Virtual Reality for Obsessive-Compulsive Disorder: Past and the Future

The use of computers, especially for virtual reality (VR), to understand, assess, and treat various mental health problems has been developed for the last decade, including application for phobia, post-traumatic stress disorder, attention deficits, and schizophrenia. However, the number of VR tools addressing obsessive-compulsive disorder (OCD) is still lacking due to the heterogeneous symptoms of OCD and poor understanding of the relationship between VR and OCD. This article reviews the empirical literatures for VR tools in the future, which involve applications for both clinical work and experimental research in this area, including examining symptoms using VR according to OCD patients' individual symptoms, extending OCD research in the VR setting to also study behavioral and physiological correlations of the symptoms, and expanding the use of VR for OCD to cognitive-behavioral intervention

Self-help Therapy for Obsessive-compulsive Disorder

The aim of this research was to investigate the use of self-help therapy for the treatment of Obsessive-compulsive disorder. Firstly, a meta-analytic study found that self-help therapy for OCD improved symptoms across varying levels of therapeutic contact. The second study strengthened the evidence surrounding the metacognitive model, finding significant relationships between OCD symptoms and metacognition. In the third and fourth studies, an online metacognitive program for OCD was developed and evaluated within a preliminary trial