Virtual Iraq for traumatized vets

Virtual Iraq is a virtual reality system that enables veterans suffering from posttraumatic stress disorder to revisit their trauma in order to become desensitized to it. The Department of Defense is testing the Iraq simulation on ground troops who have come back from the war with deep psychological trauma. The sim's engine comes from the game Full Spectrum Warrior but it's augmented with a head-mounted display, earphones, and smell-o-vision. This week's New Yorker has an in-depth piece on the Virtual Iraq clinical trials and the technology's inventor Albert Rizzo, a University of Southern California clinical psychologist who has also built VR systems for diagnosing and treating ADD and memory problems. From the New Yorker:

Strictly speaking, using virtual reality to treat combat-related P.T.S.D. is not new. In 1997, more than twenty years after the Vietnam War ended, researchers in Atlanta unveiled Virtual Vietnam. It dropped viewers into one of two scenarios: a jungle clearing with a "hot" landing zone, or a Huey helicopter, its rotors whirring, its body casting a running shadow over rice paddies, a dense tropical forest, and a river. The graphics were fairly crude, and the therapist had a limited number of sights and sounds to manipulate, but Virtual Vietnam had the effect of putting old soldiers back in the thick of war. Ten combat veterans with long-term P.T.S.D. who had not responded to multiple interventions participated in a clinical trial of Virtual Vietnam, typically lasting a month or two. All of them showed significant signs of improvement, both directly after treatment and in a follow-up half a year later. (P.T.S.D. is assessed on a number of scales, some subjective and others based on the observation of the clinician.) As successful as it was, though, Virtual Vietnam didn't catch on. It was an experiment, and when the experiment was over the researchers moved on.

Like Virtual Vietnam, Virtual Iraq is a tool for doing what's known as prolonged-exposure therapy, which is sometimes called immersion therapy. It is a kind of cognitive-behavioral therapy, derived from Pavlov's classic work with dogs. Prolonged-exposure therapy, which falls under the rubric of C.B.T., is at once intuitively obvious and counterintuitive: it requires the patient to revisit and retell the story of the trauma over and over again and, through a psychological process called "habituation," rid it of its overwhelming power. The idea is to disconnect the memory from the reactions to the memory, so that although the memory of the traumatic event remains, the everyday things that can trigger fear and panic, such as trash blowing across the interstate or a car backfiring–what psychologists refer to as cues–are restored to insignificance. The trauma thus becomes a discrete event, not a constant, self-replicating, encompassing condition.