MIND GAMES

Virtual reality is being used to treat a wide range of mental health problems. Meet some of the scientists who are pioneering VR therapy and the people who are benefitting from it

- DR LUCY MADDOX

Do you ever have days when you can’t seem to do anything right? Days when you’re fed up with yourself? Days when you berate yourself for things you’ve said or done with the sort of angry monologue that you wouldn’t subject a friend to? From time to time, we all do. But while it’s common to sometimes struggle to be kind to ourselves, for some people, especially those with depression, relentlessly picking at their own worst traits can become an endless cycle of self-bullying.

Therapy seeks to break that cycle through various approaches and one of the newest involves virtual reality (VR). At University College London, Prof John King and Dr Emma Jayne Kilford are working on a VR intervention to use as an adjunct to face-to-face therapy for depression. They hope the new therapeutic angle VR provides can help people increase their ability for self-compassion.

Their system uses a virtual room in which there are two avatars: a child and an adult. Before participants enter the room, they’re trained in how to use a compassionate script to lift the mood of someone who’s distressed. There are three parts to the script: validating experience, redirecting attention and activating a positive memory. As the participant enters the virtual room they’re confronted with the distressed virtual child and their task is to comfort the child using the script until its distress lessens. The next time the participant enters the room, they’re the child and they get to see their adult avatar (themselves from the previous session) performing the compassionate script. “They sit there as a child,” explains King, “and they literally have the experience of compassion. It’s a form of very souped-up imagery.” The adult avatar can even be made to look like the participant, although not all of them opt for this.