Virtual Reality Medical Center - About Virtual Reality

About Virtual Reality

The Virtual Reality Medical Center uses Virtual Reality-enhanced Cognitive Behavioral Therapy (VR-CBT) to treat clients with panic disorder, specific phobias, agoraphobia, and social phobia. Specific phobias are conditions such as fear of flying, fear of heights, claustrophobia, fear of driving, fear of thunderstorms, arachnophobia, and fear of public speaking.

Virtual reality exposure therapy places you in a computer-generated world where you "experience" the various stimuli related to your phobia. You will wear a head- mounted display with small TV monitors and stereo earphones to receive both visual and auditory cues.

Advantages of Virtual-Reality Exposure Therapy:

Costs considerably less than in vivo exposure (the use of real life situations for exposure therapy).
Total control of the "phobic" experience, without leaving the therapist's office.
Segments of any phobia can be repeated, allowing the client to gradually reduce fear and anxiety.
Eliminates risks of potential physical harm.
Therapy is conducted in the therapist's office, allowing for complete patient confidentiality and eliminating public embarrassment concerns.
People once resistant to traditional treatment may consider Virtual Reality Exposure Therapy.

Step-by-step process:

Plan to spend about two hours at the clinic for your first session. The session begins with a computerized assessment to better individualize your treatment. Next, your therapist will conduct a complete history and assessment in order to familiarize him or herself with exactly how your fear affects your life. After that, in sessions 1 and 2, you will be taught coping skills to help you manage your anxiety in everyday life, including how to control and change thought patterns.

We want to know when you are subjectively feeling anxious, but we also monitor your physiology, to provide an objective measurement of anxiety and desensitization. Non-invasive physiological monitoring with visual feedback is used to help you understand when you are relaxed and when you are anxious, so you can learn to recreate relaxed feelings on your own in real-life phobic situations.

Virtual reality exposure begins after you have learned these anxiety management skills, usually in session 3 or 4. Virtual reality offers the opportunity for you to practice these skills in situations in which you previously experienced anxiety, allowing the skills to generalize more easily to real world settings.

In careful, controlled stages, you will be exposed to experiences that elicit higher levels of anxiety. Each stage can be repeated until you are comfortable with the experience and satisfied with your response.

At every step, the therapist can see and hear what you are experiencing in the virtual world. If your level of anxiety becomes overwhelming, you can return to a less stressful level of treatment, or simply remove the head-mounted display and exit the virtual world.

The entire process:

lasts 8-12 sessions on average.
takes you through a graded set of phobic stimuli.
uses a head-mounted virtual reality display and real-time physiological monitoring.
is customized for every client.
is faster than traditional exposure therapy and desensitization.

If you have questions, please visit our FAQ page or call 1-866-822-VRMC.

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