Virtual reality (VR) cognitive therapies for mental health conditions.

Automated delivery of psychological therapy using immersive technologies such as virtual reality may transform the provision of evidence-based psychological interventions, allowing deployment at scale of treatments that really work. In this workshop, we will introduce the rationale for the use of VR in mental health, the design process for automated treatments, potential delivery models, and results from our key empirical trials. The exemplar will be game Change: a new VR therapy, funded by the National Institute for Health Research, that has been successfully evaluated in a clinical trial with 346 patients diagnosed with psychosis.

About the presenters

Daniel Freeman is a Professor of Clinical Psychology and NIHR Senior Investigator at the University of Oxford and a consultant clinical psychologist in Oxford Health NHS Foundation Trust. He has been researching the use of VR in mental health for over twenty years and most recently has been pioneering the development of automated VR therapies. He is the scientific founder of Oxford VR, a University of Oxford spin-out company.

Sinéad Lambe is a research clinical psychologist and NIHR Doctoral Fellow at the University of Oxford and in Oxford Health NHS Foundation Trust. She helped design and deliver the gameChange VR therapy for patients diagnosed with psychosis, and co-ordinated the multi-centre randomised controlled evaluation. She is currently carrying out a programme of work developing VR therapy for use in forensic settings.