'Avatars' help patients with schizophrenia banish their demons

 
P5 Researchers at UCL have received a £1.3 million award from the Wellcome Trust to conduct a large scale, randomised study of a computer-based avatar therapy that helps people with schizophrenia learn to control the voice of their hallucinations and delusions. Pictures from: Middleton, Jen [mailto:J.Middleton@wellcome.ac.uk] Via ES Reporter REF: NIGEL HOWARD
29 May 2013

Groundbreaking research is helping people with schizophrenia to control “voices in their heads” with computer-generated avatars that look and sound like their hallucinations.

A large-scale study was launched today after pilot research with patients in Camden and Islington produced astonishing results, with all 16 patients reporting a reduction in the frequency and severity of the attacks. Three stopped hearing voices altogether.

Today, the Wellcome Trust announced a £1.3 million grant to researchers at University College London, enabling them to further their research into the use of 3D graphics to control “persecutory auditory hallucinations”.

Therapists use the technology to recreate the patient’s “demon” and encourage dialogue. This gradually allows the patient to exert control over their demon, as the therapist — sitting in another room — is able to speak through the avatar and, over the course of three months, turn it from an enemy into a friend.

One in four schizophrenia patients responds poorly to anti-psychotic medication and researchers knew that patients able to sustain a dialogue with their persecutor felt more in control. The therapy sessions were put on to MP3 players, allowing patients to replay the conversations.

All the patients in the initial study heard voices giving them commands and believed that if they disobeyed they would be punished or killed.

Most had been hearing voices for at least a decade. One had been hearing the voice of the devil for 16 years and said the treatment had given him his “life back”. Another had been woken every day at 5am for over three years by a woman’s voice that continued all day. He said: “It’s as if she left the room.”

A third patient who had been sexually abused by an older man could not bear to see his face — which the therapist deleted — but was able to speak with the avatar leading the voice to vanish after 13 years of torment.

Julian Leff, professor of mental health services at UCL, hit upon the idea of using avatars after seeing speech therapists use them to teach lip-reading to deaf people.

He said: “One in 10 patients with schizophenia commit suicide. Quite often it’s because the voice is telling them ‘jump off a building’ or ‘run under a train’. It bothered me we didn’t have a way to help these patients to get out of this appalling situation.

“Even though patients interact with the avatar as though it was a real person, because they have created it they know it cannot harm them, as opposed to the voices, which often threaten to kill or harm them and their family.”

The new trials will be held at a clinic in Brixton and will involve 142 people on medication for schizophrenia. One in 100 people will have at least one schizophrenic episode during their lifetime.

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