Reclaiming the mind: How virtual reality helped one woman silence the voices in her head
After 30 years of schizophrenia, a Danish woman found freedom through virtual reality therapy. Now the startup behind it HekaVR is changing the face of mental health care. This emotional story of success will be shared in a keynote at the HealthTech Investor Summit on 8-10 December in Utrecht, the Netherlands.
“It was like walking a path through a forest.”
For more than three decades, Vibeke Andersen lived with a constant chorus of voices in her head—voices that told her she wasn’t worth anything, that her life had no meaning, that the world would be better off without her.
Diagnosed with paranoid schizophrenia, she spent years in and out of hospitals, heavily medicated and isolated.
“In psychosis, nobody understood me,” Vibeke recalls. “The voices told me I was not worth anything as a human being. They said I should kill myself. I used to think: ‘What’s the purpose of my life if my whole life is a mental system?’”
Then, in 2020, she signed up for a clinical research project that would combine medication and virtual reality (VR) therapy.
“I had everything to win and nothing to lose,” she says.