Page 695 - Total War on PTSD

well in treating PTSD is recognizing the instinctive human response to experiencing trauma: avoidance. As with most psychological responses to stimuli, learned avoidance of threat evolved to protect us. It is the brain's way of making sure we do everything possible to avoid a similar incident. If the last time you awoke to the smell of smoke and your house was on fire, the smell of smoke in other situations is going to trigger an instinct to flee. There is no question that trauma-focused exposure is hard medicine for ahardproblem. However,whileavoidanceisthebiggestchallengetoovercomein treating trauma, it is also the thing that VR therapy is arguably the most effective in preventing. Simply put, the use of VR is just another mechanism for delivering exposure based on the evidence-based trauma-focused approaches of prolonged exposure, cognitive processing therapy, or Eye Movement Desensitization and Reprocessing (EMDR), where people are encouraged to confront things that emotionally hurt them initially and process them in different ways. Thus, assisting a patient in the process of confronting and re-processing difficult emotional memories in VR has been shown to also be an effective approach in the treatment of PTSD.
In 2003, the University of Southern California Institute for Creative Technologies that might also be of value as a research tool for measuring, documenting, and learning about PTSD. Using such a controlled stimulus environment to conduct studies that would help to better understand the brain and biological factors that could serve to further inform the prevention, assessment and treatment of PTSD. As a treatment tool, BRAVEMIND was developed to address PTSD by offering a means by which the natural avoidance tendency could be overcome in trauma sufferers. The value for using VR for the treatment of PTSD is supported by previous reports in which patients with PTSD, who were unresponsive to previous imaginal PE therapy treatments, went on to respond
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