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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.
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