Therapists Use Virtual Worlds to Address Real Problems
From: Scientific American - 04/03/2009
By: Karen A. Frenkel    

An emerging technique to help troubled teens combines role-play in
computer-generated environments with talk therapy 

When a troubled 13-year-old named Joe first entered the Kids in Transition
program in 2007 in Camden, NJ, he hardly spoke to his therapist. Like many
teens at this residential mental health treatment facility, he was admitted
because he had trouble controlling his anger, had run away from home several
times, and had a history of run-ins with the law, according to Heather Foley,
a social worker with the program. Therapists typically encourage patients
like Joe to get at the core of their problems via face-to-face role-playing -
pretending to be in a situation and having the patient practice how to handle
it. But Foley says this approach was a nonstarter for Joe, whose
confrontational behavior and attention deficit hyperactivity disorder (ADHD)
impair his ability to engage and focus in this way. 

When that approach failed, Foley enrolled her young patient in a program that
treats teens using something familiar to most of them: the virtual world, in
this case a customized one called Simulated Environment for Counseling,
Training, Evaluation and Rehabilitation (SECTER). 

Read the entire article at:
http://www.sciam.com/article.cfm?id=therapists-use-virtual-worlds

Links:
Kids in Transition
http://www.state.nj.us/dcf/divisions/operations/education/directory.html

Simulated Environment for Counseling, Training, Evaluation and Rehabilitation 
http://www.forterrainc.com/index.php/resources/case-studies/79-greenleaf-pioneers-virtual-worlds-behavioral-therapy

CFG Health Systems
http://www.cfghealthsystems.com/

Greenleaf Medical
http://www.greenleafmed.com/

Child and Adolescent Psychotherapy Training Program
http://www.wawhite.org/training_programs/captp.htm

John Suler
http://www-usr.rider.edu/~suler/psycyber/psycyber.html