peter Chiarelli’s Health Promotion, Risk Reduction, Suicide Prevention Report 2010, also known as the Red Book. This report assessed the health of the force and outlined how improvements could be made. These improvements are trickling in. The seeds of long ago are bearing fruit. In March, Dr. Albert Rizzo and his colleagues from the University of Southern California‘s Institute for Creative Technologies published the results of their work in the Psychiatric Annals. Their virtual reality (VR) therapy — which is already evidence-based due to its adherence to cognitive-behavioral therapy and exposure therapy models — no doubt has the potential to reach the thousands of patients who have had the most difficult and, dare I say, an impossible time interfacing and benefiting from traditional methods of therapy and mental health care delivery. Simulation has long held the promise of shaping the mind through virtual experience free from the dangers of the real world. The observations that virtual traumatic experiences had real negative psychological effects were one of the indications for the existence of a complementary phenomenon where virtual safety experiences would have real positive psychological effects. Indeed, the brain is fairly poor in distinguishing reality from simulation. The effects of the confusion between reality and fantasy were again laid bare when after the 9/11 attacks people with exposure to the World Trade Center collapse on television experienced post-traumatic stress symptoms similar to those who had experienced the events first hand. Virtual reality therapy takes advantage of these basic interactions in emotional processing to re-associate the memory of a heretofore feared experience with feelings of safety rather than fear through meticulous and skillfully supported recreation of the memory and the immersion of the patient in an interactive process during which his/her … Continue reading Embracing Virtual Reality