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The Essential: The Inquiry: Can Virtual Reality Help Treat PTSD?

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The Inquiry: Can Virtual Reality Help Treat PTSD?

18/05/2016 GMT

BBC World Service - The Essential, The Inquiry: Can Virtual Reality Help Treat PTSD?

Psychologist Skip Rizzo uses virtual worlds to help soldiers talk about their experiences

Psychologist Skip Rizzo uses virtual worlds to help soldiers talk about their experiences.

Skip Rizzo is director for medical virtual reality at the University of Southern California. He uses virtual reality to help treat people with post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD). A common treatment for PTSD is to get people to recount their traumatic memories, but a lot of sufferers bury them. In this excerpt from The Inquiry, Skip Rizzo describes how he recreated scenes from the Iraq and Afghanistan wars to help soldiers talk through their experiences.

(Photo: virtual reality presented in the form of binary code, in the shape of a man’s head with virtual reality glasses on. Credit: Shutterstock)

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