Tag: Texas Health Resources

Patients at Texas Health’s Addiction Recovery Center are using virtual reality to aid in their recovery, helping them cope with their substance use disorder in a safe and controlled environment.

Texas Health’s Addiction Recovery Center began using virtual reality in treatment in July. The tool helps patients practice going to environments where there might be alcohol or drugs, like a house party or a liquor store. The treatment is based on exposure therapy, which has been in use for more than 20 years.

“Typically with exposure therapy, a therapist would actually perhaps ride with them to the parking lot of the liquor store that they’re familiar with that would create the physiological activation, then they could intervene and begin practicing those skills,” said Dr. Ken Jones, behavioral health clinical officer for Texas Health Resources. “VR kind of allows for us to bring that same cueing response mechanism into a controlled environment here.”

Each patient will practice in the VR setting for as many times as it takes for them to engage with the VR and not be activated, Jones said.

“Hopefully, by the time that they’ve had their third, maybe fourth exposure, we’ll see a trajectory of decrease in their response and an increased confidence in their ability to deploy the tools that we’ve given them,” Jones said.

There are multiple different environments for patients to experience. There’s a house party, a family gathering, and a bar scene, Jones said, all of which can be customized with a particular drink or drug. Inside the virtual reality world, patients can interact with other people, walk throughout the house party or bar, and even practice turning down an offer of alcohol or drugs. The VR world also comes with scents, like beer or wine, that the staff at Texas Health can offer the patient to increase the feeling that the setting is real.

At the 80-bed facility, the response from patients has been “overwhelmingly positive” since they began using it in July, Jones said. Jones added that the VR tool is the only one of its kind in use in the DFW area that he knows of.

“When you don’t provide the reward, the reward being the substance of choice, over time, those feelings will start to decrease, because the body’s not going to keep giving you this massive activation response every time you encounter the stimuli, if you don’t follow it up with the reward,” said licensed professional counselor Stuart Dietzmann.

Research on VR to treat addiction has shown “promising evidence that there could be some benefit,” said Dr. Tyler Wray, an associate professor of behavioral and social sciences at the Brown University School of Public Health. Although the initial research has been promising, Wray said, it’s been limited by small sample sizes and short follow-up periods.

“We definitely do not have a good sense of which substances it’s most effective for at this point,” said Wray, who studies VR in his lab.

Kelly Courtney, Ph.D., an associate professor at the University of California, San Diego, added in an email that although “no one VR-based treatment has yet been ‘proven’ to be effective,” any treatment for substance use disorder could be adapted for VR, “so it could be useful for any part of treatment/recovery.”

The tool has helped patients successfully learn to urge surf when they’re exposed to triggering environments.