Depressed dogs, cats with OCD — what animal madness means for us humans

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.