With hundreds of short-form immersive and interactive videos and VR experiences, Mindscape Commons is a critical resource for teaching mental health. A growing body of research confirms that immersive experiences help students develop empathy and practice clinical skills in a safe learning environment.
Our content is enhanced with interactive quizzes, book chapters, discussion questions, and other tools to facilitate teaching and improve learning outcomes. We support faculty, researchers, and clinicians in counseling, social work, psychology, sociology, and related fields in mental health education.
For teaching
Build clinical skills
The Mindscape Commons mock therapy sessions give a deep understanding of dispositional and clinical reactions. Safely immerse students in realistic, high-risk situations. Let them repeat experiences for mastery.
Build empathy and understanding
With our 100 VR experiences, let the student walk in another’s shoes—to feel what it’s like to be bullied, suffer from depression or anxiety, be homeless, or face immigration challenges or racism. Immersive video enhances empathy and helps students master skills.
Deliver immersive experiences
With simulations filmed in 360-degree immersive video, students are “there,” mastering skills in the moment. New 2021 content includes interactive school and career counseling video series with embedded quizzes, exclusive to Mindscape Commons, to gauge student comprehension. The videos address essential elements in school and career settings, including empathy, goal setting, positive regard, alliance ruptures, stages of change, culture, coping style, client preferences, and more.
Engage students interactively
Our videos are short, immersive, and interactive. Students respond to questions as the experience unfolds, and their responses elicit guidance from the virtual instructor.
Use the equipment you already have
Work with a phone, tablet, or laptop. For more immersion, use Google cardboard or an Oculus device.
Enliven existing courses
Easily find, add, and embed materials into courses and your LMS with extensive supplementary materials, including instructor guides, discussion questions, and quizzes.
“An innovative training tool for use in my teaching and research… allowing me to create safe, authentic experiential environments that help students gain greater confidence by exposing them to advanced client mental health scenarios.”
Tyler Wilkinson, Associate Professor of Counseling, Mercer University
Virtual Microcases, Anxiety; Grief and Loss.
© Mindscape, 2020
Our exclusive VR Microcases are authentic, immersive, and experiential. Developed with leading therapists, each four-minute case shows a presenting emotion—anger, suicidal thoughts, anxiety, depression, identity, relationship issues, trauma, grief, and others—comprising a growing “virtual library of emotions” that educators and clinicians can experience on demand.
Counseling students’ experiences viewing virtual reality case studies. Teaching and Supervision in Counseling, 2019
How Penn State Uses Mindscape Commons
“The whole idea was to think about what we do at Penn State to boost the quality and enhance the way we train our students, We need to educate our students to learn the best and newest [methods] in addition to the tried and effective.”
Carlos Zalaquett, Professor of Education and co-coordinator of the Clinical Mental Health Counseling Program at Penn State University
For libraries
Deliver remote learning
Deliver high-touch experiences, even to remote students.
Support multiple departments
Provide support for counseling, nursing, social work, psychology, sociology, and related programs.
Integrate easily
We provide a full suite of library tools, including MARC records, COUNTER-compliant usage statistics, and library branding.
Discover new VR experiences
We index over 100 quality interactive experiences.
Own in perpetuity
Make a one-time purchase and receive perpetual rights to the content.
Use existing equipment
Use only a laptop or mobile device to view content, or optionally go further with immersive head-mounted devices.
Access exclusive materials
Included are over 100 specially commissioned exclusive experiences.
Increase VR lab use
Prove the value of your VR lab with academic content that makes the most of it.
Upload and preserve
We host and preserve experiences you and your colleagues have created.
Moments of Excellence in Counseling: Cultural Adaptation
“Moments of Excellence” Interactive Simulations, developed in partnership with faculty at Penn State University, showcase evidence-based relationship-building techniques that address empathy, goal setting, positive regard, alliance ruptures, stages of change, culture, and other critical topics.
Assessment questions ask the student to engage with the videos to identify the client’s issue, predict the best counseling pathway forward, and anticipate the client’s response. An instructor guide is included.
For researchers
Conduct new research
Use our VR experiences to research empathy, implicit bias, comprehension, efficacy, and other topics.
Discover unique content
Explore the most comprehensive directory of materials in virtual reality and mental health. Find projects and collaborators.
Partner with us!
License us your experiences and learning content. We’ll pay to digitize them and generate royalties for you.
Stay current
Our alert service and frequent updates help you stay current with the latest developments in the use of technology in mental health.
Promote your research
Contribute your work to reach hundreds of mental health professionals and academics. Drive traffic back to your website.
Understand your impact
See where you’re being cited and where you’re making a difference.
We recently added more than 150 new videos and experiences, including the titles above.
“We just established a VR lab in our Social Work Department, and this directory allows us access to immediate resources for faculty use. The opportunities to educate social work students with this technology are limitless, and this opens up countless possibilities.”
Kylene Rehder, Director, Social Work program, Northwestern Oklahoma State University,
2018 Oklahoma Social Worker of the Year
Build Empathy
Project Advisors
Allen E. Ivey, University of Massachusetts Amherst
Carlos Zalaquett, Penn State University
Christina Dodd, Northumbria University
Abby Dougherty, Drexel University
Tyler Wilkinson, Mercer University
David Shulman, Lafayette College
Sarah Howard, Queensland University of Technology
April Jones, Tuskegee University
Membership options
Limited access to Mindscape Commons is available for free at mindscapecommons.net. Institutional memberships are available to access the full database. There’s also an option for purchase of perpetual rights.