As the digital landscape continues to creep into our daily lives and homes, as costs continue to rise for travel, and as healthcare and caretaker availability continues to drop; how do we possibly find a professional to focus on our individual needs?
Leave it to technology to figure out where to start, and this time, it is not AI… yet. Enter virtual reality. No, seriously… enter the digital landscape of virtual reality and begin to experience immersive treatments. These treatments don’t just stop at mental health, but it is an important place to start; especially for the veteran community.
Would the VA be more fun in VR?
Surprisingly, the VA is already in the ‘space’ of VR, with Pain and Anxiety Management programs going back to late 2017. The VA has been using VR headsets to distract veterans away from negative stressors via ‘various virtual environments.’ that include interactive games, natural relaxing spaces, and 360-degree videos. Also, as of 2023, the ‘VA has implemented a number of VR applications in more than 30 different use cases across VA medical centers in all 50 states and Puerto Rico, helping to improve rehabilitative care, staff training, and the treatment of health conditions like post-traumatic stress disorder and chronic pain,’ according to an article on the VA’s research website.
Why isn’t this technology being put into the hands of the military community with speed? Popular headsets sell for around $300-$400. That amount feels like a drop in the bucket compared to some of the technology and prescriptions that are just given away at VAs and military clinics.
Where is the disconnect?
Crystal Chambers, the CEO and Founder of Sheepdog Therapeutics, is asking the same question. She has deep connections to the military community and is trying to bridge the gap with her Emotional Wellness app, DISCOVReality. With this app, she has already created a method of treating multiple types of trauma, simply using this one app.
“Our brains don’t know the difference between reality when you’re in an entirely enclosed and secluded environment,” Crystal began. “So when you put on a virtual reality headset, your brain does not know that it’s not real. You can logic it and you can gain some control, but for the sake of working through things within your unconscious mind, which works in a lot of pictures, it’s most effective in virtual reality because you’ve removed all other stimuli.”
The Key to Immersion
According to Crystal, DISCOVReality uses several modalities to help the user’s brain absorb the virtual reality experience. The key is sound frequencies, which affect brainwaves and can create a heightened or relaxed state. Within that specific state, our brains can experience the program, and depending on the selected emotion, the correlating program helps work through specific emotions and perhaps the trauma associated with them.
“Your unconscious mind is where the programming resides and we think our conscious mind is in control, but that’s like a ship, right?”, Crystal asked. “And so if you can picture your unconscious mind as the rowers of the boat and your conscious mind is the captain of the ship, who’s really in charge. The captain can yell orders all day long, but if he can’t get his people to row, they’re not going there.”
So, How does it work?
That is where DISCOVReality comes in as a tool. The app doesn’t override the rowers, it doesn’t make the captain louder, but it does a little piece of both and allows the user to find a way to respond, rather than react in triggered moments. In Crystal’s words, the app allows you to not impulsively react to an emotion. Instead, it helps your brain practice handling emotions which allows you to shift your thought process in real time.
“This is just the first part of our software,” stated Crystal. “We have a whole roadmap of all these other things that we want to do with it. Next, we will start chunking out all of these other things that will help people shift those portions of their brains. This is the scalable, accessible, and affordable way to reach the masses. It doesn’t require one-on-one. You don’t have to be educated to do it. So how do we take something so powerful and get it into the hands of as many people as we possibly can? If we just make a 1 % shift, just 1%, we’re all in a better space.”
In the app description online, the key features of DISCOVReality are:
- Emotional Resolution in Under 60 Minutes: Guided sessions tackle stress and negative emotions, building resilience in under an hour.
- Science-Backed Brain Training: Using neuroplasticity, DISCOVReality helps your mind form healthier emotional responses.
- Self-Guided Empowerment: Take control of your emotional journey with interactive VR, enabling change anytime, anywhere.
- Progress Tracking & Achievements: Track progress with detailed metrics celebrating growth and resilience.
- Imagine the strength to face life’s challenges head-on, stay calm in tough moments, and build resilience with confidence. DISCOVReality offers a VR approach to emotional wellness, seamlessly integrated into daily life. Unlock the power of virtual reality for emotional wellness today.
“Okay, so here’s what I can tell you,” Crystal said before giving a much better review of the app and the process.”Selecting a moment in time, you work on what’s called a timeline, and what it’s doing is allowing your unconscious mind to choose its own point in time. This is because everything’s nondescript. It’s about self-guided, intuitiveness, and allowing yourself to stop at a specific place that your unconscious mind is guiding. So, what that does is it allows your subconscious mind to pinpoint the relevant emotional point at which it wants to work. And we do utilize emotional video activation, or simply put, it’s a triggering video. But the intention of that is to make sure that there’s an unconscious and a conscious connection within the emotional feeling.”
Interactive, not guided
“From an unconscious standpoint of picking the emotion that you choose and then having that trigger video happen, it ties the two together,” Crystal continued. “And now you have a physiological emotional state while you’re in the experience. Because what we’re doing immediately after that is showing your brain how to handle heightened emotions that you have identified. Next, we start with dissociation and sensory disruption. As soon as that comes up, whatever emotion you pick, even if the trigger video isn’t specifically what you would identify as that emotion, if you were to have any type of biological feedback on it, I guarantee you, have a physiological reaction from the video that comes up.”
“So now physiologically you have an emotion that’s going on,” Crystal said as she led us down the virtual journey. “And so we are now showing your brain how to do this dissociation. We’re going to create some sensory disruption so that you can have a better dissociation from it. And then once we move it across the room we give you control through a remote control. We are going through symbolic reprocessing. And so we’re allowing you to show your mind, hey, I’m in control of this.”
The program helps the user disassociate even further by minimizing pictures, and color, and distorting those images to symbolically dispose of those emotions from your body. Visually, allows your mind and body to say to each other, ‘these feelings are gone’.
Removing the baggage, not the emotion
DISCOVReality has the potential to help any type of user, not just veterans with trauma, change their thoughts and emotions on chosen topics of trauma, but it also has many other uses where it can make an impact. Crystal expects the program to be useful in suicide prevention needs, sexual trauma, defining the identity of a service member transitioning out of military service, and beyond.
“You take vegetables that your kids won’t eat and then you like grind them up, you smash them up, and then you stick them in something and they never know that you put the vegetables in,” explained Crystal. “We’re kind of putting some things in these VR experiences that make it interactive and engaging, but we’re just really sliding the veggies in.”
“The opportunity to reach those people that are having, whether it’s the ideation or whether they’re in the moment, there’s actually research that shows that 50% of suicides are impulsive decisions,” Crystal said. “And that if you can get 30 minutes of time, they will have enough emotional control to get themselves out of the decision, right? That’s a big number. And so if we can capture somebody in that 30-minute span and do a little bit of brain work that gets them through that and lessens the emotions and improves the cognitive function, that’s a solid win for me.”
You can find DISCOVReality on the Meta store.
