VR Therapy Helping to Cure Gambling Addiction

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Wednesday, July 12th, 2017 | Written by Stephen Smith

Virtual reality is coming back in style as a new boom in VR equipment and games takes off. This time around, advances in technology are letting developers create virtual reality situations across a number of different areas of the industry, instead of solely in the gaming world. Therapy is one of the many subjects that people believe will be addressed by virtual reality in the future, and there is even a research team currently looking into virtual reality as a possible means of treating gambling addictions.

Advancements in VR

In 2010, Palmer Luckey created a prototype of the most popular virtual reality headsets, the Oculus Rift. This innovation helped to revolutionize virtual reality as the world knew it, and in 2013, the gaming corporation and software developer Valve discovered different low persistence displays that could let virtual reality display and show high quality virtual reality content. This made way for a whole new brand of virtual reality.

VR and Addiction Therapy

These days, there are many uses for virtual reality, and the media has been very active of late showing off the different advances that come with virtual reality technology as far as gaming is concerned. However, the evolution of such technology is not only intended for the gaming sector, and as mentioned, there have been studies carried out about virtual reality, and how it could be used to treat a gambling addiction.

A group of researchers at the Universite du Quebec en Outaouais has been working at the Cyberpsychology Laboratory to research the uses of virtual reality technology in order to help those exhibiting signs of gambling addiction. For longer than 18 years, this team has been studying the potential benefits that virtual reality could have on a number of different ailments, and has shown that virtual reality can allow patients to be placed into an ethical, and most importantly, safe environment where they can be confronted with the craving that is often associated with addiction. Most importantly, though, it can be done without putting the people into the actual scenarios themselves, as that could be detrimental to their ultimate recovery. As Stéphane Bouchard, founder of the Cyberpsychology Laboratory at Université du Québec en Outaouais, explains:

“If a patient is addicted to cocaine, I can talk with the patient forever, but what really matters is how he or she deals with the situation when cocaine is in front of that person. The best thing I would like to do in therapy is to actually offer cocaine to the patient — but that obviously is not possible.. [In terms of a gambling addiction] I would need to go with them into the gambling scenario. But therapists don’t want to do that because they feel like they’re sleeping with the devil.”

VR versus Real Life

Using virtual reality, therapists can witness how someone addicted to gambling might react when faced with a scenario that forces them to confront the opportunity to gamble. This is because virtual reality places people in an environment where their senses are put to the test, in the process showing therapists how well the individuals are working with their treatments, and demonstrating if they are able to resist the temptation of the very thing that they are addicted to. Elaborating further, Stéphane Bouchard explained:

“When we remove the goggles, they’re all so shocked by their reaction. Then they realize that if they react that strongly in virtual reality it will probably be much stronger in real-life situations, which means that they’re not ready to go back in a casino.”

In the meantime, some people have criticized what the actual difference is between using virtual reality to treat patients as opposed to taking them to a real life casino, and the answer comes from one word: control. With virtual reality, the therapist can control the environment that the individual is thrust into, and make it a much less intense experience for them.

By using virtual reality, it is now becoming conceivable that a treatment for gambling addiction may one day be found. Needless to say, this technology boasts a huge array of other benefits outside of the fun that comes with playing virtual reality games, and as the technology grows, so will the interest in such treatments.