Curing the Wounds of Iraq with Virtual Therapy

Early on in the Iraq War, clinical psychologist Albert “Skip” Rizzo stumbled upon the video game Full Spectrum Warrior and determined to make a therapeutic tool out of it. Rizzo, a University of Southern California professor who had designed virtual reality tools to measure attention deficits in children, realized that thousands of soldiers would come back from the Middle East with post-traumatic stress disorder. Since 2005 the program he developed, Virtual Iraq, has had great success in treating the returning troops.

What is the greatest challenge in your field today?
To help people plagued by nightmares, flashbacks, and relentless stress related to a traumatic episode—being raped, narrowly escaping the collapse of the Twin Towers, witnessing a buddy die on the battlefield. Traditionally the best treatment for post-traumatic stress disorder [PTSD] is to have the person relive the trauma using his or her imagination. Repeated exposure to the horror can desensitize individuals and help them stay calm enough to reprocess what happened and get beyond it.

How does virtual reality address this problem?
We immerse the individual in a virtual world to allow him or her to vividly reexperience the episode in a safe and controlled way. In Virtual Iraq, a soldier with PTSD recounts what happened, and a therapist seated before a computer then creates an environment that captures the essential elements of the episode. Say the soldier was driving in a Humvee convoy when the vehicle in front of him blew up. By donning special goggles, he can see a reenactment: To the left he sees a desert landscape; straight ahead, the Humvee. The simulation is done on a vibrating platform, so he feels the humming of the vehicle’s motor or the rumble of the exploding IED [improvised explosive device]. We also pipe in sounds and smells: the call to prayer in Arabic, diesel fumes, even the body odor of the guy next to him. The simulation starts off relatively tame.

Read more on Discover Magazine