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Avatar Therapy: what happens when people with acute psychosis meet the voices in their heads
18 February 2025, 1:00 pm–2:00 pm
Professor Mark Huckvale presents an overview of what Avatar Therapy is and reports the findings from clinical trails.
This event is free.
Event Information
Open to
- All
Availability
- Yes
Cost
- Free
Organiser
-
UCL Events
About the lecture:
In 2009 Julian Leff had the intuition that hearers of persecutory voices might benefit from engaging in a dialogue with their voices and proposed that we construct a digital avatar that would represent and embody their voices. In therapy sessions run by a trained clinician, a voice hearer could then engage in a dialogue with the avatar and as a by-product gain some control over voices in their head. Two randomised controlled trials of Avatar Therapy have now been completed at Kings College London (funded by the Wellcome Trust) which have shown that distress caused by voices can be significantly reduced after only six sessions with their avatar. Remarkably, some participants even stopped hearing their voices. In this talk I will present an overview of Avatar Therapy and the Avatar software. I will report on the outcomes of the clinical trials and comment on future plans for making the therapy available beyond the research environment.
About the Speaker
Professor Mark Huckvale
Professor of Speech Sciences at UCL
Mark Huckvale is Emeritus Professor of Speech Sciences in the Department of Speech, Hearing and Phonetic Sciences at University College London. In a long career in Speech and Hearing Sciences, he has published over 100 research articles in areas involving speech recognition, speech synthesis, voice conversion, speech intelligibility and computational paralinguistics. He is best known for work in accent recognition, use of avatars to provide mental health therapy, hearing for speech, and voice analysis for the measurement of speaker state. He is currently CEO of Avatar Therapy Ltd which seeks to make available in clinical practice a novel therapy for relief from auditory hallucinations in schizophrenia.
