The Brave New World of Virtual Therapy

July 7, 2004 -- You're sitting with your therapist in a lovely green park, telling him about a disturbing dream you had the other night. When he asks you to describe it, you decide to first change your appearance, dim the sun and then begin your story.

No, it's not the real world, but a kind of therapy that Kate Anthony, a London-based therapist, and others envision for the near future.

In virtual, computer enhanced therapy, the therapist and patient engage in healthy discussions through computer animated characters that represent themselves. The patient chooses his or her appearance, as well as the appearance of the therapist and the setting where their session takes place.

"Often when clients sit face to face with someone, they can find it embarrassing and too emotional," explained Anthony, who is also an online counseling consultant. "By communicating with virtual reality characters, people have more freedom to discuss their problems. The experience is more vivid than typewritten exchanges, but it doesn't impose the white noise of face to face interaction."

Virtual technology that immerses a person in a computer animated world has already been put to wide use in the field of psychology. The most common applications are helping people overcome a wide range of phobias — from flying to public speaking to claustrophobia — by exposing them to virtual versions of what scares them in a controlled setting with a counselor. Other programs help people get over addictions like smoking and gambling by placing them in a virtual world of temptation and helping them learn to resist.

But therapists and computer programmers are busy working on broader ways to use the technology, from offering virtual counseling sessions, like the one Anthony describes, to creating virtual patients or even virtual symptoms that could interact with therapists and psychologists to help them better understand and train for real patients.