Virtual Reality: Helping Young People With Cancer Find Support

Transcript

• 00:05- It's that point in growth where you are stuck.
• 00:08You're in between childhood and adulthood.
• 00:12You are trying to work your way through something, right?
• 00:15You're trying to work your way through,
• 00:16you know, the social structure of the world.
• 00:18Who are you?
• 00:20- And that's a normal teenager thing.
• 00:21You know and
• 00:22relationships end and friendships end
• 00:24and people go off to college and you lose touch
• 00:27and then you throw a cancer diagnosis on top of that
• 00:29and it's like everything else takes a backseat
• 00:35- About ten, 12, maybe even 15 years ago,
• 00:38some of the initial data started coming out
• 00:39showing that these patients weren't just doing as well
• 00:42as younger patients and older patients
• 00:45and so we started looking at that and saying, ‘why?’
• 00:48‘Why is this population not doing well?’
• 00:49There is good evidence that they're not being enrolled in clinical trials as much.
• 00:53The biology of their tumors may be different,
• 00:55but there's also a very strong psychosocial component
• 00:58to the reasons that they kind of flounder with their diagnosis.
• 01:03- The primary, you know, like mental health diagnoses that my patients have
• 01:07are anxiety, depression and adjustment disorder,
• 01:09which of course makes sense because you have a cancer diagnosis
• 01:12and you're forced to adjust
• 01:14and I often kind of tell them that those are the unexpected side effects, right?
• 01:19Like they're not directly related to the chemo where you might feel nauseous,
• 01:22but it comes with the territory of having a serious illness.
• 01:30I've had six cancer diagnosis throughout my life,
• 01:33and I've been treated at Yale every single time.
• 01:36I personal background in being a cancer patient has really
• 01:40helped me connect with the patients
• 01:41and really helped me fill that role in a way
• 01:44that I don't think many others could.
• 01:47Having been a young adult with cancer
• 01:49and having seen the gap that they kind of fall into,
• 01:52whether if you're an adolescent in a children's hospital, you're often
• 01:56you feel a little bit too old for the clinic
• 01:57and if you're, you know, a 20, 30-something in the adult world,
• 02:02you feel too young for everything.
• 02:04I think the hardest part for me as a teenager going through
• 02:07cancer treatment was the isolation I felt in
• 02:11both my treatment aspect and my personal social aspects.
• 02:18- And when someone's in a state of depression, loneliness, anxiety,
• 02:23that compliance, that ability to
• 02:26do what's prescribed diminishes.
• 02:30And so there are certain cancers that we treat where
• 02:32we really need these patients
• 02:34to be taking their oral medications when they're not there
• 02:36and if they're not taking those medications, the cancer will come back
• 02:39and so there's a direct play in there
• 02:41of an inability to treat the cancer due to the mental health issues.
• 02:45- Adolescents don't want to come back to the hospital when they don't have to
• 02:48and they don't want to interact with each other while they're too sick.
• 02:53Dr. Marks and I had kind of these ideas of
• 02:56forming this virtual reality young adult support group.
• 02:59It provides a different level of immersion
• 03:02that maybe a Zoom support group wouldn't for this specific age group.
• 03:06They like to feel like they're with other people and that they're almost
• 03:11they could reach out and touch them if they wanted to.
• 03:18We worked with a company to help kind of build this software from the ground up
• 03:22where we kind of designed the space.
• 03:27It's, you know, very calming earth tones
• 03:29and there are four chairs and then my chair
• 03:33and it allows patients to connect with others from wherever they are
• 03:37while feeling still very immersed and like they were in the same room.
• 03:43The VR headsets are designed where every, you know,
• 03:46kind of ounce of light from the outside world is is cut off and it's 360.
• 03:50So you can look up and down and behind you in the room is all encompassing
• 03:54and you can see my avatar and you can see the other three avatars,
• 04:00the mouth moves when you talk, which is pretty cool.
• 04:04They have handsets so they can control kind of
• 04:06if they're talking with their hands, you can see that you get kind of
• 04:11some unique body language that comes across.
• 04:20- And so we started putting in place
• 04:22a formal institutional review board review,
• 04:25protocol review, really getting this going as a true clinical trial
• 04:28to give it some teeth and actually show that we were proving its efficacy.
• 04:33We started with some very objective measurements.
• 04:36We looked at depression, anxiety and resilience before and after groups.
• 04:41What we have seen a very objective response
• 04:44and a true improvement is in resilience, which is huge.
• 04:47So resilience really is a way to say
• 04:51how our patients kind of dealing on a day to day level,
• 04:54how are they getting through their illness.
• 04:55And we saw a difference before the intervention and after.
• 04:58After the intervention, they were
• 05:00they were measuring on resilience scales, being more resilient.
• 05:03And so that's huge for us.
• 05:04That shows real clinical progress.
• 05:08- It's a safe space where they feel like
• 05:10I can share anything and it's adolescent, young adult oriented.
• 05:14So it doesn't feel like a children's hospital.
• 05:16It doesn't feel like you're in the pediatric ward or anything.
• 05:20It's just it's age appropriate care.
• 05:21I think that is the best way I can describe it.
• 05:25- This is something that patients who may not have the means
• 05:28to come into the city, come in to support groups,
• 05:32come to the hospital on a weekly basis, are able to participate in.
• 05:36So we're able to reach those in different demographics,
• 05:39whether it be socioeconomic or geographic.
• 05:50I think what I'm most excited about is that
• 05:52we have the ability to continue to expand this,
• 05:55making it a standard of care,
• 05:57making it standard practice
• 05:58to use these groups in these populations to benefit patient care.