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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 changing” outcomes of the OIF/OEF/OND conflicts could derive from the military’s support for research and development to advance clinical systems that leverage new interactive and immersive technologies such as VR. Moreover, this may drive wider uptake of clinical VR use in the civilian sector as the technology becomes more common in society’s digital landscape. Thus, as we have seen throughout history, innovations that emerge in military healthcare, driven by the urgency of war, typically have a lasting influence on civilian healthcare long after the last shot is fired.
**For further information on this work, please access the following video directory and papers.
Directory of MedVR Online Videos: https://webdisk.ict.usc.edu/index.php/s/4q1sbMABegNNHnW
Rizzo, A. A., & Shilling, R. (2018). Clinical virtual reality tools to advance the prevention, assessment, and treatment of PTSD. European Journal of Psychotraumatology, 8(sup5), 1414560. Available at:
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