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Therapists Use Virtual Worlds to Address Real Problems
from Scientific American
When a troubled 13-year-old named Joe first entered the Kids in Transition program in 2007 in Camden, N.J., he hardly spoke to his therapist. Like many teens at this residential mental health treatment facility, he was admitted because he had trouble controlling his anger, had run away from home several times, and had a history of run-ins with the law, according to Heather Foley, a social worker with the program.
Therapists typically encourage patients like Joe to get at the core of their problems via face-to-face role-playing—pretending to be in a situation and having the patient practice how to handle it. But Foley says this approach was a nonstarter for Joe, whose confrontational behavior and attention deficit hyperactivity disorder (ADHD) impair his ability to engage and focus in this way.
When that approach failed, Foley enrolled her young patient in a program that treats teens using something familiar to most of them: the virtual world, in this case a customized one called Simulated Environment for Counseling, Training, Evaluation and Rehabilitation (SECTER).
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