Page 642 - Total War on PTSD

pathogenic meanings, the learning of new responses to previously feared stimuli, and ultimately an integration of corrective non-pathological information into the fear structure. One of the challenges associated with this treatment is the reliance on patients to be able to effectively imagine their traumatic experiences. Many patients, however, are unwilling or unable to do this. In fact, this very tendency to avoid the cues and reminders of the trauma is one of the cardinal symptoms of PTSD (along with hyperarousal, intrusive thoughts and dreams, alterations in cognitive/emotional experiences). Thus, VR was seen, early on, to be a potential tool for the treatment of PTSD and anxiety disorders; if an individual can become 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
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