Page 655 - Total War on PTSD

immersed in a feared virtual environment, activation and modification of the fear structure was possible.
From this, the use of VR to deliver PE (VRET) was the first psychological treatment area to gain traction clinically, perhaps in part due to the intuitive match between what the technology could deliver and the theoretical requirement of PE to systematically expose/engage users to progressively more challenging stimuli needed to activate and reprocess the fear structure. This is readily seen in the initial use of VR for delivering PE for other anxiety disorders, like specific phobias. In VR what clinicians can help the process along by putting people in simulations of their feared environment and then systematically making it a little bit more provocative once they’ve attained a certain level of fear reduction or extinction. If a patient has fear of flying, it is possible to put them in an airport or on an airplane in flight. Users can then experience a plane flight, they can turn their head and look around, see the passenger next to them, look out the window, etc., all in the safety of the clinical office. Once a patient has gotten through an “easy” flight and has shown a reduction in anxiety, the clinician could then introduce a little turbulence or a thunderstorm and begin the process anew in order to promote further anxiety reduction or fear extinction. With repeated exposures, the effect of reduced anxiety has been shown to transfer to real world flights and thereby helping people become more functional in engaging in the relatively safe activity of commercial air travel (which is statistically safer than driving an automobile!).
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