Confronting voices with virtual reality: a hopeful therapy for schizophrenia

BarcelonaPeople with schizophrenia can now face the voices they hear in their heads head-to-head. Thirty percent of patients with this disease who take antipsychotics continue to hear these voices despite their medication. Until now, many therapies focused on finding ways to distract the mind and avoid thinking about them. Now, a new virtual reality treatment aims to confront them and shows positive results. The new therapy, tested at the San Juan de Dios Health Park, has improved the symptoms of the disease in 90% of cases and gives hope to all those who live "with constant anxiety," according to Susana Ochoa, European leader in Avatar therapy and project director.

The treatment with Avatar-VR technology, still being studied under the Somrise project, lasts seven sessions. In the initial meetings with the therapist, the patient describes what the voices sound like: whether they are male, female, high-pitched or low-pitched, etc. And from this data, a personified version of these voices is created in virtual reality.

In the following sessions, the patient comes face to face with the voices. The therapist, aside from the professional role, is also in charge of guiding this virtual character who embodies the patient's voices. "We have to reproduce comments like 'you're worthless,' 'you're useless,' or whatever each patient feels. Then, they have to confront them and say, 'that's not true, you're not right,'" Ochoa explains. The dialogue is previously worked out with the therapist before meeting the voices through virtual reality. Through this therapy, the anxiety of people with schizophrenia is greatly reduced, as the voice can become more positive, or even disappear. "You wanted to take care of me, but you're not doing it," or they ask the voice to appear only when they are off work or without friends."

Ochoa emphasizes that Avatar therapy is not new, but it is a technology that is only being applied in Denmark, where the training centers are located, in Poland, and Hong Kong. He hopes to speak with institutions and request that this therapy be applied to several centers in the country.

A promising treatment

This therapy represents a paradigm shift in the treatment of the disease, since until now, therapy consisted of cognitive-behavioral strategies, that is, engaging in activities to distract oneself and not think about the voices, such as listening to music or going for a run. Beyond the change, the researcher points to the importance of destigmatizing mental illnesses: "It's like someone with a broken arm," Ochoa insists.

Although she affirms that there are illnesses like depression that are more accepted, schizophrenia is still highly stigmatized, to the point that some patients prefer to say they have depression rather than schizophrenia.