JMIR Publications

ABSTRACT

Background:

Mental health conditions pose a major challenge to healthcare providers and society at large. The World Health Organization (WHO) predicts that by 2030, mental health conditions will be the leading disease burden globally. The current need for mental health care is overwhelming. In New Zealand, one in six adults have been diagnosed with common mental disorders such as depression, and anxiety disorders according to a national survey. Cognitive behavioral therapy (CBT) has been shown to effectively help patients overcome a wide variety of mental health conditions. Virtual Reality Exposure Therapy (VRET) might be one of the most exciting technology that is emerging in the clinical setting for the treatment of anxiety and depression.

Objective:

This study aimed to investigate what VR technologies are currently being used to help suppress depression and anxiety. Primarily we identified whether the CBT was included as part of the virtual reality exposure therapy treatment (VRET), and if so, how? Equally important, the focus was set not only on VR hardware and used software tools but also on what the participants did in the virtual environment and how the virtual environment looked like

Methods:

We performed a scoping review. To identify significant studies, we decided to use already aggregated sources in Google Scholar Database. Overall, the goal of our search strategy was to limit the number of initial results related to virtual reality in mental health to only a relevant minimum.

Results:

Using our defined key words, Google Scholar identified more than 17300 articles. After applying all inclusion and exclusion criteria, we identified a total of 369 articles for further processing. After manual evaluation, 34 articles were shortlisted, of which 9 reported the usage of CBT with VR. All these articles were published between 2017 and 2021.

Conclusions:

Majority of the studies demonstrated the use of VR to be effective for suppressing anxiety or depression in a range of settings and recommended its potential as tool for usage in a clinical environment. As standalone headsets are much easier to work with and more suitable for home usage, the shift from tethered VR headsets to standalone headsets in the mental health environment was not observed. A total of 9 studies explicitly mentioned the usage of CBT. Out of these, CBT was conducted within a virtual reality environment in 5 studies while in the remaining 4 studies CBT was used as an addition to VRET. All 9 studies reported the use of CBT either in vivo or inside a virtual environment to be effective in suppressing anxiety or depression.