Psychiatric Service Dogs

Psychiatric Service dogs are trained to task for our clients that have any range of psychiatric disorder. Their purpose is to make the daily life of our disabled handlers workable and give those handlers independence. Psychiatric Service Dogs can aid in a variety of disorders including:

• Anxiety Disorders
• Panic Disorders 
• PTSD and CPTSD
• Bipolar Disorder
• OCD
• Agoraphobia (Social Anxiety)
• and others

We encourage our clients to label these dogs simply as Service Dogs. There is a lot of misinformation and bias in the general population. We will most often have issues with public access with our psych dogs if they are labeled specifically for psych work. As the world becomes more familiar with mental illness and there is less of a stigma surrounding it this may change over time. Where we currently stand in our society with mental illness people will assume you have an Emotional Support Animal and you are more likely to get rejected in public because ESAs do not have public access. 

We are very careful about pairing psychiatric service dogs. It can be so common for a client to have a service dog suggested to them either by their primary care doctor or psychiatrist and end up having a harder time after the dog gets home. The transition can be very difficult. In our program we specialize in Psych dogs but we want to know that our teams will be successful. We will ask a lot of questions to make sure this can be a good fit and sometimes we even suggest our clients go "borrow," a dog for a week and see what the work load will be like. We want them to get an idea of what caring for a dog will entail and the basic idea of having a dog around all the time. Getting a service dog is an extreme method of treatment. You will have this dog not only helping give you freedom and independence but you will also have it with you all the time. Once we talk clients through that fact and the work load they are signing up for THEN we go to the benefits. John's Hopkins has a great article that can guide you through the benefits that many handlers experience, read that HERE. In short, our handlers benefit in outstanding ways if they are accustomed to the shift of caring for a dog can bring, they can benefit from our dogs.  You will see:

• Reduction in Stress (Petting a dog lowers cortisol levels)
• Increase in Physical Activity (get those endorphins going!)
• Lowers Blood Pressure (side effect of lowering cortisol)
• Boosting Heart Health
• Easing Loneliness 
• Gives a sense of purpose to our handlers

There are a lot of tasks that programs can input tasks to their dogs that are just basic for every psych dog to have and are useful to most handlers. In our program we like to personalize the dog to the handler to best help. While each dog goes home based on exactly what each handler needs, these are some of our most commonly taught tasks for these dogs. 

Block - Block is simply keeping people from coming up behind handlers. Many of our clients do not want people approaching them from behind. The dog is taught whenever the team stops they are to sit or stand right behind the handler. 

Guard - Guard is similar. When you stop the dog turns in a backwards sit, still in the heel position. This allows the dog to see what is going on behind you and then allows the handler to focus forward on what they are doing. This can be taught off to the side in heel or between the handlers legs. 

Orbit - Orbit is when the dog will actually circle the handler while walking. This is used in bigger crowds to create space for the handler and keep people from approaching from all sides. 

Behavioral Interruption - Behavioral Interruption is one of our favorite and most important tasks we teach. This helps us keep clients from spiraling into an episode before it happens. Often our clients have signs that they are not doing well or starting to dissociate from the real world. A client may bounce their leg, pick at their nails, chew their nails, shake their hands or wring them. There are many different ways our bodies can show the dog its time to interrupt to help us before the episode. 

DPT -  Deep Pressure Therapy is taught hand-in-hand with behavioral interruption most often. DPT is when the dog lays over the legs of the handler and applies pressure over the legs and on the chest. This helps ground our handlers and bring them back to reality, helps calm their nervous systems and bring a panic back down.