Accepted for/Published in: JMIR Mental Health
Date Submitted: Dec 15, 2022
Date Accepted: Mar 13, 2023
The use of virtual reality to promote positive mental health. A systematic review of the literature over the past 10 years.
ABSTRACT
Background:
A large body of research documented the efficacy of psychological interventions integrated with virtual reality (VR-therapies) in treating psychiatric disorders. However, the concept of positive mental health calls for a twofold approach, where both symptoms and positive functioning should be addressed by modern interventions
Objective:
Summarize articles that applied VR-Therapies by embracing the positive mental health perspective.
Methods:
The literature search was performed by entering the keywords: “virtual reality” AND “intervention” OR “treatment” OR “therapy” AND “mental health” NOT “systematic review or meta-analysis” and by limiting to “journal article” and to the English language. To be included in this, review articles had to present at least one quantitative measure of positive functioning, and one quantitative measure of symptoms or distress, and had to investigate adult populations, including populations with psychiatric disorders.
Results:
A total of 20 articles were included. They described various protocols of VR that were applied for the treatment of anxiety disorders (5 articles) depression (2 articles), PTSD (2 articles); psychosis (3 articles); stress (4 articles) and the psychological effect of Covid 19 (4 articles). The majority of them showed the beneficial effect of VR therapies in improving stress and negative symptoms. However, 7 studies showed no or small effect on various dimensions of positivity, particularly in clinical samples.
Conclusions:
VR interventions might be cost/effective and largely scalable, but further research is needed to develop or perfectionate existing VR software/treatments, according to the modern positive mental health approach.
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