Rochelle had suffered from claustrophobia for most of her life, but her cleithrophobia was triggered in 2013 when she got stuck in a Tube (subway) train. She said: “We stopped in a tunnel and the announcement came over the speakers and the driver said “we’re being held here for a moment, we don’t know when we’re going to move on, there’s a problem with the track ahead.”…
“Something just clicked in my head and I thought “but when are we going to move? You don’t know when we’re going to move off? Really vague language like that really doesn’t help me either.”
“It was only a few minutes, I don’t think it was anything major in terms of the tube broke down or we were stuck there for hours, but for me I just went into this spiral of panic and when I got to the next station, it wasn’t my stop but I just threw myself off the train.”
As well as having anxiety, Rochelle also sometimes struggles with lifts (elevators) and big crowds because of her phobia.
Help came in a surprising way – she was approached by the BBC to try Virtual Reality Therapy as part of their documentary Can Robots Love Us?
Rochelle said: ‘It’s kind of a combination of different therapies with the use of virtual reality.
It just never ceases to amaze us how VR is being used for Good!
