The weak scientific case for emotional support animals
vox.com
vox.com
My dog gives me reason to keep living and not kill myself on my darkest days.
When I wake up sweating and shaking and panicing from anxiety, my dog gives me something soft and comforting to hold and pet. A dog reacts and loves you and distracts you by licking and being playful and in your face.
Having been alone and suffering from this for a decade prior, I can say for sure my dog helps me.
What croc of a psychiatrist can't see this.
Edit:
As for being a crutch, anxiety is not logical. Sometimes there isn't something to confront. Just a fear of impending doom from some unknown source..no matter what you tell yourself, and how much you know there is nothing, you still shake, heart pounding, sweating, physical pain from anxiety.
I could take medicine and be dependent on that, or I could hug my dog
You wouldn't begrudge somebody for being dependent on cancer medicine, would you? Or heart medicine? I would rather be dependent on meds than suffer the quality of life issues I used to have. Not sure why your opposition to treating anxiety pharmacologically, but I would encourage you to at least talk to a doctor and explore what medication could do for you.
SSRIs and such can be helpful, but I would like to stay away from xanax and things like that. I have known many people who became dependent and had their life ruined. I know it depends on the person and their background, but I'd like to avoid it all together personally.
I'd prefer to hug a dog than take potentially addictive medications.
>What croc of a psychiatrist can't see this.
Did you read the article? Your comment is basically the very first question the author asks the psychiatrist.
Even things that "feel" obvious to us should be studied. We shouldn't just take it for fact that an emotional support animal is a valid method of coping with depression or anxiety.
Especially when there are alternatives which have gone through and continue to be subjected to rigorous scientific study.
If an animal helps you cope with these things, yes by all means go for it. But you can't state that it is a valid alternative to things like medication or therapy if you've never tried them. This person may well be depriving him/herself of an even healthier life which, incidentally makes their pet's life healthier and happier as a result.
When I wake up sweating and shaking and panicing from anxiety, my girlfriend gives me something soft and comforting to hold and pet. A girlfriend reacts and loves you and distracts you by licking and being playful and in your face.
Having been alone and suffering from this for a decade prior, I can say for sure my girlfriend helps me.
What croc of a psychiatrist calls me "codependent"
Codependent implies enabling bad behavior. My dog doesn't enable my anxiety. My meds don't enable my anxiety, they treat it.
More dogs (especially French Bulldogs doing cute/funny things) is a good step forward.
Did either you or the parent commenter read the entire article or the interview at the end? Nobody is saying support animals don't help in any way.
The whole discussion is about the lack of any serious studies or evidence that animals objectively help those with mental health issues, and how exactly they help. How can you say "we should be doing more to support" something without knowing if that thing is actually helping? This is the point of the article.
Only says we don't know so they could be doing harm!
The licensing that we got (as of ~15 years ago) was nowhere near the level that is given to sight assistance dogs. However, other license authorities (I think it was TDI) were more strenuous, and my dog would not have passed them. For instance, therapy dogs had to be calm if a rabbit or cat was nearby. I'm not sure what regulations are in place now, I assume it must have tightened up since then.
In pre-9/11 days, my dog rode in the airplane cabin twice. He was chill, even calmed another passenger down on the outbound 3-hour flight by sitting in their lap.
There are no legal requirements or standards for either in terms of training either, the only standard is that if the animal is being disruptive they can ask you to remove it, but must then provide reasonable accommodation to the disabled person in the animal's absence.
It's exactly like if a company requires you to get a professional certification from, say, Oracle.
It's also pretty reasonable. if they are going to let dogs around their residents that they'd want a third party making sure the dog has a temperament suitable for that and certain amount of training - the facility doesn't know how to tell if a dog would be fit for that purpose.
It's like saying getting your video game rated by the ESRB is "snake oil" because "there's no legal requirements or standards for rating video games." Yet if you want to sell your video game at Walmart or Toys R Us you're going to have to get it rated by the ESRB.
You're also confused about where the "reasonable accommodations" comes in.
Requiring or claiming to provide licensure for animals outside of what the laws state and require is scummy and just confuses the issue as to what is and isn't allowed by law.
[In Los Angeles County, USA]
This is phrased rudely, but has an element of truth.
The facility (it's a county facility) wanted the therapy dog to be "licensed," and we went through the process to do some training, and got a vest, a patch, and a certificate (http://www.tdi-dog.org - I forget what the more rigorous one was). I doubt that we paid anything to TDI beyond a nominal fee, so that association of "snake oil" is off base.
But like I said, and as you note, the "therapy dog" process was highly variable, and it's not like there was some kind of national standard. And I would add that we did take unfair advantage of the airline exception for therapy dogs - this was in 2000 or so, before they really came into vogue - and I was uncomfortable with doing that, although I was overruled. ;-)
Then the patient can get any pet from any source, including a backyard puppy mill, without any training whatsoever. Then certain people/organizations are required to make "reasonable accommodations," including airlines.
Even worse, there's services online that you can pay a small fee for a doctor's note. Or you can just buy an ID or vest from Amazon,that looks official, or have a friend write you a letter, it's not like the airline is realistically going to check the medical credentials of the "doctor."
You can see where this is going...This of course ends up creating a loophole used solely for avoiding pet fees airline charge and having pets in a "no pets" apartment.
It's a shame because the few bad apples ruin the bunch. People who have maladapted pets and/or no consideration for others around them cause trouble.
That being said, places required to "make reasonable accommodations" for ESAs can deny boarding to unruly pets because that's not "reasonable." But for staff it's difficult to tell how the animal would react until they actually are in the air.
Services animals on the other hand are extensively trained at a cost upwards of $30,000 dollars. It’s really not easy to get a dog to behave like that.
I don't know the true efficacy, but a close friend of mine who was in pretty bad shape said the dog helped cheer him up. If nothing else just having the opportunity to pet a dog and forget about things for a bit must have been nice.
In other words who cares?
If you are lacking in emotional support, and then start receiving it, you don't need science to validate your experience.
You just know.
Landlords, for one, who have to deal with tenants that argue their E.S. animal should be excepted from the "no pets" policy. Also H.R. departments (what if an employee brings a bird to work?), hospitals, and places where food is served ("Waiter! That guy's dog licked my plate!").
It's one of those situations in which the potential for abuse is pretty big, and so there's an actual interest in differentiating "this dog helps me cope with life" from "you have to allow this untrained animal here thanks to poorly defined laws and paperwork with no clear meaning".
The same rules for humans should apply. If the pet is a nuisance, or destructive, or loud or whatever, then that pet can be removed just like a human would be removed in the same circumstances.
>So if you want to say that “my pet makes me feel good and it’s fun,” that’s great. You don’t really need lots of evidence for that.
>But with these emotional support animals, we’re talking about what is essentially a prescription from doctors to people with clinically significant symptoms. When we talk about that, there are very specific standards of evidence for psychiatric and psychological treatment, and these have not met that standard.
(Not that this always happens)
The reason for the abuse of the ESA system is that there are no alternatives provided. Your only options are to torture your pet, or abuse the system. There is no amount of money you can pay to avoid it - you can't book an entire row if you wanted.
I think this issue needs to be addressed, and a process formally institutionalized to allow pets to travel with their humans. It is very rare for anyone to be bothered when a pet is on board - most of the time it brings other passengers joy - in the cases where there is a problem, easy arrangements are made that satisfy everyone.
Outside of Cats/Dogs, if somebody sits down next to me with their Emotional Support Snake there's gonna be some loud WTFs and GTFOs and just a problem overall. Could the airline talk to individual passengers about this snake being near them on their flight beforehand? Sure. Are they going to? Nope. Better to just say there will be no gosh darn snakes on this gosh darn plane.
These are quite rare, but they happen, and the solution has always been easy and amicable: move some people around, with the dog owner making the most compromise.
> Do we need to have pet friendly/no pet flight options?
This would be great. Right now even with ESA's there is a limit on the number of pets that can be on a flight, so you would have to find a different flight if the one you wanted already had some. By no means am I suggesting there should be a free-for-all. Only to have some limited arrangement where everyone can be happy.
> Could the airline talk to individual passengers about this snake being near them on their flight beforehand?
This kind of messaging is relatively easy nowadays, ranging from a little doggy icon on the website marking a specific flight as being pet-friendly, all the way to personalized sms/emails (which are already in place).
Humans live densely, there are very few actions you can take that affect no-one in no way. We are dealing with this overly brutely in my opinion, there exists a configuration that increases net world happiness that we are not taking advantage of.
If we are going to allow people to have dogs, then our society needs to allow dogs to move through it... This seems obvious. Dogs should be allowed to go everywhere that humans go (with certain extreme exceptions).
We already have rules in place for unruly or destructive behavior, and the same should apply to dogs.
If I'm traveling and I need to stay in a hotel, I don't want anyone to fuck with me because I have my dog. He is small, and silent. No one will even know he is there, and yet, it is always a huge pain in the ass to bring him places.
I suppose a private flight is an option for some folks.
For the first there should be a framework of cerification. If you want to bring an ESA it should pass third party certification with different standards for housing and flights.
For the second we should look at alternatives. If you want to fly with pet you have to pay hundreds, often well excess of your own ticket, for them to fly cargo (unless they can fly under your seat in which case it's $125). Why so high fees / bad experience? If a pet owner labels their pet ESA the pet gets to fly with them for free. Why can't pets fly free in cabin like infants under 2? If the pet is over a certain size, then person has to buy another seat (just like an older child).
I think the certification standards and equalizing experience for pets would dramatically lower potential for abuse.
These are shorter term fixes. In the long term we should keep building evidence on the question of effectiveness.