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Monday, April 7, 2008

Do you feel depressed?


"Depression is extremely complex," explains London-based psychoanalyst Jean Allen, "And can be very hard to diagnose and evaluate". Who on earth would have thought that a video game can help doctors to find your depression level. According to a team at the U.S. National Institute of Mental Health (NIMH) in Bethesda, Maryland, however, a video-game could provide crucial clues not only in diagnosing depression, but also in gauging the severity of that depression. Interesting huh? Technology has improved so much that you can do wonders with it.

The game in question is Duke Nukem, a hugely popular virtual reality adventure in which the eponymous Duke -- a muscular, crop-haired, womanizing macho-man in the Arnold Schwarzenegger mold -- defends the earth, and in particular its female inhabitants, against an unpleasant array of aliens, mutants and other physically malformed aggressors.

Battle is joined in a variety of virtual environments, ranging from urban cityscapes to military bases and space stations, with the Duke navigating his way around these environments shooting, bombing, incinerating, stabbing, shrinking, freezing and otherwise terminating (with extreme prejudice) his hapless opponents.

This is an article from CNN.com. An interesting and informative article must be shared and here it is. Many people suffer from depression and few of them still struggle to find out the cause. Depression is very critical. It can lead you to heights of stupidity.

The use of such virtual games to assess mental condition is not in itself new. A team from the Hebrew University of Jerusalem has used navigation through a virtual reality maze to help in the diagnosis of schizophrenia, while another study from the U.S. National Institute on Aging, Baltimore, has employed a similar system to quantify the mental deterioration caused by old age.

The NIMH experiment, however, is the first of its kind to apply such technology to the problems of depression.

The study combined 30 male and female volunteers from the in-patient and out-patient psychiatric units at NIMH, ages ranging of 21-65, with 19 healthy "control" volunteers. People displaying a "high expertise" in video games were excluded.

The volunteers were allowed to familiarize themselves with a virtual reality town such as that used in Duke Nukem, before being given 20 minutes to navigate their way around that town locating various landmarks.

The results proved extremely instructive. The healthy control group were able to find their way to significantly more locations (an average of 3.8) than those suffering from depression (an average of 2.4).

Within the latter group there emerged a clear correlation between severity of depression and navigational ability, with those suffering from the most acute depression displaying the least ability to find their way around the virtual town.

I have quoted few findings from the article and to read the entire article do CLICK HERE!

1 comment:

Anonymous said...

Nice blogs to read.

 

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