Virtual reality helps vets

The Trauma Management Therapy Program, led by director of the UCF Anxiety Disorders Clinic and clinical psychology professor Dr. Deborah Beidel, is a program that uses specific smells to help treat men and women who served in Iraq and Afghanistan and suffered from combat related post-traumatic stress disorder.

The treatment starts with a five week program of individual sessions in the form of exposure therapy. The current 60 Participants use the Virtual-Reality equipment (headgear, headphones and a joystick) to simulate specific combat locations and situations that have been the cause of nightmares flashbacks or intrusive thoughts. The smells used in the program are weapon fire, body odor, burning rubber, diesel fuel, Moroccan spices, garbage and cordite (a kind of gun powder). These smells are released at specific times during the exposure session.

During the exposure sessions and over the course of the program the veteran's anxiety is measured and their progress is monitored to determine how the veteran is responding to the treatment and how the program could be improved.

According to this article, this is the first large-scale clinical research program that will incorporate smell into the specialized Virtual-Reality session for veterans of Iraq and Afghanistan.

This process is reminiscent of the schizophrenic treatment ABC covered in 2000, which also used virtual environments to replicate the symptoms of the disorder. The obvious differences between the two programs is that one is meant as a treatment (and uses smells to enhance realism), whereas the other is meant to recreate the experience of being schizophrenic (and does not use any olfactory stimulations).

When treating disorders, the rule appears to be (according to our book, other articles and in-class discussions): confront the issue and somehow find a way to make it more approachable. The goal is to be able to face the old problem like any other situation.

Since a sense of smell is actually a very important way in which humans define their environments (we associate smells with memories, emotions, people and locations), inadvertently, similar smells could remind veterans of the traumatic experiences of war. My great-uncle was a Vietnam war veteran, and my dad remembers him sleeping on the couch when a car backfired outside the house. My great-uncle scrambled around looking for his gun; he wasn't even awake. It took several years for his reactions to loud noises to die down. Hopefully, with this treatment, veterans will not take the war back with them; by concentrating on countering all sense-memories of negative events, the patients will be able to conquer their fears of the past.