This webinar will delve into the evolving landscape of virtual reality (VR) in mental health and behavioral healthcare. It will cover the therapeutic potential of VR, balanced against the risks of unregulated virtual environments. Attendees will gain insights into how virtual worlds can revolutionize telehealth applications, offering innovative therapy options and expanding access to care. By viewing these environments as social systems, both their positive impacts and potential pitfalls will be explored. The webinar will also discuss the critical legal and ethical questions surrounding VR in mental health, highlighting the urgent need for policy development to guide its safe and effective use.
LEARNING OBJECTIVES:
-Understand the therapeutic potential and risks of virtual environments and analyze virtual environments as social systems.
-Discuss ethical and legal considerations for integrating virtual environments into mental health care.
-Emphasize the need for policy development, professional engagement, and learning to guide the safe and effective use of virtual reality.
CERTIFICATES:
Registrants who fully attend this event or training will receive a certificate of attendance via email within two weeks after the event or training.
PRESENTER:
| Donna Z. Davis, PhD, Director, Immersive Media Communication Master’s Program & Oregon Reality (OR) Lab, University of Oregon School of Journalism and Communication |
| Donna Z. Davis joined the University of Oregon faculty in fall 2010 when she taught in Eugene for one year before moving to Portland. She now directs the Immersive Media Communication master’s program and the Oregon Reality (OR) lab at the SOJC-Portland. She brings more than 25 years’ experience in public relations, fundraising, and nonprofit communication to the classroom, including 10 years as producer and host of Family Album Radio, an award-winning, daily, two-minute radio program distributed through NPR.
Davis earned her PhD in mass communication from the University of Florida, where she studied relationship formation in 3D immersive virtual environments. Her ethnographic research continues to focus on the potential uses of immersive media, virtual worlds, gamification, and other emerging social media, with a special interest in marginalized and vulnerable populations. Her research on embodied experience and identity among people with disabilities in virtual reality was funded through a grant from the National Science Foundation. She was also an inaugural faculty fellow for the SOJC Agora Journalism Center for Innovation and Civic Engagement, extending her work with people with Parkinson’s disease who find and build support in the virtual world. |
The Great Lakes MHTTC is offering this training for individuals working in HHS Region 5: IL, IN, MI, MN, OH, WI. This training is being provided in response to a need identified by Region 5 stakeholders.
