This morning, we’re reposting this fascinating article on the therapeutic uses of VR that originally appeared on Gamesindustry.biz.
Here’s a truism for you: dementia is a god-awful thing. A savage and remorseless condition, it strips away a lifetime of accumulated experience and personality, eradicating memory and emotional attachment, sometimes seeming to erase a person entirely. It’s a heart-rending process to witness, watching somebody vanish by degrees in this way, seeing them become angry, depressed or violent, and losing all recognition for the people they’ve loved for their entire lives.
Sometimes, the decay can be kinder than expected – patients may drift into a kind of happy reverie, a sort of peace descending as their ember fades. Often it does not happen like this. In many cases, someone who has begun to exhibit the early signs of dementia will be aware of what’s happening, the unavoidable degradation made all the more bitter by the diminishing moments of clarity which pass fleetingly across the lens of their consciousness. Agonisingly for those around them, it can be supremely difficult not to will on the acceleration of the process, or indeed the final embrace of death, in a desire to see the tragedy of this recognition extinguished for good. There is scant comfort in knowing that the final stages of erasure leave little room for self-reflection.
And yet, for every guilt-saturated second in which you may wish for the release of a friend or relative from this inexorable grasp, you can be stung a thousand times by the merest hint of recognition in their eyes – a tiny smile, a grateful squeeze of the hand. The darkest curse of dementia can be the fragments of the person it leaves behind.
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Of course, this conjecture comes from the selfish perspective of the witness. I speak with a little experience: both my father and grandmother were ravaged by dementia in the final stages of their lives. As a result, I know that it’s difficult enough to be involved in the process, even at considerable remove, that it becomes easier to grieve in advance. To begin, quite frankly, to think of them as dead already.
Then, someone you thought had vanished resurfaces, gasping, for even the briefest moment. In the last days of her life, I visited my grandmother in hospital and talked with her about things which had happened – 30 years ago in my childhood and 80 years ago in her’s – in astonishing detail: memories of happy days spent in sunshine and light. She was frail and faltering, but she had clarity and emotional continuity. A woman I hadn’t seen for years was there once more. She never left that bed, and did not go gently, and I have never really forgiven myself for all the conversations I didn’t have in the months and years prior, the encounters rushed through, the moments wasted.
Years later, when my semi-estranged father passed, I wasn’t lucky enough to have another chance. Never tremendously close, we had precious few shared memories to revisit and he’d lost all recognition of me well before his final days, but I know there were things which eased his passing – happy recollections of his own. Even when he began to exhibit signs of unpredictability which sometimes escalated to violence, there were bits of his old self in between.
The point is this. Dementia can present us with a locked door, a sullen slab of unresponsiveness. It’s exhausting, harrowing, alienating. It’s only going to become more common, but there is hope. Pharmaceutical trials are showing some results in the amelioration of its onset. Mental health practices and dietary advances are leading to fitter, healthier brains more resilient to its advances. And VR may have its part to play as well.
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Source: Eurogamer