Depicting a hallucination as a virtual reality avatar can successfully help reduce the symptoms of schizophrenia, researchers report today.
The technique, developed at the South London and Maudsley NHS Foundation Trust, has successfully been tested in a randomised controlled trial, it was announced.
The treatment involves the patient and therapist jointly creating an avatar to represent the problematic voice. During the subsequent three-way conversations, the therapist provides a voice for the avatar, giving it a reassuring personality.
Some 150 patients took part in the study – and half of them received “avatar therapy.”
The study found that avatar therapy worked faster than the alternative of counselling – offered to the placebo group. However after 24 weeks there was no measurable difference between the impact of avatar treatment and counselling.
But at 12 weeks, seven patients receiving avatar therapy – 10% – reported that hallucinations had completely disappeared as did two in the counselling group, the researchers report in The Lancet Psychiatry.
Researcher Professor Tom Craig, of King’s College, London, UK, said: “Our study provides early evidence that avatar therapy rapidly improves auditory hallucinations for people with schizophrenia, reducing their frequency and how distressing they are, compared to a type of counselling. So far, these improvements appear to last for up to six months for these patients.
“However, these results come from one treatment centre and more research is needed to optimise the way the treatment is delivered and demonstrate that it is effective in other NHS settings.”
Dr Ben Alderson-Day, of Durham University, writes in the journal: “Thinking of voices as entities or agents that can be engaged with – a notion largely ignored or discouraged for many years within mainstream psychiatric thinking – raises a key question: who, or what, is changing in Avatar therapy?”
Ann Mills-Duggan, of the Wellcome Trust, which put £1.3 million into the project, said: “Avatar therapy is a promising new approach and these early results are very encouraging.
“If the researchers can show that this therapy can be delivered effectively by different therapists in different locations, this approach could radically change how millions of psychosis sufferers are treated across the world.”
The Lancet Psychiatry 24 November 2017 [abstract]
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