VR for social work & counseling - Mindscape Commons, plus new social work, counseling, & therapy videostreams

Mindscape Commons provides immersive, interactive, and virtual reality experiences, serious games and apps for teaching and research in counseling, social work, psychology, health sciences, and related programs. The ~300 titles in Mindscape Commons are viewable on most devices, with enhanced immersion available for Google-cardboard smartphones, Oculus headsets, and other VR devices.

Mindscape Commons's commissioned titles - Virtual Microcases and Interactive Simulations - include interactivity and viewer assessments covering a range of clients and mental health situations. Mindscape Commons expands its collection by pointing to Open Access Virtual Reality content and VR resarch projects.

On Friday, April 29, 2022, PennImmersive and AR Across Penn will hold an informative demonstration of Mindscape Commons's VR capabilities. This workshop will meet in the new Design Thinking space in BioTech Commons. Registration and additional information are provided at the Penn Libraries Reservations & Events website.

The Penn Libraries' membership in Mindscape Commons provides free hosting and technical support for Penn-created VR works. Mindscape Commons received the Association of Learned and Professional Society Publishers 2021 Award for Innovation in Publishing, in recognition for allowing "the next generation of counsellors, social workers, and psychologists to explore these experiences, build empathy, and develop critical clinical skills in a safe and repeatable setting". Mindscape Commons is published by Coherent Digital, who also publishers Policy Commons, the fulltext database for public policy worldwide.

The Penn Libraries have recently expanded our social work, counseling, and therapy videostream collections through two additional acquisitions. The new Psychotherapy.net Social Work Collection offers more than 40 videostreams intended to support classroom learning and to prepare social work students for field placements. The Social Work Collection runs on the Psychotherapy.net videostream platform, hosting more than 330 additional videostreams on psychotherapy, counseling, and addiction treatment for our Penn Libraries subscription.

The Counseling and Therapy in Video: Volume V, the Symptom Media Collection adds 756 new videostreams to our ~2,000-title Counseling and Therapy in Video on the Alexander Street platform. While some Volume V titles offer clinical cases, most titles are brief videostreams that present mental health conditions aligned to DSM-5 and ICD-10 diagnostic criteria. 94 titles - the Test Section Index series - are pairs of titles intended for teaching and learning contexts, with one version displaying a title slide introducing the DSM-5/ICD-10 symptom, and the other with no title slide.