The Motivation for Designing a Computer-assisted Procedure for Training Therapists

While research has found differences between novice and expert therapists those differences do not seem to be significant for treatment outcome. A crucial factor in this finding is that certain processes keep the psychotherapist from learning effectively. One of those processes is the lack of good feedback (on the macro and the micro level). If there is any feedback, it is probably biased (those who get better do not return for more therapy) and incomplete (patients are not routinely followed over a longer period of time). Due to client privacy it is also not possible for a supervisor to be part of a therapy session and intervene at critical moments. A virtual, interactive environment would not pose such limitations. Psychotherapists could train on quite realistic avatars how to intervene in a critical situation (for example suicide) without putting anyone at real risk. The “role-playing” skills of a digital avatar will be much better than a fellow colleague within a few years and the program can be stopped anytime to discuss the process and repeat parts of the intervention. A virtual training would also make sense economically. After the programming, the costs depend only on the running costs of the hardware and the supervisors. Speaking of which, master psychotherapists that now supervise the trainings would gain a lot of free time to do other important things. If the medium of the digital training is video / text-based (and thus does not require VR equipment) the internet would pose an ideal way to reach thousands of interested graduate students.