Pets As Antidepressants

Journal of Psychiatric Research

Last December I wrote about how owning a dog, especially if you’re single, can lower your risk of all-cause mortality as well as acute heart problems.

Here, we connect pet ownership with mental health, specifically a form of depression that is incredibly difficult to treat.

In the early 1800s poet John Keats described his (likely undiagnosed) depression with the following: “I am in that temper that if I were under water I would scarcely kick to come to the top.”

His words are a reminder of the severity of poor mental health, and I don’t want to simplify the challenges that depression brings by saying that the solution is to merely adopt a cat. The solution is likely a combination of tools including therapy and exercise as well as synthetic and botanical medications.

However, this research shows that one possible part of the solution could be to adopt a pet.

In this study, a group of 33 patients with treatment-resistant depression (TRD) agreed to adopt a pet. Most adopted a dog, some two dogs, and a few brave souls adopted a cat. The control group of 33 people decided to forgo that responsibility. Both the pet and non-pet groups maintained the same medication treatment (yeah, the one that wasn’t working) they were previously taking before adopting this new intervention.

During the study, each patient was evaluated for depressive symptoms at the beginning, after 4 weeks, then 8 weeks, and then 12 weeks. By the end of the study, a third of the new pet-owners no longer met the criteria for depression. The few who didn’t improve in the pet-group were the cat owners. I’m kidding, they didn’t mention that.

Overall, the pet group made significant improvements, both when compared to their state at the beginning of the study and also in comparison to the non-pet group. Sadly, the other patients continued to have poor responses to the drugs and none of them remitted.

These results are impressive for such a minimally invasive (and cheap) therapy. To me, the best part is that the patients who benefited found that their symptoms began to decrease after just one month into the study. By the second month their symptoms were significantly different from those of the non-pet group.

Takeaway: For some, owning a pet is the ticket to improving mental health. Pets can help keep you company, increasing your daily movement, all while adding more meaning to your life. In this study, animal therapy was strong enough to help alleviate symptoms of treatment resistant depression–a severe condition that our best medications and therapies often can’t cure. This makes you wonder what owning a pet would do for the rest of us who don’t have it as bad. My vote? Get yourself a dog and take her on a hike.