Virtual Therapy

Virtual reality therapy encourages you to join a virtual world specifically developed and aimed at increasing your exposure to negative stimuli so you can build resilience and emotional strength with the guidance of a psychologist.

VR therapy is a technique in psychological treatment that branches from exposure therapy, which focuses on the use of virtual reality technology to simulate exposure to aversive stimuli and triggers that cause clients stress and anxiety in the real world. The concept is to acclimate and become desensitized to the phobia by increasing exposure to the stressful stimuli progressively through treatment.

Exposure therapy is commonly used for the treatment of phobias, such as the fear of flying, fear of public speaking, fear of spiders, and school phobia in children. Virtual reality therapy can also be used for the abuse of substances, such as drugs and alcohol, gambling, pain reduction, PTSD, depression, anxiety, and eating disorders.

A Virtual World

For many years, psychologists have been faced with a limitation in exposure therapy due to a lack of exposure possibilities owing to the expediency and financial difficulties that simulating a physical world situation may pose. For instance, it is quite expensive to create a situation in which a client can experience the fear of flying without being on an airplane, and exposing a client to spiders is not adaptable in the real world. However, with Virtual Reality Exposure Therapy, you can fully immerse yourself into a virtual world made for the specificities of situations that are distressful and presents numerous ways of helping you desensitize yourself from fearful conditions.