Abstract for Sue Halpern's "Virtual Iraq"

Claim: virtual immersion programs can help those suffering from PTSD

Statement of Claim: “Boyd’s doctor…encouraged him to seek out psychotherapy, telling him about an experimental treatment option called Virtual Iraq, in which patients worked through their combat trauma in a computer-simulated environment.”

Subclaims:

1. Virtual Iraq can be tailored to just about anyone

2. Immersion therapy has been used for years now

3. Immersion therapy has a high rate of success

Support:

1. “To make Virtual Iraq, Rizzo started with two basic scenarios: the market-town street scene and a Humvee moving along an Iraqi highway, where all the exit signs are in Arabic and the road cuts through sand dunes. Then he gave therapists a menu of ways—visual, aural, tactile, even olfactory—to customize them. At the click of a mouse, the therapist can put the patient in the driver’s seat of the Humvee, in the passenger’s seat, or in the turret behind a machine gun, and the vehicle moves at a speed determined by the patient. Maybe the gunner in the turret is wearing night-vision goggles—the landscape goes grainy and green. A sandstorm could be raging (the driver can turn on the windshield wipers and beat it back); a dog could be barking; the inside of the vehicle could be rank. Rizzo’s idea is that giving the therapist so many options—dusk, midday; with snipers, without snipers; driving fast, creeping along; the sound of a single mortar, the sound of multiple mortars; the sound of people yelling in English or in Arabic—increases the likelihood of evoking the patient’s actual experience, while engaging the patient on so many sensory levels that the immersion in the environment is nearly absolute.”

2. “Strictly speaking, using virtual reality to treat combat-related P.T.S.D. is not new. In 1997, more than twenty years after the Vietnam War ended, researchers in Atlanta unveiled Virtual Vietnam.”

3. “but Rizzo says that she has a gift, and so far eight of the nine patients she has treated no longer meet the criteria for P.T.S.D. (This number does not account for those who dropped out.)

Warrant: The audience of this article are psychologists and people who have been affected by the Iraq War or people who have PTSD.