Virtual war deals with post-traumatic stress

LA Times/Houston Chronicle:

None of this is really happening, but the experience is almost overwhelming in "virtual Iraq."

The Humvee plows along a desert road. The engine rumbles underfoot, and Black Hawk helicopters whirl overhead. A sandstorm blows in, and insurgents pop up and shoot with sickening blasts that shatter the windshield. Is that the smell of burning rubber?

Those sensations of war are being fed into a special helmet, goggles and earphones. They are conjured by a computerized virtual reality developed in part by gaming engineers and psychologists at the University of Southern California and being tested, among other places, at the Naval Medical Center in San Diego. The goal is to treat post-traumatic stress disorder.

Universities, private companies and the federal government are pouring millions of dollars into creating and testing such virtual Iraqs to help ease the psychological disorder that, according to a 2004 study by the Walter Reed Army Institute of Research, affects more than 15 percent of combat personnel returning from Iraq.

Sufferers might have anxiety, nightmares, flashbacks, emotional numbness, jumpiness and physical pain. Unable to return to combat or civilian jobs, some receive disability payments for years or for life.

With a therapist's supervision, the virtual Iraqs are designed to vividly, yet safely, enable those veterans to confront war experiences in ways that go beyond traditional counseling and drug therapy. The computer programs, even with the somewhat cartoonish digital depictions of combat, seek to relieve trauma by repeatedly revisiting its origins and not letting fear fester.

Lt. Cmdr. Robert McLay, a Navy psychiatrist who is a research leader on virtual-reality treatment of PTSD in San Diego, explained that more customary forms of exposure therapy for trauma might require visits to actual locations, such as returning a rape victim to the scene of the assault.

"You don't want to send someone who is traumatized back to Iraq," he said. "This allows us to bring someone back, but within the situation here."

And, he said, some PTSD sufferers are unable or unwilling to recall things in counseling sessions without stimuli, such as the digitalimages of a combat hospital, a recorded Islamic prayer melody or the smell of cordite explosives misted into a psychologist's office.

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It is interesting to see how technology is used to help those who have already helped the war effort. While my experience in Vietnam had its moments of fright, they were not persistent enough to subject me to PTSD. I hope those who suffer from it can find peace with this new procedure.

Sissy Willis has a post on a new device cobble together to help the troops in Anbar province keep up with the bad guys. It is great to see how technology and innovation can help the war effort. It is what sets us apart from our enemy, whose tech is all parasitic.