Does the metaverse pose a threat to mental health?

The technological foundation has existed for decades. As long ago as 1979, the American engineer Eric Howlett developed a pioneering virtual reality system, the LEEP (Large Expanse Extra Perspective), a stereoscopic projection with a visual effect of depth of field that was unusual at the time. Inventions such as Howlett's or the virtual works of art by David Em or Jarod Lanier started to be applied to fields such as video games in the early 1980s. Ten years later, NASA presented its flight simulators based on augmented reality (AR), the next evolutionary step in this race to produce digital environments that looked ever more realistic.

In a strict sense, the conditions that have ended up making what we today know as the metaverse possible already existed in around 1997. The concept had been coined five years earlier, in 1992, by the writer Neal Stephenson in his science fiction novel Snow Crash. Later, Second Life was the first practical example of the opportunities offered by a recreational application of this technological development. On the online platform created by Linden Lab in 2003, players were offered an alternative life in a virtual universe, creating an avatar and using it to interact socially with other users in all kinds of contexts.

In its almost 20 years of existence, Second Life has housed a community that once exceeded one million residents (today there are around 700,000). It has had a parallel economy system, schools, art galleries, sports competitions, religious services, scientific innovation platforms and even a diplomatic network, with virtual embassies from countries such as the Maldives, Sweden, Estonia, Colombia, the Philippines and North Macedonia. However, promoters of the metaverse network currently under development insist that Second Life (like The Sims and Roblox, another two similar initiatives), is nothing more than a largely outmoded precedent.

The future belongs to virtual corporate development environments such as Horizon Worlds from Meta Platforms or Microsoft's VR Chats, which are far more technologically sophisticated and designed to accommodate tens of millions of users in the medium term. Horizon Worlds was officially launched in December 2021, after a short period operating in a restricted beta phase, and today it already boasts more than 300,000 monthly users and has around 10,000 virtual worlds created by the community itself.

 

These may seem like relatively modest numbers for what Mark Zuckerberg describes as the most promising technological development of our age. But they are just the start. According to the German academic Andreas Kaplan, an expert in viral marketing, digital environments and social networks, "we are not talking about a specific metaverse, which Horizon Worlds could be, the Zuckerberg version of Second Life", but about the future of social interaction on the Internet, which will soon become an augmented reality environment in which all of us, although some more than others, will interact with other internet users through avatars immersed in virtual environments of a growing hyperrealism".

For Kaplan, it is a technological dream that could become a "nightmare" if we are not capable of "limiting and sensibly regulating it." Kaplan is concerned, above all, that metaverses "may end up becoming technological enablers of the high level of addictiveness that social media has been shown to have."

As he himself explained in an article in The Choice, the academic has dedicated part of his activity as a researcher to studying the habits of users of Second Life. One of his most significant findings is that a high percentage of the members of this community consider their "second life" to be much more attractive and rewarding than the first."

This explains why they spend an average of 2.8 hours a day connected to Second Life, with at least one weekly session of more than four hours and peaks of up to 16: "Some users only disconnect from the platform to sleep", says Kaplan. Their alternative life has replaced their real one. This level of compulsive use has several cornerstones: "the quest for fun, the need to establish social relationships, the desire to learn and the possibility of earning money."

This trend towards seclusion and seeking social gratification in a virtual environment has been bolstered by the pandemic and does not exclusively affect children and adolescents, but also an ever increasing number of adults. Kaplan relates this phenomenon to "a global scenario in which advances in artificial intelligence, automation and digitalisation will leave a growing number of citizens without work, depending on some type of basic income, and with a lot of free time that they will need to occupy in some way."

The metaverses are going to help fill that gap by offering "much improved virtual environments, more content, and greater opportunities, making it likely that an increasing number of earthlings will choose to desert the real world and settle more or less permanently in any of the metaverses being built". Kaplan does not dare to put a date when this technological dystopia will materialise, but says that "almost certainly, it will have happened within ten years".

Phil Reed, professor of psychology at Swansea University, also warns of the potential negative effect of metaverses on mental health. The abuse of technology is already producing such striking problems as "an increase in hallucinations and psychotic outbreaks", episodes in which a fatigued, vulnerable and overstimulated mind "loses the ability to distinguish reality from fiction".

In an article in the Psychology Today publication, Reed states that these patterns of addictive and compulsive response to technological stimuli translate into "high rates of adverse psychosomatic response (6%), depression (4%), psychosis (0.5%), paranoia (5%), and severe mental illness (2%)". These are risks that are "by no means negligible" and which a company like Facebook, "with 1.9 billion daily users", should definitely factor in "when creating a technological platform that is even more immersive than social networks and, as a result, potentially much more addictive".

 

Nick Allen, professor of psychology at the University of Oregon, offers a more nuanced view: "Many young people and adolescents seek refuge in virtual environments because for them they are safe and provide them with a social support network that they lack in their daily reality. I am thinking, for example, of the millions of LGTBI young people for whom social interaction technologies are a vehicle for empowerment". However, a high degree of immersion in technological environments presents the problem of "gradual abandonment of physically and mentally healthy habits, such as physical exercise, real interaction, contact with nature or a certain order in eating and sleep habits".

The more compelling, rewarding and immersive a technology experience is, "the more likely it is to produce these adverse effects". Reed believes that the remedy for these disorders, as with almost everything, lies "in balance and self-regulation, to a certain extent". But since not everyone is capable of self-regulation, he recommends "active parental control in the case of minors and a certain degree of social alertness that allows us to detect and intervene in cases where someone in our environment is developing a technological addiction".

For Anna Bailie, a researcher at the University of York, "technology is, by definition, ambivalent: It poses big problems, but it also offers big solutions. Bailie suggests that "the metaverse could be the setting for highly effective online virtual therapies, suitable, for example, for people who may have difficulties accessing face-to-face therapies".

She has been theorising for several years about this new therapeutic approach in the metaverse, an option that she considers is about to materialise: "It is something that we'll see very soon. And its success would prove my thesis that the metaverse is not so much a threat as a neutral environment with multiple possibilities, a powerful tool whose ultimate character will depend on how we use it". Also from the perspective of mental health.

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