Diving into Virtual Therapy: Can it Really Cure Anxiety and Depression?
Originally posted on Medium, re-shared here with the permission of the author.
Common mental disorders such as anxiety, depression and chronic stress are increasing rapidly in prevalence globally — can VR save the day?
While presenting a patient’s progress report to my internal medicine professor during my final year of medical school, she abruptly interrupted me mid-sentence. “Did you just say cured?” I hesitated. “You should be incredibly careful when using such language,” she continued “cured is a promise you cannot keep, and as a physician, your word is your bond.”
I think about this interaction often, and while its applicability varies across medical and surgical specialities (once a fracture is healed, it is for most intents and purposes, cured) one area where it most certainly rings true is mental health.
It’s helpful to prefix any statements with the truth of the matter — while our understanding of mental health conditions and how they affect us has come on leaps and bounds in recent years, it is ultimately is still limited. The role of genetics, the efficacy of medication — even the diagnostic criteria used for psychiatric conditions in the DSM-5, are all hotly disputed topics among thought leaders in the field. When discussing the science around mental health, we must leave the door open for the possibility of new breakthroughs.
One thing is for certain — pharmaceuticals are big business. They’ve received the lion’s share of the attention when it comes to treatment of common mental disorders in recent years. In lieu of many viable alternatives, we’ve been forced to accept debilitating side effects and soaring costs of treatment. VR treatments are the new kid on the block— a beacon of hope in a long monopolised marketplace. But are they clinically effective, or just another gimmick?
The Evidence
This scoping review of 9 studies published in JMIR Mental Health, assesses efficacy of VR in treatment of anxiety and depression in combination with Cognitive Behavioural Therapy, and shows extremely promising results. A further systematic review published in the SAGE Open Nursing Journal concludes that VR can be used to manage symptoms of anxiety, depression, fatigue, and pain. The evidence base for the usefulness of VR in clinical practice is growing fast, with over 220,000 new articles on PubMed mentioning virtual reality since 2019.
At the very least, we now understand VR to be an effective and researched-backed adjunct in the treatment of common mental disorders. This fairly nascent approach could still benefit from broader research, and I imagine cohort studies over a period of 5 to 10 years will allow for a better understanding of efficacy. To describe VR as curative for common mental disorders at this stage would be premature, but the findings in the short term are certainly a cause for optimism.
