Oliver was an extremely dashing,
handsome, charming, and largely unstable male
that I completely lost my heart to.
(Laughter)
He was a Burmese Mountain Dog,
and my ex-husband and I adopted him,
and about six months in,
we realized that he was a mess.
He had such paralyzing separation anxiety
that we couldn't leave him alone.
Once, he jumped out of our third floor apartment.
He ate fabric. He ate things, recyclables.
He hunted flies that didn't exist.
He suffered from hallucinations.
He was diagnosed with a canine compulsive disorder
and that's really just the tip of the iceberg.
But like with humans,
sometimes it's six months in
before you realize that
the person that you love has some issues.
(Laughter)
And most of us do not take the person we're dating
back to the bar where we met them
or give them back to the friend that introduced us,
or sign them back up on Match.com.
(Laughter)
We love them anyway,
and we stick to it,
and that is what I did with my dog.
And I was a — I'd studied biology.
I have a Ph.D in the history of science
from MIT,
and had you asked me 10 years ago
if a dog I loved, or just dogs generally,
had emotions, I would have said yes,
but I'm not sure I would have told you
that they can also wind up with an anxiety disorder
and a Prozac prescription and a therapist.
But then, I fell in love, and I realized that they can,
and actually trying to help my own dog
overcome his panic and his anxiety,
it just changed my life.
It cracked open my world,
and I spent the last seven years, actually,
looking into this topic of mental illness in other animals.
Can they be mentally ill like people,
and if so, what does it mean about us?
And what I discovered is that I do believe
they can suffer from mental illness,
and actually looking and trying to identify mental illness in them
often helps us be better friends to them
and also can help us better understand ourselves.
So let's talk about diagnosis for a minute.
Many of us think that we can't know
what another animal is thinking,
and that is true,
but any of you in relationships
— at least this is my case —
just because you ask someone that you with
or your parent or your child how they feel
doesn't mean that they can tell you.
They may not have words to explain
what it is that they're feeling,
and they may not know.
It's actually a pretty recent phenomenon
that we feel that we have to talk to someone
to understand their emotional distress.
Before the early 20th century,
physicians often diagnosed emotional distress
in their patients just by observation.
It also turns out that thinking about
mental illness in other animals
isn't actually that much of a stress.
Most mental disorders in the United States
are fear and anxiety disorders,
and when you think about it, fear and anxiety
are actually really extremely helpful animal emotions.
Usually we feel fear and anxiety in situations that are dangerous,
and once we feel them,
we then are motivated to move away
from whatever is dangerous.
The problem is when we begin to feel fear and anxiety in situations that don't call for it.
Mood disorders, too, may actually just be
the unfortunate downside of being a feeling animal,
and obsessive compulsive disorders also
are often manifestations of a really healthy animal thing
which is keeping yourself clean and groomed.
This tips into the territory of mental illness
when you do things like
compulsively over-wash your hands or paws,
or you develop a ritual that's so extreme
that you can't sit down to a bowl of food
unless you engage in that ritual.
So for humans, we have "The Diagnostic and Statistical Manual"
which is basically an atlas
of the currently agreed upon mental disorders.
In other animals, we have YouTube.
(Laughter)
This is just one search I did for "OCD dog"
but I encourage all of you
to look at "OCD cat."
You will be shocked by what you see.
I'm going to show you just a couple examples.
This is an example of shadow-chasing.
I know, and it's funny and in some ways it's cute.
The issue, though, is that dogs can develop compulsions like this
that they then engage in all day.
So they won't go for a walk,
they won't hang out with their friends,
they won't eat.
They'll develop fixations
like chasing their tails compulsively.
Here's an example of a cat named Gizmo.
He looks like he's on a stakeout
— (Laughter) —
but he does this for many, many, many hours a day.
He just sits there and he will paw and paw and paw
at the screen.
This is another example of what's considered
a stereotypic behavior.
This is a sun bear at the Oakland Zoo named Ting Ting.
And if you just sort of happened upon this scene,
you might think that Ting Ting
is just playing with a stick,
but Ting Ting does this all day,
and if you pay close attention
and if I showed you guys the full half-hour of this clip,
you'd see that he does the exact same thing
in the exact same order, and he spins the stick
in the exact same way every time.
Other super-common behaviors that you may see,
particularly in captive animals,
are pacing stereotypes or swaying stereotypes,
and actually, humans do this too,
and in us, you know, we'll sway,
we'll move from side to side.
Many of us do this, and sometimes, you know,
it's an effort to soothe ourselves,
and I think in other animals that is often the case too.
But it's not just stereotypic behaviors
that other animals engage in.
This is Gigi. She's a gorilla that lives
at the Franklin Park Zoo in Boston.
She actually has a Harvard psychiatrist,
and she's been treated for a mood disorder
among other things.
Many animals develop mood disorders.
Lots of creatures
— this horse is just one example —
develop self-destructive behaviors.
They'll gnaw on things
or do other things that may also soothe them,
even if they're self-destructive,
which could be considered similar
to the ways that some humans cut themselves.
Plucking.
Turns out, if you have fur or feathers or skin,
you can pluck yourself compulsively,
and some parrots actually have been studied
to better understand [triplotomania?], or compulsive plucking in humans,
something that affects
20 million Americans right now.
Lab rats pluck themselves too.
In them, it's called barbering.
Canine veterans of conflicts of Iraq and Afghanistan
are coming back with what's considered canine PTSD,
and they're having a hard time reentering civilian life
when they come back from deployments.
They can be too scared to approach men with beards
or to hop into cars.
I want to be careful and be clear though.
I do not think that canine PTSD
is the same as human PTSD.
But I also do not think that my PTSD
is like your PTSD,
or that my anxiety or that my sadness is like yours.
We are all different.
We also all have very different susceptibilities.
So two dogs, raised in the same household,
exposed to the very same things,
one may develop, say, a debilitating fear of motorcycles,
or a phobia of the beep of the microwave,
and another one is going to be just fine.
So one thing that people ask me pretty frequently:
is this just an instance of humans
driving other animals crazy?
Or, is animal mental illness just a result of mistreatment or abuse?
And it turns out we're actually
so much more complicated than that.
So one great thing that has happened to me
is recently I published a book on this,
and every day now that I open my email
or when I go to a reading
or even when I go to a cocktail party,
people tell me their stories
of the animals that they have met.
And recently, I did a reading in California,
and a woman raised her hand after the talk and she said,
"Dr. Braitman, I think my cat has PTSD."
And I said, "Well, why? Tell me a little bit about it."
So, Ping is her cat. She was a rescue,
and she used to live with an elderly man,
and one day the man was vacuuming
and he suffered a heart attack, and he died.
A week later, Ping was discovered in the apartment
alongside the body of her owner,
and the vacuum had been running the entire time.
For many months, up to I think two years after that incident,
she was so scared she couldn't be in the house when anyone was cleaning.
She was quite literally a scaredy cat.
She would hide in the closet.
She was un-self-confident, and shaky,
but with the loving support of her family,
a lot of a time, and their patience,
now, three years later,
she's actually a happy, confident cat.
Another story of trauma and recovery that I came across
was actually a few years ago.
I was in Thailand to do some research.