What Can Animals Teach Us About Mental Health?

When I call Laurel Braitman to interview her about her debut book Animal Madness, she’s laughing hysterically. She’s just popped on to Junkee to check out the kind of site we are, and has discovered our piece about Benedict Cumberbatch’s inability to say the word ‘penguin’. “Pengwing! … Pengling!” she cackles. “You guys kill me.”

In conversation, Braitman is charming and engaging, able to quickly zoom in on specific details or pull out to view the bigger picture — much like Animal Madness itself, which is meticulously researched and rich with rigorous scientific detail, yet a joy to read (even when it deals with some disturbing subject matter).

Animal Madness examines the mental health of animals, and in so doing explores a number of serious questions. Are animals’ minds like our own, or different? Can we say that animals are conscious in the same way we are? If so, what might animal mental illness reveal about human mental illness? And what lessons can humans learn about recovery and their own mental health from animals?

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Junkee: You begin Animal Madness talking about your Bernese Mountain Dog, Oliver, and his own neuroses. Could you tell us a little about how you started work on this book, and how Oliver came into your life?

Laurel Braitman: I think what happened to me is what happens to most people when they fall in love: you fall for somebody, and that could be a person or another species entirely, and before you know it you’ve lost your heart, and you don’t know yet what you’re going to do at the end of the relationship when you’re six months in. That definitely happened with my dog. You know, the first six months with him were amazing – we played hide and seek all over the house, and we went for walks, and my husband and I tried to figure out what he’d sound like with a human voice, and so on.

Then about six months in he developed just crippling anxiety. We couldn’t leave him alone unless we left him alone on a very Rain Man-ish type of schedule; everything had to happen at a certain time or he would just lose it. And I don’t say that lightly: the most extreme thing he did was jump out of our third-floor apartment. He pushed a window air-conditioning unit out of the way, chewed a hole through a metal screen, and then he jumped. He fell about fifty-five feet onto cement. He also had a canine compulsive disorder that meant he excessively licked himself; he also ate things that weren’t food; he had hallucinations, and at night would snap at flies that didn’t exist. He had a number of different problems.

I had never experienced anything like that before: I grew up on a farm, and our dogs were really well-adjusted. I always thought that other animals had emotions, but if you asked me a decade ago if they could have anxiety disorders, I’m not sure I would have said ‘yes’. I think I would have said, ‘That sounds too anthropomorphic’. But Oliver changed all of that for me.

Oliver was a rescue dog, and you talk about wondering what had occurred before he came into your lives to cause him this anxiety. Did you ever get to the bottom of that? 

LB: Yes and no. I think I solved it as much as you can solve it, which is that we don’t really know what anxiety is in people, either. Our own emotional experiences are mysterious, and they will always be mysterious, because my anxiety is different to your anxiety, and your anxiety is different to a turtle’s anxiety, is different to a whale’s anxiety – and even within species we’re different.

I think that’s what’s given rise to every song ever written, for example, and all of literature: these questions of trying to plumb the experience of being a feeling animal. And while we can look at these things that indicate anxiety, and stress, and fear – I’m not saying they don’t exist, but some element of them will always be unquantifiable. That doesn’t mean they’re not real, or that they don’t happen; it just might mean that we don’t have the language to talk about it, or to measure it. That’s how I came away from my book – the more I learn about all of this stuff, the more questions open up, and I think that’s really the only honest way to talk about mental health. There’s no one solution for dogs or cats or humans or elephants. There’s things that help all of us, definitely.

When I started doing this, people said, ‘God, why do you want to spend seven years writing about animal mental illness? That sounds so depressing!’ And I never really understood that question, because I actually don’t think this stuff is depressing at all. It’s so hopeful; I met so many animals who got better. And the animals recovered with things that help us: friendships; sometimes they go on pharmaceuticals; a change in environment; the ability to exercise free will and make choices; healthy, healing relationships with members of their own species or other species entirely; feeling useful, having a job; exercise. These are basic human things that we do to make ourselves feel better, and it turns out they also work for wombats and whales.

Some of the feedback you’ve received accuses you of anthropomorphism – the projection of human traits onto animals – as though that’s a bad thing, but you actually take some time in the book to talk about why anthropomorphism might not be so bad. 

LB: I’m a rampant anthropomorphiser. I really believe in it. But while I’m talking to you, my dog is laying next to me, and he’s not wearing an outfit – I will never put him in a little hat. (Full disclosure is that I was in a dog parade over the weekend, and he was in a cape. But he didn’t mind it! And I did try to make sure it was the most dog-friendly cape possible, but we were going as superheroes, so it had to be done.)

“I will never stuff an animal into a situation or an outfit they don’t want to be in … [Sometimes] we’re so busy projecting our own needs and desires onto another creature that we’re blinded to their point of view, and their desires.”

In general, though, I will never stuff an animal into a situation or an outfit they don’t want to be in. I think that’s an example of anthropocentrism, and a bad kind of anthropomorphism, where we’re so busy projecting our own needs and desires onto another creature that we’re blinded to their point of view, and their desires.

But I think that we can anthropomorphise well — we can identify with other animals’ emotional states, and seek to meet their needs by identifying with them through our shared traits. Looking in them for pieces of ourselves that we share. And that’s a two-way street: we should not be scared of identifying with other animals, because it helps us help them. I just think we need to do it well.

Also, I don’t think we can not anthropomorphise. I think it’s a fallacy that we can have some objective human viewpoint; that’s impossible, because we’re animals, too. As long as we’re animals, thinking and wondering about the experience of another animal, we’re already projecting. So just I think it’s ridiculous, people who say we can not anthropomorphise – then they’re refusing to wonder about the experience of another creature. That’s how our minds work: it’s always an act of imagination, empathy.

In the book you talk about the neuroscientist Jaak Panksepp’s work. He suggests that because animals have very different forms of experience – because their senses are so different to ours — their cognition and their emotional states would also necessarily be different. For examples, dolphins have an emotional response to hearing the sonar ping of a long-lost companion that humans will never be able to comprehend. But your book makes an argument that even though we may never have access to that emotion, there’s a value in trying to understand it. 

LB: Yes! Imagine if we applied it to humans: you can’t understand what a baby is feeling, or someone who speaks a different language to you, but does that mean that you can’t identify with them? That’s crazy.

It also makes the world so much more fun and exciting to be a part of. If you consider that bees may have emotions that go with seeing a flower in ultraviolet light, or that octopuses may have a colour change emotion, or an elephant may have an emotion for feeling a friend through foot communication that creates infrasound – that’s just so magical!

We’ve worked it out in fiction — that’s why we make up superheroes with special extrasensory powers. But it turns out that the world is so much more interesting than we can even imagine in our blockbuster movies.

Contemporary science is revealing that animals have rich inner lives, but one of the great things about the book is that you trace the history of those scientific approaches, starting with Darwin’s theory of animal emotions.

LB: We’re so self-congratulatory about what we know now, and in so many ways it’s humbling to then look at a late nineteenth–century scientist and see that they were already saying this stuff. I think that’s important. Not to be a grumpy historian about it all, which I often find myself being, but I think it matters. This is not new, and it’s certainly not news to people who work with animals as their colleagues all day. I really doubt any zookeeper, for example, or really good hunters, or dog trainers, would be surprised by my book. They may be surprised by the language, or the history but, in some fundamental ways, it’s just not new.

I think the way we’re now looking at animal intelligence and emotional capacity is new. Things like putting dogs in MRI machines and then giving them treats and looking at how their brains respond – that’s new. But Darwin didn’t need an MRI machine to say that his dogs could be happy or disappointed or jealous … Looking at evolutionary history as if the present moment is the zenith of the best things that have ever happened for every animal on earth just doesn’t make sense. This is also true of intellectual history.

We started with Oliver, who got you into this terrain, but what are some other really salient or interesting examples of animals with mental illness that you encountered while writing this book?

LB: The animals that keep me up at night thinking about them are often the elephants. And it’s not because they’re considered to be more intelligent – although they are incredibly intelligent – but the elephants that I met while researching the book just cracked my heart wide open.

You know the cliché about an elephant’s memory? Well, it turns out it’s really true. And I spent a bunch of time in Thailand while researching this book, with elephants and the people who have devoted their lives to making them feel better after they’ve suffered some sort of trauma in their past. And because elephants are so emotionally intelligent and smart and long-lived, they really can be affected emotionally by things that happened in their past, just like us. Further, an elephant who is emotionally distressed or sad is a public health hazard; you’re in a country where elephants are everywhere. So there’s this huge incentive – it’s an initiative of kindness, but it’s also about public health and keeping people and their investments safe, to make these elephants feel better.

“The elephants that I met while researching the book just cracked my heart wide open.”

It’s not actually that complicated. It’s complicated to live with an elephant, and I don’t think they should ever be in captivity at all, but these elephants can’t be released into the forest because it turns out there’s no forest left for them to live in. So they’re caught between the human and non-human world. And what turns out to make an elephant feel better is what makes us feel better: it comes down to treats, really, and friendships, and friendship with a very particular other elephant. The mahouts that are really devoted will spend a long time, sometimes years, finding the right companion for the elephant that will make her feel better.

That kind of dedication just inspired and awed me. And then these elephants will heal each other and stay with each other, provided they’re not taken away by their owners, for the rest of their lives. They will often then mediate, let’s say, the sufferings of a fearful elephant’s relationship with the rest of the herd, or the outside world.

I just came away from it feeling like human therapists and psychiatrists and social workers are well and good, but some of the best healers I’ve ever seen have turned out to be elephants – and even bonobos.

So what lessons do you think the treatment of these animals’ mental illnesses can teach us about treating humans?

LB: First of all, nearly everything we know about treating mental illness in humans stems from studies we’ve done on other animals. So that includes every psychopharmaceutical that’s available, which exists because it relaxed or made less anxious or psychotic another animal in the 1950s. How we think about infants – that they need more than food and good hygiene in order to thrive; that they also need affection – that came out of monkey studies.  The idea of emotional resilience in the wake of trauma? Pavlov’s studies with dogs were really fundamental in the making of those ideas. So in many ways everything we already do know, we know from other animals.

In terms of what I saw, I really think we can borrow so much from veterinary medicine when it comes to treating emotional problems. When you bring another creature to the vet, their first response isn’t to reach for the prescription pad; rather, they’ll ask you about that animal’s life. I think that’s huge. Oftentimes, at least in the United States, when you appear at your nurse practitioner’s or your doctor’s office, you get a prescription first. Also, we really do think about other animals as a product of their environment, which is really useful when it comes to improving their emotional health. So that’s one thing I wish we could borrow.

The vet will ask you what kind of kibble your dog’s eating, and how much exercise it gets. Your psychiatrist doesn’t necessarily ask you those questions. Those are important questions! If you could ask a dog about what its puppyhood was like and whether its mother was nice, that would probably be important information, too. But they can’t tell you.

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Animal Madness is out now through Scribe.

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Chad Parkhill is a Melbourne-based writer and editor. He has written for  The Australian, The Lifted Brow, Killings (the blog of Kill Your Darlings), Meanjin and The Quietus, and tweets from @ChadParkhill