Imagine you are wearing virtual reality glasses. So is your therapist. You are hooked up to a machine that challenges your greatest fears. Your therapist is there to help you make the right choices, like a guardian angel. Is this really therapy?
The U.S. Army and Canadian military swear by it. They spend $4 million annually on computer-generated programmes, which they believe can treat post-traumatic stress. Can this growing field, known as cybertherapy, really work as an effective tool to combat fears?
Cybertherapy is not new. A small number of therapists have been using virtual environments for more than ten years to help people work through phobias. But with technological developments and a growing number of annual conferences, cybertherapy seems to be going international.
Advances in computer models are apparently now allowing therapists to address the wider and more complex challenges of phobias. For example, sufferers of agoraphobia can now come into contact with virtual humans, or avatars if you like, and experience the panic and fear they feel in real life situations. But with their therapist there to advise. And research, from experiments conducted in America, showed that this form of cybertherapy had a positive impact on patients ‘real-life’.
However, as you can imagine, cybertherapy has generated criticism. Jaron Lanie is a computer scientist and author of ‘You Are Not A Gadget: A Manifesto’. He says: ‘Even if this approach works, there will be side effects that we can’t anticipate and in some scenarios I would worry about defining what’s normal based on what we can model in a virtual environment.’
But surely cybertherapy can only exist as one of the many techniques and tools used by therapists. With distrust of technology as a replacement for medical and psychological skills, will therapists and medical bodies really turn to virtual approaches?
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