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training or as healthcare support agents. The capacity to produce a controlled stimulus environment where users can confront their fears safely, or learn new ways socially interact with others via virtual human roleplaying, or even as a way to become distracted from acute pain, presents opportunities for advancing clinical care that didn’t exist just 20 years ago.
This chapter provides a brief summary of applications that illustrate the current use of VR to address the behavioral healthcare needs of those suffering from the psychological effects of trauma. Since our work in this area was really instigated by the urgency to address the mental health needs of trauma-exposed SMs and Veterans from the OIF/OEF and even Operation New Dawn (OND) combat theaters, it is only appropriate to put this work in a larger historical context, especially since it can help those outside those ‘realms’. If one reviews the history of the impact of war on advances in clinical care it could be suggested that clinical use of VR may be an idea whose time has come. For example, during WW I, the Army Alpha/Beta Classification Test emerged from the need for better cognitive ability assessment; that development later set the stage for the civilian intelligence testing movement over the next 40 years. Later on, the birth of clinical psychology as a treatment-oriented profession was borne from the need to provide care to the many Veterans returning from World War II with “shell shock” or “battle fatigue” with the VA creating a clinical psychology intern program in the late 1940s. At the same time, the creation of the National Institute of Mental Health (NIMH) came from an executive order from President Harry Truman as a vehicle for addressing the challenge of “Combat Neurosis”. More recently, the Vietnam War drove the recognition of PTSD as a definable and treatable clinical condition. In similar fashion, one of the clinical “game
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