Based on the information from this project and the knowledge from the class, I realised that immersion and reality can affect people in different ways, for example, when people feel fully immersed, people can confuse the gap between reality and virtual and thus be affected by the virtual. Based on this knowledge and understanding, if I could change the existing VR experience, I would want to make the virtual environment more realistic to enhance immersion and thus move towards the possible idea of VR mental health therapy. I believe that better immersion and virtual environments would make it easier for people to relax, thus making psychotherapy more effective. With this in mind, I began an initial search for information and concrete examples of psychotherapy and virtual reality. Interestingly enough, people are already experimenting with virtual reality technology to treat different psychological disorders as an alternative to some real-life treatments.
At the very beginning, after the initial reading and understanding of this material, two issues came to mind that I was particularly concerned about and wanted to expand on. The first issue was how to use and how to improve the use of exposure therapy in virtual reality. This issue focuses on different treatments for phobias that allow the user to directly confront the thing or environment they are afraid of. This requires a great deal of immersion and realism in the virtual environment, an issue that has been tried and tested in the medical world and examples have been reported. But then I developed another idea, which was to use virtual reality to help restore and learn some of the social dysfunction of people with mental illness, allowing the user to slowly accept and learn some basic behaviours or problems so that they can be treated differently. However, as there are many different types of mental illness and different behaviours between patients, this remains a matter of discussion and theory. Based on the question of whether virtual reality technology is appropriate and how it can be used for work related to the treatment of mental illness and mental disorders, I began to look for further information and confirm my direction.
After a certain amount of information seeking and understanding, I began to confirm the direction of this thesis. I wanted to further discuss how virtual reality can help people with mental illness to recover and learn from some of their social dysfunctions, and to do so more in terms of the immersion in reality that virtual reality creates. Among the many psychiatric problems I have inquired about is probably the most vulnerable to virtual reality, a psychiatric problem known as Maladaptive Daydreaming, a mental health problem in which a person daydreams or fantasises excessively. It is a psychologically unhealthy or negative attempt to cope or adapt to a real problem. People who do this often gradually lose their ability to recognise in extremely vivid and detailed daydreams. Many sources also suggest that such daydreaming may be spontaneous and according to these sources that the problem is still mainly caused by anxiety, depression and other mental health conditions resulting from excessive real-life stress. The main problem is that there is not a good treatment plan in place, as it is not yet an official mental illness, so there is no standard treatment. However, many sources suggest that the main treatment for Maladaptive Daydreaming is mental health therapy. Which is called cognitive behavioural therapy (CBT) is also a common approach to treating anxiety and depression. This approach focuses on allowing the patient to release and relieve some of their stress by communicating or portraying what they are thinking and wanting to do.
From this material I began to wonder if virtual reality could be used in a similar way to help such patients to release their stress. By using drawings, models, or other methods to recreate their fantasy scenes in virtual reality, or by showing them to others, even those who are reluctant or inept at communicating could use VR to perform CBT therapy. This approach is basically risk-free and not more psychologically taxing for the user, and perhaps they can slowly show and present themselves through this act to gradually treat this mental health problem, and in the end this virtual fantasy reality presentation could perhaps be used for other similar mental health problems that use CBT therapy. So my final question might be whether and how virtual reality can be used to treat Maladaptive Daydreaming a similar way to CBT.