The VEPSY UPDATED Project: clinical rationale and technical approach.

More than 10 years ago, Tart (1990) described virtual reality (VR) as a technological model of consciousness offering intriguing possibilities for developing diagnostic, inductive, psychotherapeutic, and training techniques that can extend and supplement current ones. To exploit and understand this potential is the overall goal of the "Telemedicine and Portable Virtual Environment in Clinical Psychology"--VEPSY UPDATED--a European Community-funded research project (IST-2000-25323, www.cybertherapy.info). Particularly, its specific goal is the development of different PC-based virtual reality modules to be used in clinical assessment and treatment of social phobia, panic disorders, male sexual disorders, obesity, and eating disorders. The paper describes the clinical and technical rationale behind the clinical applications developed by the project. Moreover, the paper focuses its analysis on the possible role of VR in clinical psychology and how it can be used for therapeutic change.

Six-month follow-up of in-patient experiential cognitive therapy for binge eating disorders.

Treating binge eating disorders is not easy: the disordered eating is usually combined with a patient who is overweight and often obese. As underlined by the current literature, treatment outcome must focus, at a minimum, on the binge eating characterizing this disorder, on weight changes, and preferably also changes in co-morbid psychopathology. To address these issues, cognitive behavioral therapy (CBT) is still considered the best approach. However, if we check the results of follow-up studies, different authors reported some relapse in the frequency of binge eating and small weight gains over the follow-up period. This paper describes the 6-month follow-up outcome of the Experiential Cognitive Therapy (ECT), a multi factorial treatment for binge eating disorders, including virtual reality therapy. These results are compared in a randomized controlled trial (n = 36) with the ones obtained by CBT and nutritional groups only. The results showed that 77% of the ECT group quit binging after 6 months versus 56% for the CBT sample and 22% for the nutritional group sample. Moreover, the ECT sample reported better scores in most psychometric tests including EDI-2 and body image scores.