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Psychiatric Interventions in Virtual Reality: Why We Need an Ethical Framework

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  07 September 2020

MARIA MARLOTH ,
JENNIFER CHANDLER  and
KAI VOGELEY
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Abstract

Recent improvements in virtual reality (VR) allow for the representation of authentic environments and multiple users in a shared complex virtual world in real time. These advances have fostered clinical applications including in psychiatry. However, although VR is already used in clinical settings to help people with mental disorders (e.g., exposure therapy), the related ethical issues require greater attention. Based on a thematic literature search the authors identified five themes that raise ethical concerns related to the clinical use of VR: (1) reality and its representation, (2) autonomy, (3) privacy, (4) self-diagnosis and self-treatment, and (5) expectation bias. Reality and its representation is a theme that lies at the heart of VR, but is also of specific significance in a clinical context when perceptions of reality are concerned, for example, during psychosis. Closely associated is the autonomy of VR users. Although autonomy is a much-considered topic in biomedical ethics, it has not been sufficiently discussed when it comes to applications of VR in psychiatry. In this review, the authors address the different themes and recommend the development of an ethical framework for the clinical use of VR.

Keywords

virtual realityhuman–computer interactionvirtual reality in clinical contextautonomy
Type
Articles
Information
Cambridge Quarterly of Healthcare Ethics , Volume 29 , Special Issue 4: Clinical Neuroethics , October 2020 , pp. 574 - 584
Copyright
© The Author(s), 2020. Published by Cambridge University Press

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Footnotes

Funding acknowledgement: This study was funded as part of the project consortium THERENIA within the funding framework “Network of European Funding for Neuroscience Research” (NEURON) under the ERA-NET scheme of the European Commission, with funds from BMBF, Germany (01GP1822), and from the Canadian Institutes of Health Research (CIHR).

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