Pets do not significantly benefit the emotional health of owners with severe mental illness, study shows
Pets do not significantly benefit the emotional health of owners with severe mental illness, study shows
A new study published in the CABI journal Human-Animal Interactions suggests that companion animals—including dogs, cats, fish and birds—do not significantly benefit the emotional health of owners with severe mental illness.
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A study of 170 people?!? That seems a little low as an n count to be drawing such sweeping conclusions from.
What does "severe" mean? I know that without my cat (may he rest in peace) I wouldn't be alive today. Now I have something else to live for, he's never forgotten
severe mental illnesses such as bipolar disorder or psychosis.
In the sense of expecting a dog to make you less bipolar somehow, I think that would be laughable.
Speaking from an angle of chronic, usually severe depression along with transient psychosis, etc., I'm willing to back up that having a pet helps me greatly. If I don't get out of bed, the cat won't eat. She refuses.
So I have to get up, and I have to continue looking after her because no matter how sick of this shit I ever get, she's never done anything to deserve my abandonment. She's a bright point where I'd otherwise have no real argument for this.
Can also confirm her constant bullshit is a calming distraction when something knocks me off balance, which does do a little bit to keep me from spiraling into what could turn into stressed-induced psychosis if I let it develop into a feedback loop. On the rare occasions it does still degrade, she's still there in the same way nobody else is.
Honestly, it's a testament to her breed, and I'm probably stuck only adopting Maine coons forever now just because they're known to be so compassionate and needy that I don't have a quiet moment left to sit and make myself worse.
It likely doesn't help with some, but even the term "severe" is sufficiently diverse enough and the research pool small and ill-documented enough that I think they're overstating their findings here before they've sufficiently finished the work.
170 is a fairly substantial sample size, but it does pose challenges with data interpretation when there's no intervention and the expected effect size is small.
Life sciences often uses much smaller sample sizes, but with intervention.
At the absolute minimum, the headline here should be "found no evidence of" rather than "do not". The good old absence of evidence vs. evidence of absence thing.
It was hard enough to find even this many people to support their bs theory.
We surveyed 45 people about whether the earth was flat, 25 said yes, that’s over half!!!