Interview with Dr. Ruth Diaz: Part 2
Part of the Season One "VR is Alive" Finale
: For this final interview of the first year in the VR is Alive Series, we are fortunate to join Dr. Ruth Diaz (she/they) earlier this year to chat about her vast experience as a social scientist inside and outside of multiple social virtual reality platforms, visiting virtual worlds she designed or recognized along the way...
ArmaniXR: Social work and helping humans can be very challenging outside of doing it professionally. What inspired you into the field of psychology?
Ruth: Well, it was adjacent to social work, and I was inspired into social work because I worked in veterinary medicine. I ended up becoming somewhat well-known in the veterinary community as a veterinary assistant or tech for euthanizing animals. I didn't do the euthanasias, but I supported and set up the whole process and helped it go through. Over time, I developed a reputation—probably over about five years—because whenever I was present, everyone (vet, pet owners, other staff) seemed to walk away feeling a sense of meaning and more positive than negative. It really moved people, and they got closure.
This was when I was 20 years old—very young. It was one of my first jobs, stepping into veterinary technician practice of sorts. After doing that for a while, I had a plan to become a veterinarian. However, I started to understand that the field of veterinary medicine was hard to get into and also pretty toxic. At that time, I learned that all veterinarians had to experiment on animals as part of their training, and I realized I could never do that.
Being a part of so many euthanasia experiences—hundreds over the years—I began to understand that humans were creatures too. In my imagination, I look back and feel like there were humans without fur with these panicked heartbeats, and then there were tired heartbeats in the animals who were suffering. To help everyone let go in a peaceful way, not a violent or traumatic death, I felt I had to harmonize the rapid, panicked heartbeats and the slow, tired heartbeats. In doing so, I helped people let go, feel that final "song" of the heartbeats, and just breathe it out, releasing everything.
This process made me learn to forgive humans. Like most people, I had been hurt by humans in different ways—neglected and abused growing up—but I started to see that humans were the most lost animals in the room. They lacked orientation to their own worthiness, which led to all kinds of behaviors that stopped them from giving each other permission to leave and be done. But somehow, we found compassion in our hearts to lean into pain to help those we loved who had fur, ensuring they didn’t suffer.
That realization fascinated me. The a-ha moment slowly grew over time as I recognized that these humans were letting themselves feel more hurt because they loved the beings with fur. If I really wanted to help the beings with fur, I needed to help the beings without fur—or with very little fur.
So, I turned my scope onto social work and then psychology. I went into psychology because I came to understand that to truly honor human understanding and how we all work together, I had to walk the pilgrimage of believing in our separateness and brokenness. That’s what psychology became for me—a study of how we are separate and how we are broken.
Can you tell me what you'd want the field of psychology to know about social VR that you've learned?
Thank you for that question. When you asked, I noticed a different flavor of grief rise up—there’s like a rainbow of Ruth’s grief today. This particular grief comes from having gained distance over time from a field I was deeply connected to. I made the very intentional decision to give up my clinical license when I stepped into XR. There were too many tensions around being in a traditional therapist role while wanting to explore the intersections of psychology and virtual reality. The field didn’t know what to make of my curiosity about teaching psychology through XR—it was just too weird for most people in the field at that time.
Stepping into VR, I realized there is no established licensing, no ethics boards for how to be in social VR. It truly is no man’s land, and out of love and respect for the field of psychology, I felt I needed to let go of that bind and step fully into this space. Many of my colleagues didn’t understand what ‘being in VR’ meant, let alone my decision to explore it as a medium for teaching psychology.
What I wish the field of psychology knew is that humans are naturally self-healing creatures. The field often binds people—tying them up in different ways through diagnoses and labels. While these psychological ‘binds’ can temporarily slow down harm, they can also cause more damage if we don’t teach people how to unbind themselves. I believe psychology has gotten lost in binding people without building bridges to help them untangle and heal. Instead of creating spaces where people can understand and release their binds, the field keeps adding more ties, reinforcing the very challenges they aim to resolve.
My message to the field is simple: Don’t believe too much in the systems and labels, because they can eventually hurt people—even the psychologists using them.
Much of my work, especially in VR, has become about unbinding people. I explain the binds, what purpose they serve, and how they can also harm. This has led me to think deeply about the impact of certain psychological terms. I often feel like a machine unwrapping the effects of these terms—offering metaphors and doors for people to walk through instead of locking them into labels. Terms like ‘self-sabotage’ are a good example. Yes, they can help someone take responsibility for their actions, but they can also lead people to believe they are their own worst enemy, creating an internal polarization that can be incredibly harmful.
I’ve spent years explaining how many psychological terms can both help and harm, depending on how they are used. I wish more people were taught to handle these concepts with care. Diagnoses can be useful, but over time, they can also become restrictive if people aren’t given the tools to move beyond them.
Another critical issue is that psychology, as a field, was built on a foundation of white supremacy. It wasn’t intentionally harmful, but it perpetuates inequalities because it was created in the image of the dominant culture. The more I studied objective measurements like IQ and cognitive testing, the more I saw that these ‘objective’ tools were deeply flawed. After years of working with these methods, I had to step back and acknowledge the harm they were causing, especially to diverse communities. Psychology’s tools were based on small groups of white people, and the cost of believing in them is immense.
My message to the field is simple: Don’t believe too much in the systems and labels, because they can eventually hurt people—even the psychologists using them. Many therapists I’ve spoken with eventually come to feel disillusioned, realizing the limitations of the constructs they’ve been trained in. They often express a desire to throw their textbooks out the window. They tell me, ‘I always feel better after spending time with you, but I didn’t learn this in any school we went to.’ And I tell them, ‘Go scream and hit pillows with people for 20 years, and you’ll get there too.’
It’s messy, gut-wrenching, slobbery work to release the binds and unlearn what’s been taught. But it’s worth it. Being in VR gives me a glimpse of the future—one where communities will heal together, sharing their creative, three-dimensional journeys. That’s where I believe mental health and wholeness are headed.
I’ve noticed how worlds and avatars can evoke many particular emotions beyond their meshes. Whether they're avatar creators or virtual world creators, what do creators need to know about psychology?
There are occasionally dangerous virtual worlds in the social apps that are featured by the application. They remind me of putting a child in a room with a loaded gun with the safety off, and having a spotlight on the gun. They can become really popular in those spotlights, and rarely have any trigger warnings. Hopefully, these moments are just a glitch or an algorithmic boost. I know enough from working inside these companies that it is unlikely that anyone on the product teams elevated those worlds purposefully. But I’ve seen a new level of viral brain destruction that can be created in worlds like this, and it disturbs me deeply…
I would say psychology is not "out there." It’s here, right now. It’s all around us. It is the pixels we are shifting around and calling worlds, ideas, and things. Just because you’re not practicing psychology doesn’t mean it’s not happening in every action taken. Every world, every avatar, every motion is an expression of psychology. If you don’t know the ripple of what you’re expressing—and most people don’t—be curious. Don’t assume it’s somebody else’s job. Be flexible, and shift when it’s not working for someone. Continually adapt things to make them less harmful and more healing.
Most people believe that because there’s a profession called psychology, if they’re not in that profession, they don’t have responsibility to tend to the psychology of others. That’s somebody else’s job. Especially in XR, citizenship of the metaverse seems like a really faraway thing. People say, This is the Wild West. But the Wild West was someone’s home. A group of people came there and said, This is our home now. They decimated the culture and the guardianship of that space, thinking it was an adventure. Much of XR is doing that with people’s psyches—people they’ve never met and will never meet. We don’t know the consequences of this technology and how much harm it may be doing. We’re not even looking for it.
Psychology is not "out there," and it’s not somebody else’s job. It’s something we’re all in, like a soup we’re constantly stirring with each other.
We don’t have psychologists behind a lot of this. And even those psychologists, as you know, have issues themselves. I would invite both parties to see XR as a shamanistic exploration of how to mind-meld and not hurt more than heal. We do that through play and silliness, but hopefully, we’ll all get bored of ego fantasies someday and come into a place of deep curiosity about what this technology is doing to build a healthy village in our physical reality.
Because really, VR and especially social VR is a type of substance use—an intentional fantasy and delusion to take a break from what isn’t working in our physical world. If we don’t use it on purpose, if we don’t arrive with a choice and practice of using it intentionally, we’re part of the Titanic captain’s white male psyche trying to get faster to his retirement while slaughtering a lot of people on the way. It’s up to each of us, individually, to make a choice to use this technology on purpose. It starts with me, and it starts with you.
It doesn’t mean we always have to be "on," thinking about everyone’s feelings more than our own. But it means I choose to grow through this. That’s it. I choose to grow through this. If we all committed to that every time we put our headsets on, we’d be making a different kind of place together for sure. And I choose to play through this. I choose to love through this. I choose to release and let go and not be "on" for a while. But then, I choose to be on purpose again, and I know I will arrive on purpose again.
That’s the message. Psychology is not "out there," and it’s not somebody else’s job. It’s something we’re all in, like a soup we’re constantly stirring with each other. And one of the dangerous worlds I’m referring to has made it to an elevated spot. It has people in it 24/7 just sitting with this incredibly painful story that’s weaponized without any qualifiers or understanding of what it means. It’s a hemorrhage—a hemorrhage in the community consciousness of social VR. And it’s hurting me that it exists like that. Also, in the mystical rhythms of everything, I sent the world creator a friend request, and it turns out to be someone I’d already met when I was interviewing trolls. This was their alt, their secret identity. But they trusted me enough that when they got the friend request, they sent me a picture of my request to friend them and said, Oh, you found me.
Now, I know a secret about the world creator that if the application itself knew, they’d definitely take that world down. I’m holding so many different perspectives here, and I’m not sure what the right course of action is, except asking questions, staying curious, and being ready if things escalate. My genuine concern is that people are going to kill themselves because of this world. If there’s evidence of that happening, I’ll escalate my concerns quickly. But I don’t know that I’ll hear about that evidence for a while, unfortunately, until it’s already happened.
This virtual world is pretty horrible, but also pretty brilliant. I took a longtime PC VR person in there last night—they came to find me because I’d been venting to them about it on Discord. They took me there because they were tired of hearing me vent. We talked it through, and they agreed: “This is serious and concerning.” And I asked, “So, what are you going to do about it?” They said, “I’m not going to do anything.” And I thought, “Okay, thank you for telling me the truth.” That’s a new data point for me: I’ve explained it to someone who knows the culture, and has powerful connections in the application, they agree it could lead to harm, and they’re not going to do anything.
Hopefully, within the next week, I’ll meet with the world creator. My big request for that world is not that it be taken down, but that it gets qualified—there needs to be some kind of informed consent for injury, or a trauma or trigger warning. That’s all I’m asking for. I think worlds like that should have a special place. They are medicinal, archetypal, and powerful. But without the qualifier of warning people to be on purpose when entering them, they can break people’s brains, hearts, and relationships.
It’s like that scene in Men in Black where Will Smith touches the item that flies around and destroys everything. This virtual world is like that item. I don’t want that item to not exist. I just want something to hold it, so we can approach it on purpose. I’m in awe of the creator—it’s so simple and so direct, but it’s like an enzyme that breaks people.
You can read Part 3 of our interview with Ruth on Friday, September 27th!