PTSD –Post Traumatic Stress Disorder
Summary
Post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) is a term for certain severe psychological consequences of exposure to, or confrontation with, stressful experiences that the person experiences as highly traumatic. Clinically, such experiences involve actual or threatened death, serious physical injury, or a threat to physical and/or psychological integrity, to a degree that usual psychological defences are incapable of coping with the impact. It is occasionally called post-traumatic stress reaction to emphasize that it is a result of traumatic experience rather than a manifestation of a pre-existing psychological weakness. The presence of a PTSD response is influenced by the intensity of the experience, its duration, and the individual person involved.
PTSD may also have a delayed onset of months, years or even decades
Symptoms can include general restlessness, insomnia, aggressiveness, depression, dissociation, emotional detachment and nightmares. A potential symptom is memory loss about an aspect of the traumatic event. Amplification of other underlying psychological conditions may also occur. Young children suffering from PTSD will often re-enact aspects of the trauma through their play and may often have nightmares that lack any recognizable content.
CAREN PTSD environments are utilizing the multi sensory inputs avaliable inside the system to apply a type of exposure Therapy. Exposure therapy is a Cognitive behavioral therapy technique for reducing fear and anxiety responses. It is similar to Systematic desensitization, though it works more quickly and produces more robust results. It is also very closely related to Exposure and response prevention, a method widely used for the treatment of Obsessive-compulsive disorder. It based on the principles of habituation and cognitive dissonance..
Currently used CAREN environment is for treatment of PTSD caused by
war related trauma.
The environment is a multi layer / multi level build type so that the higher the level of the subject, the more complex, distracting and crowded the scenery will get. Focus will be on environmental exposure All visual feedback tools will be used to allow the patient to focus on the environment. Subjects will be gradually exposed to environments of increasing complexity while physiologic measures such as heart rate are monitored. These environments may contain stimuli that may provoke a stress response.
The user experience assists overcoming PTSD through the gradual introduction of the PTSD causes in a safe environment, using multi sensory integrated reality environment.