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Military Uses Virtual Iraq To Treat PTSD
Hugh Pickens writes "Traditionally the best treatment for post-traumatic stress disorder [PTSD] — being raped, narrowly escaping the collapse of the Twin Towers, or witnessing a buddy die on the battlefield — is to have the person relive the trauma using his or her imagination. Repeated exposure to the horror can desensitize individuals and help them stay calm enough to reprocess what happened and get beyond it. Now Clinical Psychologist Albert "Skip" Rizzo has developed a program that has had great success in treating returning troops from Iraq. A soldier with PTSD recounts what happened, and a therapist seated before a computer then creates an environment in the program Virtual Iraq that captures the essential elements of the episode. By donning special goggles, the soldier can see a reenactment and while the simulation starts off relatively tame over the course of several weeks, the therapist monitors the patient 's response and more elements of the episode are introduced until the individual can finally go through an intensely vivid recreation of it without being overpowered by terror. Other programs offered to treat PTSD include Virtual Airplane, Virtual Audiences, Virtual Heights, Virtual Storm, and Virtual Vietnam."
If it helps legless vets, more power to them. You sound like the kind who spit on returning Vietnam vets.
Infuriate left and right
Doesn't this show that intense violent video games might very well have a desensitizing effect on kids? I'm not talking about stupid theories about turning kids into killers, I just mean that they might react less strongly, and possibly less negatively, to violence after playing Grand Theft Auto. Something to think about. Anyone have any studies based on this?
p.s.
I'm a gamer and personally love GTA and many other other very violent games.
The point isn't to make you feel better. The point is to be able to address what happened and move on....it's not a huge surprise that talking through in a controlled, supportive environment what happened might help people address the situation and resolve it.
/. people have other methods that have been empirically backed by a number of excellent studies, I'm sure that these people would be all ears. They're really just doing their best to help, and would love some more.
Of course, if the armchair
"Other programs offered to treat PTSD include Virtual Airplane, Virtual Audiences, Virtual Heights, Virtual Storm, and Virtual Vietnam."
All but the last are for desenstitization of phobias (as are those for snakes and spiders). The same programs would work for PTSD as they're simply VR of exposure to a particular situation, but I can't recall there ever being a case of audience-induced PTSD.
Rizzo has also used his VR work in stroke rehab, a worthy effort. OTOH, he used it to 'erase' the well known and much decried persistent gender effects (males being better at it than females) in the mental rotation task (MRT) http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mental_rotation . Not bad work, but he credited VR, not simply exposure and practice. One of my undergrad labs approached the Virginia Tech VR "tank" folks and asked for help in replicating this. The VR lab suggested using VRML instead for our own convenience. We did so, and we built two full sets of the MRT out of wooden blocks. We tested males and females from psychology as well as from engineering. We found the effect he did, but got the same effect from both virtual and manual manipulation. The effect was from practice, not specifically VR immersion.
To pull this back on topic, the above tends to support the traditional military medicine model for treating "shell shock" and "battle fatigue" (as PTSD was know for the past century) by exposure, ie. "return to the battlefield as soon as possible". Just as with electroshock therapy, much as I dislike the fact the numbers show it to be effective.
"I may be synthetic, but I'm not stupid." -- Bishop 341-B
Other than showing that you're an asshole, your post shows you haven't thought about what it's like to live around guys with PTSD. They have families and neighbors who, you know, didn't volunteer to sign their lives away. Innocent bystanders, you might even call them. Programs that help treat direct sufferers - even if you don't think they deserve it - can make a huge difference in the lives of everyone around them.
The city I live in has a very large military presence, and I welcome every bit of assistance the government can provide in helping them return to society.
Think harder.
Yet another way for the veterans affairs office to waste taxpayers dollars.
Do you think the cost of this intervention is anything like the cost of the war to begin with? It's a trivial extra cost. Decent nations factor in the cost of being nice to the vets after a war.
More importantly, is the cost of the intervention more than the cost of having the PTSD sufferer continue to suffer? Fixing up a young traumatised soldier is an investment: from one rather crass point of view, the government effectively invests in creating taxpayers, and I bet refurbishing a soldier is much cheaper than creating a new taxpayer from scratch. Hint: you personally benefit from the availability of other taxpayers.
Most importantly, these people are worthwhile human beings who got a bit buggered up. Being decent human beings ourselves, we should want to spend our money on fixing them up. Hint: if you do not want to do that, you are not a decent human being.
Yeah, I'm a public health guy who lives in a country with a decent health-care system [read, better than the US system]. That means that I know the good economic and moral reasons for the society to provide physical and mental health care. Doing anything less is frankly sub-human. Arguing for less is, at best, ignorant. At worst, it is malicious and inhumane.
PS. yes, that sort of whining about health expenditure makes me really angry and anti-american. It is amazing how so many Americans believe that their system is superior and the only morally defensible system. Empirically, it is more expensive and less effective than other Western systems. People die because of your theoretical whining about 'socialised health systems.'
Yes, yours is a great country and all, but it's got a few damned ugly patches, and the worst of it is that so many of you don't have the ability to criticise yourselves and actually change something.
Please, go forward, patch yourselves up, be strong, be good, get back to being the envy of the world. I would like to revisit the USA one day, but first, I need to want to be there. End rant.
Your anti-establishment posts on this and other threads are new and refreshing. No one has ever been as anti-corporate or anti-government or anti-military as you. You are clearly at the forefront of independent thought.
That's what you want to hear, right?
Maybe you should "think harder" about not being an overprivileged white kid growing up in suburbia where your biggest problem is if pop will let you drive the new truck to prom, and more about the fact that there are people for whom the military is the best job opportunity, or the best chance at college, or the best chance at getting out of their rapidly failing town. The PTSD is a side effect that's nearly impossible to plan for and incredibly difficult to treat.
Would you be more sympathetic to someone with cancer?
Of course, if the armchair /. people have other methods that have been empirically backed by a number of excellent studies, I'm sure that these people would be all ears. They're really just doing their best to help, and would love some more.
I've got one... don't send our young men and women into wars unnecesarily.
PTSD is a lot less impacting if you never have to experience the traumatic part.
-Rick
"Most people in the U.S. wouldn't know they live in a tyrannical state if it walked up and grabbed their junk." - MyFirs