My Mental Health in VR

Isabella Perrin
Nov 13, 2017
2 min read

Taking inspiration from the BBC three series 'My Mental Health in VR' , Virtually Better wants to explore how effective the use of VR can be to get people talking about their mental illnesses.

The series

Three participants with mental health conditions shared their experiences using Google's virtual reality tool Tilt Brush to help visualise how these experiences felt to them.

So in light of this, creative digital producer Ian Ravenscroft told Virtually Better why he wanted to create the series.

"I feel Virtual reality is really important to spread awareness of mental health and one thing I learnt is that it personalises people with their mental illnesses."

To this day, mental health is increasingly becoming less of a taboo, as people are learning to accept their mental health problems and can feel they can talk about it. The Producer feels that talking about mental health needs to go above and beyond and really delve into peoples issues.

"Virtual reality is a tool that can express peoples personal conditions, it means that the troubles people feel day in day out can really be expressed with the use of VR which simply wouldn't be able to be achieved just by talking alone."

"It plays on the creative side, like an expressive art form and what I learned throughout the series is that the people really enjoyed talking about what they feel and allowed them to understand their mental illness in a deeper way."

So what happens next?

Right now, we're still not at a stage to say that VR will be the predominant tool used to get people talking about their mental health. Cognitive Behavioural therapy is still practised on patients and commonly used as a therapy in the UK. Ian thinks that there is still a lot of research to be done into whether it can be used a therapy but int terms of talking about mental health - it definitely is useful and should be incorporated into peoples lives more.

VR is still a niche subject in science. Studies in Europe have been done to show that it can help people with PTSD, calm down stress and even be effective for dementia. It has helped people with anorexia build a healthier relationship with their body but in terms of mental health, a lot of work is yet to be done.

Yet, Ian says that "it is becoming a part of our daily lives and will soon just be the norm. The use of VR is definitely a positive thing and I can see it becoming a tool that is used in mental health. There's a gap which VR could definitely fill that void."