Ipsit Vahia

A car will mysteriously appear at your door and take you to wherever you need to go.

And now they're not dependent on people to take them to meet a friend or to go buy groceries or go watch a film or whatever.

But virtual reality, I feel, is an undertapped and underutilized technology.

All of the above.

So my favorite story around VR has to do with a very specific patient.

She was one of my patients and we were doing psychotherapy.

And about 10 or 12 sessions in, it was just this moment in the process of psychotherapy where we really needed to talk about her childhood.

And she was just consciously or subconsciously, it was hard for her to do it, where she was happy to talk about her childhood.

That's where I used VR, where we were able to get her to stand in front of her childhood home.

So we had her retrace her childhood walk from home to school.

And then we had her stand outside where her father's business used to be.

And something about this was transformative.

She became tearful minutes after.

I think the art of geriatric psychiatry is actually on an individual by individual basis, figuring out exactly what the person needs.

You know, as physicians, we're sort of prone to think about curing diseases.

In late life, it doesn't work like that.

It's, you know, many things are not really curable.

Yes, sometimes the thing that this person needs is medications or psychotherapy to alleviate depression or anxiety.

But at other times, it's listening, it's connecting.

And there is this implicit fear of aging.