A conversation with your mental health psychologist from a virtual beach in Bali

Long waiting lists, low turnover, and fewer and fewer specialists available to deploy. A selection of issues facing mental health facilities in recent years. Christoph Lynen and Mike Verhiel came up with a solution in the form of VR glasses. This way, you can work on your recovery at home in the virtual environment of your choice.

“People’s self-esteem is very high. Combined with the expertise of the practitioner, waiting times for treatment are reduced,” explains Mike Verhiel CEO. PlantainIn this article start of the dayVerhiel explains exactly how his solution works.

How did you come up with the idea?

“The idea originally came from my co-founder Christoph Leinen. All my friends had something to do with the mental health care system.There was a lot of talk about mental health care at the time.I don’t expect these issues to be resolved any time soon.Just open the newspaper, The front page was full of articles about long waiting lists and a severe shortage of practitioners.

how did you start?

“Originally, we wanted to develop a product that practitioners could use in their treatment rooms. We need to reduce the cost of both.We have found a better solution in an application that clients can use independently.Therapies can still be done in the clinic, but the therapist can help the client with the problem at home. You can also suggest working on it. EMDR protocol. This is therapy for people who have been traumatized by accidents or violent incidents. “

What does your product look like?

“With our app, you can receive EMDR treatments at home using VR glasses. It also reduces the burden on health authorities, because the accelerated pathway of care makes spots more quickly available to others who need this care. You can go from one treatment to full-blown treatments three times a week.

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Wearing these VR glasses performs the same steps as a physical EMDR consultation. It offers even more. You can also choose a comfortable environment for your treatment. This could be, for example, in a luxurious apartment or in a relaxing setting. The session structure is the same, but the settings are different. “

What applications are built into the glasses?

“The EMDR protocol is of course included. exposure therapy, addiction, and mitigation protocols. Also, starting in February, medical hypnosis will be available. This large and diverse range of applications sets us apart from our competitors. We want to give our patients as many tools as possible so they can work independently on their care. “

“Our goal is to increasingly support physical practitioners by improving the development of virtual practitioners.”

Mike Verhiel, CEO of Psylaris

What did the experts think of your idea?

“Treatment of clients online was still a strange concept for practitioners before the corona crisis. I often had “no” for the answer until I partnered with the party I was still with. Slowly but surely, the party began to research more and more. And as a result, the patient felt much better after such autonomous his EMDR treatment. “

What challenges did you encounter?

“Will clients really be able to treat themselves with the therapies that I have studied over the years as a practitioner?” Then we found that people’s perception of our application changed rapidly when they started doing it themselves. There were also fears on the part that they would lose their jobs because of this application, but this was not justified as they still needed a medical practitioner to guide them through the process.

We faced another challenge of finding someone with the expertise to create these self-learning algorithms. We can not only create, but also analyze data and continuously improve our products. In the end, we were able to assemble an excellent team of 14 people. This was definitely one of our biggest challenges. By 2023, we hope to employ at least 35 people. “

What are your other goals going forward?

“We are currently active in the Netherlands, Belgium and Germany. However, compared to the Netherlands and Belgium, Germany still does not have many customers. However, it is an interesting market with very high quality healthcare. We have already seen that in the Netherlands we have struggled for some time with the reimbursement process for health insurance companies, in Germany there are phased plans for this and it has become more attractive to offer our products in Germany as well. I have sneak peek That is, we are also considering the Scandinavian countries. “