Isabel Munera Madrid
Madrid
Updated Sunday, April 7, 2024-17:39
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"Sometimes you don't need words to feel better; you just need the closeness of your dog"
(Natalie Lloyd)
"When I have
a panic attack
I feel completely out of reality, I only think that I am dying and that at any moment my heart will stop and I will stop breathing." When
Olivia
, my dog, sees what is happening to me, she does not hesitate to sit next to me and rest her body on mine. Feeling her skin and her support comforts me and brings me back to reality. Little by little my breathing begins to calm and the pressure in my head begins to decrease. Then comes the crying, but Olivia is also there to comfort me. For me it is a gift that life has given me and that makes me feel better," explains
Julia
, 45 years old, who has suffered from
an anxious-depressive disorder with agoraphobia
for more than 20 years.
Although he still continues to have panic attacks, since having Olivia he claims that they have become easier to handle. "Before it was worse, I live alone at home and when I had an attack, the fear multiplied by 1,000. Now I have Olivia and just being there helps me. It's incredible."
But this two-year-old Golden Retriever knows how to do many more things to help Julia than just be there
. She has been trained to give her the rescue medication she is prescribed
when she suffers an attack. Also to bring her cell phone to him in case she had to call the emergency room and to get her out of a crowd when the situation begins to overwhelm her. "With her I feel safe, my fears are still there, but they are much more bearable and I feel like I can be more independent," Julia confesses.
For motivational speaker and TikToker
Kody Green
(with more than a million followers), his dog
Luna
is his lifeline when
hallucinations
, the result of his
schizophrenia
, lurk. In one of his videos on the popular social network you can see how her four-legged companion does not react when she asks him to say hello. Her lack of response tells him that what she is seeing is the fruit of her mind and not a flesh and blood person. Green was diagnosed with schizophrenia at age 21, he is now 28, but his first symptoms began when he was just 19. Luna has been trained to help him
identify hallucinations and also to prevent him from self-harm.
"When something doesn't make sense or I have a thought like: why is there another person in my house if it should only be my wife and I?, I ask Luna to say hello. If there is someone, she approaches, greets them and "She lets them pet her. If there's no one there, she just sits and looks at me. That's how I know it's a hallucination and that there's no one really there," Green explains in an interview for the YouTube channel
Living Well With Schizophrenia.
Additionally, Luna prevents further self-harm when auditory hallucinations are very persistent. "When they are very strong, I have a tendency to hit my face and scratch myself and I have even gotten hurt. But since I have Luna she comes closer and sticks to my neck. This makes me realize that I am hurting myself and I can stop," he adds.
Olivia and Luna are
psychiatric assistance dogs
, that is, they have been selected and trained by specialists to help their owners who suffer from a mental disorder. Like them, many dogs make the lives of people with
depressive disorders, anxiety, trauma, schizophrenia, bipolar disorder or obsessive-compulsive disorder,
among others, easier.
Training
Although they also provide emotional support to their owners, psychiatric assistance dogs should not be confused with
emotional support dogs.
The first are "trained to perform exercises that directly mitigate the mental disorder or alteration of their handler," says
Enrique Solis Álvarez
, director of LealCan, a company with 30 years of experience in the
dog training
sector . In contrast, emotional support dogs "are dogs whose mere company offers emotional support, comfort, or a sense of security" to their owner, but have not undergone any training to perform specific tasks.
So can any dog be trained to become a psychiatric assistance dog? It depends, he must have specific characteristics depending on the needs of the person he is going to help. "You don't have to be of a certain breed," explains Solis, "but, for example, if you are required to do what we call
pressure therapy,
which is providing deep or partial pressure for a calming effect, you will hardly be able to cooperate. a very small dog in this task. It is also necessary that the dog does not have behavioral problems," he adds.
Whether it is a dog that lives with the person suffering from the disorder (and that has been evaluated as suitable to be trained) or one that is specifically selected for this purpose, it must always undergo
personalized training
based on the needs of the person. your guide, who will ask you for help using
a verbal or gestural signal
.
"For example," Solis describes, "to inspect a room and mitigate the handler's possible fear or to request pressure therapy or
seek medication.
Also, in the event of compulsive scratching, stop that behavior before the handler hurts himself." ".
How they help
There are many tasks for which they can be trained, points out
Mónica Kern
, specialist in assistance dogs, volunteer at Perruneando Madrid and collaborator of the Chair of Animals and Society at the
Rey Juan Carlos University
: "They can warn of a crisis (such as in the example of the following video), help to calm down in crisis situations, warn to take the medication, carry it,
remove (its owner) from a stressful situation,
notify someone if you are suffering from a sensory alteration or disconnection "And, of course, they give
security and emotional stability
."
Despite their important help, psychiatric assistance dogs
are not recognized as such by law in Spain.
In fact, there are only "
five types of assistance dogs
: guide (for blind people), signal (for deaf people), service (for people with physical disabilities), those that provide help to people with autism spectrum disorder, and dogs warning or medical alert," explains Kern, who considers that it is in this last category where psychiatric assistance dogs could be included in the absence of specific regulation.
However, in Solis' opinion, "
greater legal recognition
should be offered to this type of dog, since they do as important a job as the rest of the five recognized types."
Of course, both agree that the most important thing in any case is
to guarantee the well-being of the animal
. "You must carefully test who you give the dog to," says Kern. "At Perruneando we work with the dog that the user already has if it is valid to be able to train it as an assistance dog, because this way we make sure that
there is a bond
and the person wants their dog as part of their family. If a person has a crisis aggressive (whether due to psychiatric disorders or other physical or sensory pathologies) and vents their frustration on the dog, they should not be suitable to have a dog with these characteristics," he defends. An opinion shared by Solis, for whom "animal welfare must always come before training needs."
Sigmund Freud with his dogs in Pötzleinsdorf in 1931.GETTY
Jofi, Sigmund Freud's faithful assistant
Sigmund Freud
was one of the first to realize the potential of dogs in therapy. The father of psychoanalysis always received his patients with his chow chow
Jofi.
He was convinced that the dog's presence helped create a more relaxed environment for his patients to open up while they recounted their lives on the couch. Furthermore, he claimed that his reactions allowed him to reach a more precise diagnosis.
The psychoanalyst had his dog assistant at all times in his office at 19 Berggasse Street in Vienna, whom he described as follows: "She is a charming creature, so interesting in her feminine characteristics: wild, impulsive, intelligent and not as dependent as dogs usually are.
But he was not the only one who realized the benefit that the company of dogs could provide to humans. Other psychiatrists and psychologists have also defended the therapeutic benefits of animals in the treatment of various mental health problems. This is the case of
Boris Levinson
, considered one of the pioneers of pet-assisted therapy. This child psychologist, who coined the term "pet-therapy", included pets in his psychological interventions starting in 1953, after, by chance, his dog Jingles sneaked into his office and helped a withdrawn child. with which everything up to that moment had failed. Levinson realized that contact with the animal helped the child calm down and show his emotions.
In his book
Animal-Assisted Child Psychotherapy,
Levinson argues that the presence of his dog in the sessions
favored communication with children
, especially those who had communication or behavioral problems, obsessive-compulsive tendencies or autism.
And dogs achieve something that is sometimes more difficult for humans to achieve: establishing an emotional bond with those who live mostly in their inner world.