I just wish those who study this illness could think outside the box for a moment, instead of talking nonsense about anxiety and stress causing agoraphobia and how such and such a therapy should be used to treat it. If they’d only listen to people who suffer from it, listen properly and without their head filled with preconceived notion, they might actually learn something.

One little bit of advice for agoraphobia sufferers: google ‘vagus nerve’ and read about its connection to both the digestive system and the heart. This nerve can be very much involved in your feelings of faintness, as it acts on the heart and can have an effect on heart rate. When you’re out in public do you ever get a feeling of pressure in your upper abdomen, followed by a feeling of faintness? If so, be sure to tell your doctor about this and see if he thinks this is down to your vagus nerve.

And, medical men and women, please stop making assumptions about agoraphobia. There is indeed an anxiety component to this illness, but the anxiety comes afterwards, it’s a result of the illness, not the cause, at least in many cases. That there’s a physical cause for the illness itself is something about which I no longer have the slightest doubt – and I speak as someone who suffered from this illness for over 30 years but who is now cured.

This is just a brief note to point out this interesting post about a novel application of virtual reality to healthcare in the Second Life Herald: Interview With the Agoraphobic: Fighting the Fear in Second Life. It’s apparent that healthcare

Pathfinder, I know you guys got some stick for your research ethics policy, and I’m pleased to see that you seem to have removed it. However, the vacuum it leaves is perhaps not encouraging for research groups who need be to sure that, if they embark on a project in SL, the ToS will not change and pull the rug from under them while they’re halfway through, or that LL will shy away from confonting the as-yet unexplored issues that will arise if SL is to be a valid platform for research.

Perhaps you should make some official statement on the website saying something along the lines of “We support and encourage research within SL and will defend SL researchers. In particular, we will not stop research activities that have been passed by a recognised research ethics committee unless ordered to do so by a court”. For example, I’m currently planning a project looking at how people adjust to chronic pain. Now I know that some people with chronic pain self-medicate with illegal drugs. If I was to be running this project within SL then I’d want some kind of a guarantee that you wouldn’t just pull the whole thing if you got a sniff of a complaint that it was promoting illegal activity. (If you do have such a statement then I haven’t found it yet).

This problem, for me, isn’t just restricted to SL.

Very interesting article. I do hope Roberto makes some good progress with the work he’s doing.

It’s not scientific in any sort, or by any means, but it does make for an interesting discussion, especially in the console gamers versus PC/MMO gamers. SL opens up avenues of making money to people who can’t handle working in loud, noisy jobs (which most are unless you are a librarian), and I think that’s a neat concept as well.

I myself, can’t handle being in the jobs that are currently available to me (and no I’m not claiming disease or anything of the sort), but the loudness, the immaturity in having to work near people my age, and all that good stuff, leaves me open to work in SL in relative peace.

Pathfinder,

Let’s hope that people do some peer-reviewing and scientific analysis of the claims here, and don’t just drink the Linden Kool-Aid, which often makes the very emotional and seemingly unassailable claim that Second Life helps the disabled. Who could question these claims without sounding like they are against helping the handicapped?!

Well, I do. Let’s take a group of people actually suffering from agoraphobia. Or let’s take a group of people who are caregivers for schizophrenics.

And let’s actually do a double-blind, peer-reviewed critical study with real science, not pseudoscience.

Let’s devise some actual scientific metrics. Compare therapies given in the normal way to agoraphobics, and compare those who are exposed to 2 hours or 10 hours or whatever works, to Second Life simulation, which are going to ostensibly provide “healing”.

Let’s compare training to caregivers in the traditional way, using literature, artwork, and interviews with patients to help them understand schizophrenia, and compare training using a simulation in SL for what it’s like to be a schizophrenic.

I’ll bet that the outcomes will show that the contrasting therapies or trainings provide *no measurable difference* (just like any studies with “serious games” point to the same thing often). But everyone will emotionally agree that Second Life is “more fun”. Then you can only hope that whoever is in charge of the budget and purchase orders will be able to prevail on his colleagues if they are overlooking the cost of new computers, graphic cards, bandwidth, land and most importantly — *time*.

In other words, the task isn’t just to find some friend on a medical journal, or some science writer in a mass media publication, and get them to come to Jesus and put in this article in an ecstatic, religious, sort of unscientific way. The task is to get people seriously examining the ecstatic claims and doing serious peer-reviewed work on these claims. It might actually show that Second Life is a vast distraction and a fake. If you are a scientist, you’ll have to accept that outcome.