Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder is a type of anxiety disorder which can occur following exposure to a traumatic event, such as when one’s safety was put in danger. It is the second most common psychological disorder in Australia, affecting 1.1 million people each year.
PTSD causes a wide range of long-lasting symptoms that can leave an individual and their family in a lot of emotional and financial distress. This is because PTSD symptoms often disrupts many aspects of everyday functioning, from grocery shopping to maintaining relationships. Left untreated, symptoms can persist for decades and lead to other disorders like depression, substance use, and dementia.
There are several approaches to treating PTSD, but the gold standard is a psychological treatment called ‘Exposure Therapy’. ‘Exposure Therapy’ is administered by a mental health practitioner, such as a psychologist, and requires the patient to gradually recall details relating to the trauma that they experienced.
This often sounds quite confronting, however there is a strong rationale behind this technique.
When people are fearful of something, they tend to avoid the feared object, activity, or situation (consider the person who flees the room when they see a spider scuttle past). This avoidance helps reduce feelings of fear in the short term, but long term can make the fear become worse.
Exposure therapy requires the patient to safely confront their fear, in order to overcome it. In the case of PTSD, the feared object is the memory of the trauma (and any reminders), meaning the patient must confront the trauma that they experienced.
A psychologist will ask their patient to slowly recall and describe their traumatic experience in order to reduce feelings of fear. This vivid imagining of the feared object, situation or activity is known as Imaginal Exposure therapy.
Imaginal Exposure Therapy is the ‘gold standard’ for PTSD treatment, but it has many limitations. The delivery of Exposure Therapy to patients with PTSD requires recall of distressing trauma memories which often causes acute emotional distress.
The lack of objective feedback for the treating psychologist, means that they cannot limit the intensity of the exposure. These can ultimately result in high patient drop-out rates.
Ultimately, the shortcomings of exposure therapy have led to sub-optimal efficacy, with just one-third of PTSD cases treated by exposure therapy experiencing recovery.
Immersive Exposure Therapy has elevated this gold standard of treatment, providing improved treatment outcomes, increased safety and a reduction in stigma related to therapy.
Virtual Reality has unlocked new possibilities in treatment recovery and already proven itself to be a highly effective tool in the delivery of exposure therapy, with a plethora of research studies demonstrating improved treatment outcomes when compared to standard exposure therapy.
