Inside Mental Health

Stigma towards people with mental health issues is a widespread issue with real consequences. Within healthcare there is powerful research showing how empathy training in staff and clinicians can improve patient outcomes. It can also help a workforce who are under extreme pressures and at risk of burnout.

The Inside Mental Health project will build on work already carried out over the past four years by internationally renowned immersive studio Anagram in using VR to represent the experience of mental health issues in a way which has shown to have an impact on empathy.

Having worked closely with the lived experience community in the design of a VR experience called Goliath which tells the story of a man diagnosed with schizophrenia, this stage of work will involve working with leading Simulation experts from Oxford Health NHS Foundation Trust and UWE School of Health and Social Well-being to create an immersive training experience that can be used in the healthcare education context.

Accompanying the VR the project will develop a unique personalised debriefing session to enhance longer term learning. This session will use data from bio metric sensors to show users their physical responses to the story and enable a deeply reflective session about their connections to the narrative and its subject matter.

Inside Mental Health uses the immersive power of interactive VR storytelling combined with its proven impact as a training tool to create a new generation of empathetic care workers who through self-awareness are able to foster resilience in the workplace.