With people now able to work from home (thanks to collaboration tools like Hosted SharePoint!), get a degree from home, why not get therapy from home with your very own virtual therapist? Virtual therapy helps treat patients with various disorders including anxiety, phobia, post traumatic stress disorder, addictions and other conditions. The military has already begun using cyber therapy to treat traumatized veterans as well as to screen soldiers for mental problems and disorders.

Patients and therapists engage in conversations as they would in a real therapy setting only this is a virtual one (custom-built using code from Second Life). Research from Preferred Family Healthcare suggests that patients are more likely to show up for virtual therapy sessions than real-world ones.

They found that 95 percent of those in their virtual-world program completed or attended their sessions, versus only 37 percent of patients being treated face-to-face.
Moreover, many clients may feel embarrassed or too shy to bring up certain subjects when they are sitting face-to-face with someone and may feel more at ease communicating with virtual characters.

Whether or not computer generated interactions measure up to human ones in all cases remains to be seen.