FACE YOUR FEARS

Could virtual reality treatment help cure people of their phobias?

“Although I knew I was standing in a grey, carpeted room, I was soon sweating and frightened”

Over the years I’ve taken part in some crazy self-experiments, ranging from infecting myself with a tapeworm to prolonged sleep deprivation. But the worst was a film I made on fear, during the course of which I agreed to go caving. I am mildly claustrophobic, so when I got stuck deep underground I almost screamed the cave down. This delighted the director, but it was the most frightened I have ever been.

So I was sympathetic when one of my co-presenters on Trust Me, I’m A Doctor, psychiatrist Dr Alain Gregoire, admitted to having a fear of heights. This phobia affects around 20 per cent of people in the UK.

The traditional way of treating phobias is by exposing yourself to the thing you fear in a controlled way. So I was surprised when I heard Alain was going to try and crack it using virtual reality (VR). But I later discovered there is solid evidence that VR can be effective. In a trial carried out by researchers from Oxford University and published in The Lancet in 2018, 100 people with a fear of heights were randomly allocated to receive either no treatment, or six sessions of VR intervention over two weeks.

Those in the second group wore a VR headset that allowed them to explore a virtual environment where they could carry out tasks like looking over the ledge of a 10-storey building, or walking onto a platform to rescue a cat in a tree. While they were doing these activities, a virtual therapist talked to them about their fears.

The volunteers had to fill in surveys that scored their fear of heights before and after the treatment, and then again at four weeks. “Everyone who had the VR treatment benefited to some extent,” said Prof Daniel Freeman, who led the trial. “The average reduction in fear of heights was 68 per cent. So down by two-thirds, which is a large clinical effect.”

But would it work for Alain? With trepidation he donned the headset and entered a 3D virtual world. “It felt incredibly real,” he later explained. “Although I knew that I was standing in a grey, carpeted room with a flat floor, I was soon sweating, anxious and frightened. My legs began shaking and I developed pains in my chest as they asked me do a series of tasks at ever greater ‘heights’.”

But he found he could live with the fear and his symptoms improved. When he was later challenged with a real situation where he had to look over a big drop, he was surprised to find that he could do it. “Throughout my career I’ve believed it takes a long time to make significant psychological changes. Yet this brief intervention definitely worked for me.”

VR therapy is now offered on the NHS in some parts of England and is also being trialled for other conditions like obsessive compulsive disorder (OCD). When they come up with a VR world that can treat claustrophobia, I might just give it a go.