Towards Virtual Therapy for Alcoholic Depression

Abstract

Alcoholic depression, a biological based mental illness that can have lasting emotional and physical effects. Graded exposure (either in vivo or by imaginal) is the fundamental to obtain an improvement of the depression symptoms. But many patients appear to have difficulty imagining the prescribed scene and they also express strong aversion to experiencing real situations. This research proposes a Virtual Reality Exposure Therapy, which can be an alternative to standard graded exposure, for treating alcoholism and depression simultaneously, where patients are immersed in to three dimensional environments, a bar and a beach, and a set of interface tools that allows patients to immerse, navigate, and interact with objects in the virtual bar and beach environments. A virtual bar is developed in generating significant increases in subjective alcohol craving when alcoholics are exposed to the bar, where cue exposure with coping skills training may result in increased use of skills, increases in days abstinent, decreases in drinking and leads to elicit craving in real situations. A beach is created as a relaxation technique and distraction from alcohol, where the pleasant and calm environment gives positive changes physically and mentally from depression. Five alcoholic depressed patients were exposed to VR bar and beach environments and subjective craving, attention to alcohol cues, and relaxation level were assessed across the environments by Visual Analog Scale, Alcohol Attention Scale and Galvanic Skin Response (GSR) respectively. Overall, subjective craving and attention for alcohol increased across the bar environments and reduced drastically in VR beach on severe drinkers. Participants reported high levels of relaxation in the beach and indicated that the virtual beach is perceived a great distraction from alcohol craving intention. The novelty of the research is to address a mind distraction to beach when he experiences with alcohol in real situations, which is a relaxation method gives positive changes in mind, controls drinking and reduces depressed mood. These preliminary results suggest that VRET is a promising new medium for treating alcoholic depression on severe alcohol dependents.