Depression Association of America. However, the VA has continued to emphasize traditional prolonged exposure therapy as the treatment of choice, and VR-based therapies have gained only limited adoption, despite active promotion by DOD, and despite VRT having much lower cost and apparently higher success rates. A $12-million ONR funded study is currently underway to definitively compare the efficacy of the two methods, PET and VRT. Military labs have subsequently set up dozens of VRT labs and treatment centers for treating both PTSD and a variety of other medical conditions. The use of VRT has thus become a mainstream psychiatric treatment for anxiety disorders and is finding increasing use in the treatment of other cognitive disorders associated with various medical conditions such as addiction, depression and insomnia. Applications Psychological therapy Exposure therapy Virtual reality technology is especially useful for exposure therapy – a treatment method in which patients are introduced and then slowly exposed to a traumatic stimulus. Inside virtual environments, patients can safely interact with a representation of their phobia, and researchers don't need to have access to a real version of the phobia itself. One of the primary challenges to the efficacy of Exposure therapy is recreating the level of trauma existing in real environments inside a virtual environment. Virtual reality aids in overcoming this by engaging with different sensory stimuli of the patient while heightening the realism and maintaining the safety of the environment. One very successful example of virtual reality therapy exposure therapy is the PTSD treatment system, Virtual Iraq. Using a head mounted display and a game pad, patients navigate a Humvee around virtual recreations of Iraq, Afghanistan, and the United States. By being safely exposed to the traumatic environments, patients learned to reduce their anxiety. According to a review of the history of Virtual Iraq, one study found that it reduced PTSD symptoms by an average of fifty percent, and disqualified over seventy-five percent of participants for PTSD after treatment. Virtual Reality Exposure Therapy (VRET) is also commonly used for treating specific phobias, especially small animal phobia. Commonly feared animals such as spiders can be easily produced in a virtual environment, instead of finding the real animal. VRET has also been used experimentally to treat other fears such as public speaking and claustrophobia. Another successful study attempted treating 10 individuals who experienced trauma as a result of events during 9/11. Through repeated exposure to increasingly