Virtual Reality in psychiatry and psychotherapy

The use of virtual reality (VR) technology in psychiatry and psychotherapy has spread continiously over the last two decades. Researches has mainly focused on the VR-based therapy of anxiety disorders, but encouraging results have also been published in the field of diagnosis and therapy of eating disorders, addictions, autism, and ADHD. There have been fewer reports on the therapy of schizophrenia yet. In these cases VR interventions cover a wide range of symptoms. VR based interventions have already been developed for cognitive and social abilities that are more difficult to alleviate by medication. Among positive symptoms, the developed methods mainly focus on auditory hallucinations and delusions. In general, the current results confirm the effectiveness of VR-based therapeutic interventions and justify the need for further research. Research and therapy on this fieed at the VR Laboratory of the Department of Psychi - atry and Psychotherapy, Semmelweis University also support literature data. However, the widespread use of VRbased interventions requires further well-designed, blinded, randomized, long-term follow-up studies.