From: Matt Merkley <MERKLEY@DELPHI.COM>
Subject: SCI: Various health perspectives (psychotherapy, autism, eyes, etc.)
Date: Sat, 10 Jul 1993 15:24:36 -0400


VIRTU-L


> It would be a challenge to work out what sort of
> world/experiences would be of therapeutic value for general
> disorders and particular cases. I believe I've read (or
> maybe made up) a suggestion that VR might be of use in
> getting in touch with autistic children.
  - John Young (jyoung@stx.com)

John, thanks for your interest.  I've also received a suggestion that
VR may be useful in the treatment of phobias: providing a medium for
controlled exposure and desensitization.  I'm wondering if its use
couldn't be generalized into the more mundane but common area of the
typical family conflicts, maladaptive patterns of behavior, that form
the bulk of the psychotherapeutic workload. Here, I'm wondering how
flexible and individualized the virtual environment can be made -- can
you custom-build good-enough models of abusive parents, maddening
spouses and kids etc for the user to work out his/her difficulties on?
Or an image of the patient him/herself?  (Now that would need some
careful study -- meeting up with yourself in a virtual world?)  

I would stress that the models wouldn't have to be anything like
perfect.  Human therapists use -- in fact often depend on -- the
patients' projection or displacement of their internal model of the
person in question onto the therapist, and such could be the case, in
principle, in the virtual environment.

RE:Yet another movie with VR in the plot:

> According to _Film Threat_ (the OTHER movie magazine), yet
> another film is in production that features VR in the plot.
> (In current release in _House of Cards_, which apparently
> uses VR to "cure" autism).
  From: jew5001@zeus.tamu.edu (WILLIAMSON, JOHN EDWARD)

Yep -- there's no cure in sight -- it's a physiologically based
condition -- defect(s) in the actually neural 'wiring' and not a
Freudian-style reaction to psychic trauma or bad parenting.  We'd be
thinking in terms of something to bring the autistic person out of
his/her 'shell' a bit, or give him/her an easier, more controllable
alternative environment to learn in.

----

Re: Eye problems associated with VR. If I may throw in an observation
from my perspective: I can't think of any exceptions, in medicine, to
the principle that every benefit comes with its own share of risk, but
that doesn't stop you from going ahead in the knowledge that overall,
the benefit outweighs the risk.  Even if (and keeping in mind Bob's
"We need to keep asking the researchers to be precise, explicit, and
willing to help develop mitigating strategies when uses are worth the
effort") these eye problems turn out to be real, it probably means
that, as others have suggested, some kind of guidelines, e.g. limiting
time of exposure, or allowing for a post-use adjustment time, will be
needed.

Matt Merkley.
U of Kansas School of Medicine
Dept. of Psychiatry,
Wichita