Robert Neil McLay: Treating PTSD with Virtual Reality

As much as he is an advocate for simulators, McLay also remains a healthy skeptic.

"It works but I'm not convinced it?s the best thing out there," he says. "I'm not absolutely convinced yet that the gizmo portion of it—the actual virtual reality—is the active component of treatment. It may be just meeting with the therapist as often as we are and providing the type of therapy that we are."

That's the question that McLay and his colleagues at NMCSD are now trying to answer. "Do you really need all these gizmos or can you do it with a still computer image without using the fancy simulators?" he says. "If you could, that might be good news. It would mean we were able to do this type of treatment in a lot more different clinics and with a lot more people."