Virtual reality therapy helps troops deal with PTSD

June 29, 11:25 AMDomestic Violence ExaminerTrudy Schuett

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The military is turning to the virtual world to treat traumatized veterans of the Iraq war, giving troops a high-tech way to confront and overcome mental war wounds.

Virtual Iraq uses electronically re-created Iraqi environs that look like a video game, as well as the sounds and smells of deployment, to help those suffering from post-traumatic stress disorder revisit the events that affected them so profoundly.

It is a joint venture of the Air Force, Navy and Army, along with the University of Southern California and Virtually Better Inc. The visual environs created for the therapy are based on the video game "Full Spectrum Warrior."

"We help them confront the memory of the trauma," said Dr. Barbara Rothbaum, psychologist and director of Atlanta’s Emory University’s Trauma and Anxiety Recovery Program. Rothbaum is a pioneer of virtual reality therapy who co-founded Virtually Better. "Sometimes it’s hard to get at it. What we think is the virtual reality can help create a more potent exposure. ... It puts the person back there."

Almost everyone responds to a traumatic situation with fear, which goes away for most people, according to Rothbaum. PTSD is at least in part caused by a person not dealing with that fear and the emotion of their traumatic event. The event is so painful or horrific, that a person’s natural tendency is to avoid it, she said in an e-mail.

"However, when people avoid thinking about it and all reminders of it, the fear does not [lessen]," she said.

In exposure therapy, a therapist helps the servicemember confront the memories, so that he or she becomes less afraid of those memories, thus being able to look at the situation differently and more rationally.

"Once their fear has decreased enough that they can really look at the situation and what happened and what they did, more than likely they will come to think about it differently, and realize, for example, it wasn’t their fault, or there was nothing they could have done differently, or they did the best they could under the circumstances," Rothbaum said.   More at Stars&Stripes - Virtually Better, Inc - USC Institute for Creative Technologies