A New Way for Therapists to Get Inside Heads: Virtual Reality
Dr. Jewell is among a handful of psychologists testing a new service from a Silicon Valley start-up called Limbix
that offers exposure therapy through Daydream View, the Google headset that works in tandem with a smartphone.
“We feel pretty confident that exposure therapy using V. R.
can supplement what a patient’s imagination alone can do,” said Skip Rizzo, a clinical psychologist
at the University of Southern California who has explored such technology over the past 20 years.
Barbara Rothbaum helped pioneer the practice at the Emory University School of Medicine in Atlanta,
and her work spawned a company called Virtually Better, which has long offered virtual reality exposure therapy tools to some doctors and hospitals through an older breed of headset.
So Dr. Jewell, a psychologist in Colorado, treated the patient through a technique called exposure
therapy, providing emotional guidance as they revisited the intersection together.
