Wednesday, May 07, 2008 Literatus: Listeners, healers By Zosimo T. Literatus, R.M.T. Breakthroughs
BENJAMIN Hoff wrote in his book, The Tao of Pooh: “Lots of people talk to animals. Not very many listen, though. That’s the problem.” And yet, it appears that mental health is not so much dependent upon listening as the natural physical contact. That’s the essential outcome of the Berget team’s study that we mentioned last week.
After six months, no change was observed in patients receiving standard and medical treatment. That is not a compliment to mainstream psychiatric medicine.
However, in patients receiving animal-assisted therapy (AAT), significant increases were observed in their self-efficacy and quality of life.
Patients with the largest increase in self-efficacy also showed the largest increase in their coping strategy, and reporting the largest improvement in mood. This subgroup favored to a larger extent physical contact with the animals.
The animals included dairy cows, sheep, and horses, and smaller farm animals such as rabbits, poultry, pigs, cats or dogs.
Of the 90 original psychiatric patients, 21 patients (23 percent) dropped out from the study after a range of one to 6 weeks.
The main reasons included little interest in the animal species on the farm (26.7 percent), boring work (20 percent), and unknown private reasons (26.7 percent). Higher dropouts came from hospitalized patients, especially among those who had been using sleeping pills.
“The contact with the animals may have produced a pleasurably experienced social interaction that made the patients less afraid of new situations,” Berget observed. Or, AAT intervention may have improved the effects of the ordinary psychiatric treatment by “serving as a catalyst for positive development in the patient,” he continued.
Pet lovers may have an inherent edge over non-lovers when it comes to mental health — if these findings can be sustained by future studies. It somehow opens a surprising truth that most humans may have missed out because of their inherent disinterest in animal contact; those “lesser creatures” we may have come to see so routinely as to lose a deep interest in them. And yet, the current scientific evidence indicates that animals, too, can be God’s tools to bring a healing touch to forgetful and increasingly distracted human beings.
Christian priest and social worker Henri Nouwen sees much clearly through the confusion: “The friend who can be silent with us in a moment of despair or confusion, who can stay with us in an hour of grief and bereavement, who can tolerate not knowing, not healing, not curing — that is a friend who cares.” Sounds like our dogs, cats, and cattle, isn’t it? Would silence be the grace that most of us busy career people have missed regretfully? Think again, and maybe again, and again.
