Computer aided group therapy

In the beginning we had the Freudian analysts whose therapy took the form of four one hour sessions a week, presumably and generally speaking, always the same days and the same hours. The analysand built up a complicated relationship with the analyst, usually told him all kinds of stuff that he wouldn’t tell anyone else, and sometimes felt much better for it.

Which was all very well, but was rather expensive, which made an opportunity for the group therapists. Rather than an analyst and an analysand, we had a facilitator with a group, maybe half a dozen or more. Maybe group dynamics became more important than the relationships between group members and the facilitator. In any event, there needs to be trust, trust that what is said in group stays in group. A formula used in all kinds of vaguely comparable situations: I associate to the late Duke of Edinburgh saying, in the series ‘Crown’, in the context of a long promotional cruise on the ‘Britannia’, that what happened there, stayed there. Thinking particularly of riotous, not to say disreputable, goings-on on islands in the Pacific.

Trust, the giving and taking of which, can be, I imagine, an important part of the therapeutic process. Particularly perhaps for people who, for reasons from their past, find it hard to trust.

And then there were ritual practises of one sort or another all over the world, more or less from the beginning, a modest fraction of which were supported by recreational drugs of one sort or another, including psychedelic drugs, perhaps from mushrooms. With one example being regular attendance at the Mass of a Catholic Church, complete with bells and smells. Another being the substance facilitated, ritual orgies invented by Huxley for his ‘Brave New World’.

And more recently we have had the rather self-consciously resurrected rituals of New Age people and their kind.

Rituals which, at least some of the time and for some of the participants, serve some kind of therapeutic purpose. Matters which were touched on some weeks ago at reference 6.

Against this background, psychedelic drugs (YDs to reference 2) appear to be gaining ground as respectable drugs for helping with various mental problems, for example depression and end life anxiety.

Help often seems to involve self-transcendent experiences (STEs to reference 2, mystical type experiences or MTEs to reference 10). A weakening of the self. The blurring of the boundary between self and other. And it is part of the argument of reference 2, that the interpersonal element is often missing here and needs to be put back. Learning how to get on better with other people is often a part of what a person seeking help needs. So group therapy is better than taking drugs in the privacy of a laboratory.

However, working with or using psychedelic drugs is a problem in that they are illegal in many countries. Often seriously illegal.

But it turns out that maybe virtual reality tools (VR) can be used to create much the same effect, without all the bother of getting mixed up with controlled substances. This is what reference 2 is all about, puffed by reference 1.

The VR in question is not all that flashy to look at, with a framework provided by a wriggling stretch of poly-analine, the modelling code for which happened to be at hand. Analine being an amino acid which sometimes occurs in stretches in DNA, stretches which are not to be confused with polyaniline which is quite different. Maybe the fact that the lead author for reference 2 was a computational molecular physicist in a previous life had something to do with it. He also has a taste for scientific bubbles, mysteries, quanta and all. Maybe he knows the people at Google who use DeepMind to fold proteins, a project which gets into the news from time to time.

So a small group and a facilitator, all in their own spaces, possibly scattered across the country, not to say the globe, don headsets and are inserted into a rather simple world, at least to look at. Everyone is represented in this world by a glowing, throbbing blob, manipulable to some extent. A linking ring is provided by the wriggling alanine. All this in the opening snap above. They are then eased into an STE, with all the blobs coming together and more or less merging. A wheeze which may have therapeutic potential.

I imagine that an important ingredient here is the fact that while members of the group can talk to each other, they only see each other (and themselves) in the form of blobs. Group members gross appearance, status and standing in the world are largely obliterated, leaving just, to coin a word, the soul. A stronger version of the uniforms worn by some societies, uniforms which have a similar levelling effect. Think masons with their gloves and aprons. Or soldiers with their fancy uniforms of old.

 

Reference 3 and reference 4 provide some groundwork. Lots of statistics and complicated figures. Validation of various questionnaires which try to find out about STEs, in particular the Communitas scale snapped above. There is also the rather longer, older and better established MEQ30 of reference 11. With the authors being well aware of the difficulties and dangers of using self-reports for this sort of work – the lack of alternatives notwithstanding. That said, there has been some work with scanners: how do the brain’s networks stand up to assault by YDs?

While the author of reference 5 was important in the world of mysticism. A sort of founding father. A one time colonial civil servant in what was then called Ceylon, who went on to do twenty or more years at Princeton, winding up at Laguna Beach, south of Los Angeles. The place were, as it happens, I bought my first copy of Krakauer’s ‘Into Thin Air’. Perhaps he invented the phrase ‘noetic quality’ which I have yet to fathom, help from Wikipedia notwithstanding.

Other matters

There seems to be some overlap with the world of computer games and their virtual reality.

There seems to be some overlap with the work that Google is doing, or has done, with its deep dream generator, some material on which is to be found at reference 7. A sample is offered below.

Which appears to be a good deal more complicated than the visual world offered at reference 2.

 

Some customer feedback.

Conclusions

There seems to be something in this. Maybe VR will take its place among the therapeutic battery presently available to therapists.

But I worry that we are opening something of a Pandora’s box. One messes with other peoples’ minds at their peril – and one would not want to make it too easy for amateurs to get into the game.

References

Reference 1: VR is as good as psychedelics at helping people reach transcendence – Hana Kiros, MIT Technology Review – 2022.

Reference 2: Group VR experiences can produce ego attenuation and connectedness comparable to psychedelics - David R. Glowacki, Rhoslyn Roebuck Williams, Mark D. Wonnacott, Olivia M. Maynard, Rachel Freire, James E. Pike & Mike Chatziapostolou – 2022. 

Reference 3: Factor Analysis of the Mystical Experience Questionnaire: A Study of Experiences Occasioned by the Hallucinogen Psilocybin - Katherine A. Maclean, Jeannie-Marie S. Leoutsakos, Matthew W. Johnson, and Roland R. Griffiths – 2013.

Reference 4: Psychedelic Communitas: Intersubjective Experience During Psychedelic Group Sessions Predicts Enduring Changes in Psychological Wellbeing and Social Connectedness - H. Kettner, F. E. Rosas, C. Timmermann,  L. Kärtner, R. L. Carhart-Harris, L. Roseman – 2021.

Reference 5: Mysticism and philosophy – Walter Terence Stace – 1960.

Reference 6: https://psmv5.blogspot.com/2022/07/mourning-form-and-content.html. 

Reference 7: https://deepdreamgenerator.com/. 

Reference 8: https://anuma.com/. A spin-off corporation. ‘Digital group therapeutics combining virtual reality (VR) with the science of psychedelics. Inventing the future of authentic, human connection to address the global mental health crisis. aNUma’s immersive group experiences leave participants feeling calmer, happier and more connected. Backed by research, we are transforming mental health and wellbeing by combining multi-user virtual reality with psychedelic science and group therapeutic processes’.

Reference 9: https://anuma.com/science. ‘The science behind aNUma. The following papers - from scientists and academic labs with whom we are affiliated - form the foundation of our approach’.

Reference 10: Isness: Using Multi-Person VR to Design Peak Mystical-Type Experiences Comparable to Psychedelics - David R. Glowacki, Mark D. Wonnacott, Rachel Freire, Becca R. Glowacki, Ella M. Gale, James E. Pike, Tiu de Haan, Mike Chatziapostolou, Oussama Metatla – 2020. Lifted from reference 8 above. Covers some of the same ground as reference 2. The source of the opening and closing snaps. 

Reference 11: https://psychology-tools.com/test/meq-30.