A British company is behind a new system based on virtual reality. The goal? Empowering the millions of people with social anxiety disorder around the world to conquer their fears.
According to the anxiete.fr platform, social anxiety is none other than the set of feelings of apprehension , inner tension and outer embarrassment triggered by the gaze of others. Any situation can then trigger social anxiety, such as passing a test (diploma, driving license, etc.) or even being the center of attention. The person then has the impression that others are scrutinizing them and judge her, whatever she does. That same person thinks they are going to cause something negative and/or elicit harsh and critical judgment.
In other words, social anxiety can be very disabling in everyday life. You should know that this disease affects millions of people around the world. In France, 22.5% of the population (in 2018) was impacted to varying degrees.
An article published by Venture Beat on March 10, 2020 discusses a virtual reality device intended to treat social anxiety. Several patients are already experimenting with it in several countries (United Kingdom, United States, China) during weekly half-hour sessions. Fully automated, the VR concept contains a virtual coach whose mission is to guide users. This saves time and makes it easy to incorporate this concept into a care pathway.
Immersed in a virtual world, the objective of patients is to perform various classic tasks everyday. This involves, for example, placing an order in a bar, entering a store or even taking the bus. While ordinary people think these are commonplace situations, people with social anxiety dread them.
At the origin of the concept, we find Daniel Freeman, professor of psychology in the department of psychiatry at the University of Oxford (United Kingdom). He has been developing this program for 20 years, now under the aegis of Oxford VR. The project also receives support from the National Health Service and has fundraising of more than 10 million euros.
In 2018, we were talking about another VR concept aimed at combating anxiety. It was the Heal-ium helmet , presented as being able to analyze the electrical activity of the brain. This is possible via a kind of headband equipped with an electroencephalography (EEG) type brain sensor.
Here is the project video published by Oxford VR:
