Development of a social skills training programme to target social isolation using virtual reality technology in primary mental health care.

Introduction: People with severe mental illness often have a small or no network of friends and limited contact with their family and live social isolated lives. We developed a social skills training programme to be administered by public mental health professionals in helping those with mental illness to overcome their social isolation. Methods: The programme was developed over 3 years in close collaboration among psychologists, service users, municipal mental health professionals, mental health service researchers and a local firm providing virtual reality (VR) training. We started with the simplest available equipment, that is, a cardboard headset combined with a smartphone, then we used Oculus Quest and now Oculus Quest 2. Results: The resulting programme is comprised of eight steps from: 1) identify service user's primary and secondary goals to 8) three-month follow-up. Conclusion: Several factors made adoption and implementation of VR technology possible in a relatively short timeframe: namely, the municipality and service users were involved from the beginning of the development process, efforts were made to introduce VR to mental health professionals and allow them to reflect on its usability, solutions were low-tech and low cost, and the long-term research collaboration was established without municipal financial obligations.

Exploring the Potential for Use of Virtual Reality Technology in the Treatment of Severe Mental Illness Among Adults in Mid-Norway: Collaborative Research Between Clinicians and Researchers.

BACKGROUND: Virtual reality (VR) technology is not currently used in the treatment of severe mental health illness in Norway. OBJECTIVE: We aimed to explore the potential of VR as a treatment for severe mental health illness in Norway, through collaborative research between clinicians and researchers. METHODS: A collaborative research team was established, comprising researchers, the manager at a district psychiatric center, and the manager of the local municipal mental health service. An all-day workshop with eight clinicians-four from specialist mental health services and four from municipal mental health services-was conducted. The clinicians watched three different VR movies and after each one, they answered predefined questions designed to reflect their immediate thoughts about VR's potential use in clinical practice. At the end of the workshop, two focus group interviews, each with four clinicians from each service level, were conducted. RESULTS: VR technology in specialist services might be a new tool for the treatment of severe mental health illness. In municipal mental health services, VR might particularly be useful in systematic social training that would otherwise take a very long time to complete. CONCLUSIONS: We found substantial potential for the use of VR in the treatment of severe mental health illness in specialist and municipal mental health services. One of the uses of VR technology with the greatest potential was helping individuals who had isolated themselves and needed training in social skills and everyday activity to enable them to have more active social lives. VR could also be used to simulate severe mental illness to provide a better understanding of how the person with severe mental illness experiences their situation.