Mental Health care – going to the dogs or is it all just for the birds?

It’s not a euphamism. I mean it quite literally.

Blind people have had them for years. Now deaf people have hearing dogs. But what use can a dog be to a person with a mental illness?

According to the limited information – and Wiki – quite a lot.

A psychiatric service dog is a specific type of service dog trained to assist their handler with a psychiatric disability, such as post-traumatic stress disorder or schizophrenia.

Although assistance dogs classically help with physical disabilities, there are a wide range of psychiatric issues that an assistance dog may be able to help with as well.

Now the thing to note here is – a service dog is not the same as a therapeutic dog.

We all know that therapy dogs are nice and cuddly and give us a little emotional boost. Bit like an AIN.

But psychiatric service dogs…. they’re the RMN’s of Animal Therapists.

I’m torn between a serious post – and one that simply takes the piss. But I realise I don’t know what these mutts are capable of – so who am I to judge?

The main difference with a service dog is that they are trained to compensate for effects of an illness or disability. They’re not just for petting.

I’ve seen lots of dogs do some pretty amazing things – like load the washing machine, fetch a book or lick it’s own nuts. But what about helping someone with a mental illness? How?

The literature is scarce. (Results 1 – 10 of about 973 for “psychiatric service animals”)

But I did manage to find a couple of interesting links; like this one to the Psychiatric Service Dogs Society.

The Psychiatric Service Dog Society (PSDS) is a 501(c)3 nonprofit organization dedicated to responsible Psychiatric Service Dog (PSD) education, advocacy, research and training facilitation. We provide essential information for persons disabled by severe mental illness, who wish to train a service dog to assist with the management of symptoms.

Click here for a  5 min vid. Or here for a podcast.

It all sounds good – but what do they actually do?

Here’s a list of suggested applications:

I think there’s a few items in there that are perhaps anomolous – like the people with schizophrenia forgetting their identity? But for ‘grounding’ and negative symptoms – there’s  a fair bit of scope.

Now there are some ethical considerations -

A recent trend has developed to tether very young autistic children to dogs to keep the children from bolting or running away. In other cases, the dog is expected to act as a babysitter and notify the parents when the child tries to leave the house.

Containing Autistic kids? No. But I see a role for those dogs in the Forensic MH service.

But what about the major stuff?

The acute psychotic episodes?

Can they help?

I”m not so sure a dog can contain such things for it’s handler.

No. In fact – that’s probably the time to call for the Parrot Practitioner.

A few months ago, in a cafe in St. Louis, I met a man named Jim Eggers, who uses an assistance parrot, Sadie, to help control his psychotic tendencies. Eggers looks like a man who has been fighting his whole life. He is muscular, with a buzz cut, several knocked-out teeth and many scars, including one that runs ear-to-chin from surgery to repair a broken jaw. Eggers avoids eye contact in public — he walks fast down streets and through stores staring at the ground, jaw clenched. “I have bipolar disorder with psychotic tendencies,” he told me as he sucked down a green-apple smoothie. “Homicidal feelings too.”

Eggers’s condition has landed him in court several times: a disturbing-the-peace charge for pouring scalding coffee onto a man under his apartment window who annoyed him; one-year probation for threatening to kill the archbishop of St. Louis because of news reports about church money and molestations by priests in other cities (which the archbishop had nothing to do with). In describing his condition, Eggers says it’s like when the Incredible Hulk changes from man to monster. His vision blurs, his body tingles and he can barely hear. According to his friend Larry Gower, who often serves as a public liaison for him, in those moments, Eggers gets extremely loud. They both agree that Sadie is one of the few things keeping Eggers from snapping.

Sadie rides around town on Eggers’s back in a bright purple backpack specially designed to hold her cage. When he gets upset, she talks him down, saying: “It’s O.K., Jim. Calm down, Jim. You’re all right, Jim. I’m here, Jim.” She somehow senses when he is getting agitated before he even knows it’s happening. “I still go off on people sometimes, but she makes sure it never escalates into a big problem,” he told me, grinning bashfully at Sadie. “Now when people make me mad I just give them the bird,” he said, pulling up his sleeve and flexing his biceps, which is covered with a large tattoo of Sadie.