Among other topics, North Star Care CEO Amanda Wilson discusses the benefits that the anonymity in VR brings to AUD treatment in this recent article by in Behavioral Health Business.

“We thought that group treatment in a virtual space, where the person is represented as an avatar, would give people the freedom to both participate in the first place, if they were reticent, but also the ability to really speak freely … and feel very comfortable communicating in this space.”

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One of the powers of VR is its ability to evoke powerful visceral feelings by transporting people to real or imagined places at any point in time. Unlike a flat screen, the viewer is enveloped in a living 360 scene with sounds and action occurring all around them.

There can be many different uses for leveraging this powerful medium (education, mental health, both hard and soft skill training), but a recent BBC story highlights one that shows the true breadth of how the technology can be leveraged.

The story centers on Project Dastaan, an endeavor co-founded by the grandson of one of the many migrants that was displaced during the violent partition of India and Pakistan in 1947. Many families fled for their lives and have never returned to the places they left.

“But now, they can revisit those very places – the houses they left behind, the schools they dropped out of and even the people they thought the would never see again,” according to the projects founders.

Seeing the reaction of the refugees as the take in their VR surroundings shows the true power of the medium. “It was great, it was wonderful. I was feeling as if I had gone back to my childhood,” says one man.

Personalizing the 360 video experience in VR in ways that evoke a sense of presence is a powerful tool that has many use cases. Video of a childhood home, a particular room, a place someone used to visit, a walk someone used to take – these can all be brought back for the purposes of comforting, healing, and remembering.

The Foretell Reality VR platform offers a variety of capabilities and features including 360 video for one or more simultaneous viewers. Click here to schedule a demo.

Thanks to the AR Post for the recent write up about partnership with North-Star Care and for highlighting the fact that the need for remote addiction treatment is not going to end with the pandemic.

Read more here.

Since their discovery in the mid 1930’s, Theta Waves, which provide critical beats in your brain to help support your overall comprehension level and memory, have been of great interest to the mental health community. Nearly 70 years after their discovery, scientists may have found a way to boost these mental beats through the use of VR without the use of medication. 

A recent article by “Fast Company” discusses a recent study conducted by scientist Mayank Mehta that leveraged VR to mimic the same type of mental beats that Theta Waves produce using tiny VR headsets attached to mice. Mehta, who has conducted previous studies focused on VR and Theta Waves found in the past that the “frequencies (the pitch of some thoughts, not their rhythmic beats) are routinely slower in VR than in the real world.”

The mice that Mehta worked with in this experiments, which primarily focused on analyzing the mechanisms of the brain, were found to “experience boosted theta rhythms while in VR that they didn’t experience in the real world, even though the entire VR environment was meant to duplicate the mice’s real-world environment as closely as possible.” The overall cognition of the human brain is oddly improved when using virtual reality, and while Mehta and other scientists cannot yet pinpoint exactly why this is, they do believe that this could be a “huge breakthrough in how we treat mental health and cognition.”

In the next couple of weeks, Mehta will be publishing another paper focusing on the benefits of VR on cognition, and how there is no hidden consequence to advancing your theta rhythms through VR. 

Foretell Reality is a social virtual reality platform that supports different use cases including therapy and support, soft skills development, and business and design collaboration. Click here to schedule a demo.

In late 2016, Frontiers in Psychology published a case study whose authors explored “the feasibility/clinical potential of using immersive virtual reality technology to enhance DBT® mindfulness skills training.”

Dialectic Behavioral Therapy (DBT®) curriculum focuses on exercises that improve “mindfulness, emotion regulation, interpersonal effectiveness, and distress tolerance.” It is considered the most effective treatment for Borderline Personality Disorder (BPD) but the demand for DBT® training “far exceeds existing clinical resources” and “most patients with BPD never receive DBT®” according to the study’s authors.

In the case study, a 32 year old female subject diagnosed with BPD was immersed in a VR experience that gave the “illusion of slowly ‘floating down’ a 3D computer-generated river while listening to DBT® mindfulness training audios.” 

At the end of a series of these sessions, the woman stated that “urges to commit suicide, urges to self harm, urges to quit therapy, urges to use substances, and negative emotions were all reduced.”

The study concluded that “Future controlled studies are needed to quantify whether VR-enhanced mindfulness training has long term benefits e.g., increasing patient acceptance and/or improving therapeutic outcome. Computerizing some of the DBT® skills treatment modules would reduce cost and increase dissemination.”

Since 2016 when this case study was conducted, the availability and accessibility of VR technologies has dramatically increased. With a $299 Oculus Quest and an internet connection, those suffering from BPD can not only experience solitary mindfulness DBT exercises but also group sessions and guided 1:1 therapy based on other aspects of the DBT curriculum. VR is a scalable telehealth technology that is ready now for broader commercialization to treat various mental health conditions like BPD.

Foretell Reality is a social virtual reality platform that supports many different types of avatars with varying degrees of realism and expression for different use cases including VR therapy and support, soft skills training, and business collaboration. To schedule a demo, click here.

In a recent Journal of mHealth article, Miri Polachek of Joy Ventures, a VC firm whose mission is to “advance the nascent category of science-backed consumer products for wellbeing,” spoke about the benefits of augmented and virtual reality (AR/VR) for mental health, particularly during and after COVID. 

Polachek emphasized the benefit of people having access to mental health support from the comfort of their own homes, and how the goal should be to have these platforms readily available to those who need it. 

“There are many VR/AR solutions that target the general, healthy population, creating new mindfulness and meditation experiences to help people strengthen their emotional resilience and navigate everyday challenges.”

Polachek goes on to point out that AR/VR can provide “highly personalized” treatment that can even be adjusted in real time to meet a client’s needs. Additionally she noted that the technologies are highly scalable and flexible in a way that can promote long-term results. 

“Even before the pandemic, social isolation, stress, and anxiety, were worsening problems – but with greater use of behavioral health technologies, people will have better and more accessible options for receiving the care they need,” Polechek concludes.

Foretell Reality is a virtual reality that enables remote group therapy and peer support for addiction, depression, anxiety, and other mental health challenges. Visit our website to schedule a demo today. 

Since the 1990’s, doctors have been leveraging Virtual Reality (VR) exposure therapy to treat phobias and PTSD. Does VR also hold promise as a tool to treat one of the most common mental disorders, depression?

A recent article in Frontiers in Psychology highlights various ways in which Cognitive Behavioral Therapy (CBT) and other techniques for the treatment of depression can be translated into therapeutic VR experiences that result in positive outcomes for patients.

Among them are imagery re-scripting, a VR therapy that has been found to improve the mental
state of people with depression. It often times “involves the patient using mental imagery to
either recreate a memory (rescripting) or expand upon an example scenario in a prompted
direction (positive imagery training), in their mind. The patient is tasked with finding alternative
solutions to the imagined situation that reduces their distress, and then rehearses a novel solution
in greater and greater detail.”

Another technique, avatar therapy allows the patient to create an avatar that then engages in verbal hallucinations that would typically be internalized by the user, and then verbalizes them to the patient, which in turn can help them disprove these notions, and help restructure their mental state.

Social skills training is also a generic CBT technique which can be translated to VR. “Such skills may include correctly interpreting and norm-appropriate responding to verbal and non-verbal social cues, conversational skills, assertiveness training, and relationship building. VR is uniquely well suited for training social skills via virtual conversational agents and immersive scenarios.”

Overall, the authors identify a number of areas in which CBT could be translated into VR including:

• Behavioral Activation and Physical Activity
• Cognitive Restructuring
• Social Skills Training
• Embodiment Experiences
• Positive Affect Through Virtual Gardens and Animals

Foretell Reality is a virtual reality platform for various behavioral and mental health applications including individual or group therapy sessions, support groups, and social skills development. We work with our partners to develop experiences tailored to the needs of their business and patients. Schedule a demo here.

Our client, XRHealth, recently highlighted the value of anonymity and the ability to participate from the comfort of one’s own home during emotionally loaded support group therapy. XRHealth therapists not only moderate group conversation but they leverage the 3D avatar bodies and the shared environment to include physical exercise and stretches during sessions. 

“Traditionally, groups meet in person, but online and virtual support groups are becoming more popular and accessible due to technology, especially during the COVID-19 pandemic. Online and virtual meetings are particularly beneficial for those who are homebound, have social anxiety, live in a rural area, have hectic schedules, or prefer anonymity.”

“Foretell Reality has developed an avatar-based, multi-participant virtual reality platform specifically designed for group therapy. At XRHealth, the ability for our patients and moderators to connect with each other through VR is powered by Foretell Reality”

Read more here and be sure to scroll down to watch the video.

A recent pilot study shows that Virtual Reality (VR) can help people with anhedonia experience positive affect. Anehodia describes a lessened ability to experience joy and those who suffer with it are at an increased risk of suicide. It is common across mental disorders including depression, social anxiety, schizophrenia, and substance abuse disorder. 

Due to factors such as fear of positive emotion, it has proven very difficult to treat, and most therapies have been largely ineffective because of their focus on negative affect. Even cognitive behavioral therapies that focus on positive reinforcement are hindered because anhedonia sufferers may lack the motivation to engage in rewarding activities.

Viewing positive imagery in VR has shown to increase positive affect in participants in pain management and anxiety studies. Because the immersive qualities of VR allow greater access to reward circuitry and require minimal effort to engage in positive activities, researchers of this pilot study hypothesized that virtual reality would help lessen anhedonia in depressed patients. 

Six participants with clinically significant depression experienced VR behavioral activation with imaginal recounting in 13 hour-long sessions over a period of seven weeks. After viewing positive scenes in VR, participants were instructed to choose one scene and write down the positive emotions and sensations they experienced while immersed in that scene. Then they were asked to recount a personal memory with similar positive emotions in order to transfer the VR experience to their own lives. 

Results showed a significant decrease in anhedonia. This is encouraging news for further study of a possible treatment to a disorder that lacks effective treatments. VR can help sufferers savor pleasurable moments and offers access to pleasurable activities with minimal access, thereby counteracting the lack of motivation to engage in activities.