For veterans with Post Traumatic Stress Disorder, animals are service animals and not emotional support animals, according to a recent study.
Over the past decade, the research group has been studying whether trained service dogs can help veterans with PTSD, a mental health condition that some people develop after experiencing a traumatic event. The first and largest clinical trial of its kind, which assesses this complementary intervention, builds on years of preliminary findings.
The study followed 156 post-9/11 veterans from the waitlist of K9s For Warriors, a nonprofit that matches trained service dogs with veterans who have PTSD. Of that total, 81 received service dogs, and 75 remained on the waitlist throughout the three-month study. Most had been deployed and had served in the Army, three-quarters identified as male, and the average age was 38 years old.
All veterans initially completed online surveys about their well-being and were interviewed about their PTSD symptoms by expert clinicians. Researchers followed up with the participants three months after they either got a service dog or remained on the waitlist.
Those with service dogs had less severe symptoms and better quality of life. For example, they had milder depression and anxiety and better moods. They also had significantly lower odds of still meeting the diagnostic criteria for PTSD.
These results provide the most definitive evidence to date that service dogs are more than just pets. These findings suggest that partnerships with these trained animals can yield lifesaving benefits for current and former service members.
PTSD Treatments
Most medical conditions have specific, proven treatments. If you have cancer, you probably need to take chemotherapy drugs. If you’re fatigued and irritable, you need sleep.
Post Traumatic Stress Disorder does not fall into this category. This mental disease dates back to ancient times. Yet, in all this time, no one has developed a specific, proven treatment for PTSD. That’s probably because scientists have only recently come to understand the true nature of PTSD. More on that below.
Current PTSD treatments are hit or miss. These treatments involve some combination of drugs and therapy. Not every combination works for everyone. Sometimes, no combination works at all. That’s especially true if the victim developed comorbid PTSD.
PTSD symptoms are so severe that many people use drugs or alcohol to self-medicate. This approach often works in the short term. Alcohol and drugs are basically tranquilizers. People who overuse them usually do not feel anything. However, in the long term, the self-medication approach is unsustainable. Eventually, science cannot cure these victims’ bodies and/or minds.
Drugs prescribed for PTSD are mostly anti-anxiety drugs or antidepressants. These drugs address some PTSD symptoms but do not address others, such as nightmares and flashbacks. Furthermore, these medicines do not affect the chemical imbalance that causes PTSD. Additionally, the FDA has not approved any new PTSD drugs in over ten years.
Experimental drugs, mostly hallucinogens like MDMA (molly), have shown some promise, but right now, they are still experimental.
Therapy varies as well. Some people respond to individual therapy. Individual therapists help people identify and avoid PTSD triggers. Group therapy is effective in many cases as well. Group therapy reminds PTSD victims that they are not alone and they need not suffer alone.
Innovative therapy, like art therapy, touches some lives as well. Art and music could fill the void that occurs after patients get a handle on their PTSD. But they aren’t particularly effective in extreme cases.
For PTSD patients, animals are somewhere between emotional support animals and service animals. They are not specially trained, but they do more than help PTSD patients feel good.
The Science of PTSD
For many years, doctors treated PTSD like it was a nervous condition or a run-of-the-mill brain injury. Anti-anxiety drugs address nervousness, and many doctors believed that rest and hydration effectively treated brain injuries. Some doctors still believe that.
The truth is that PTSD is a unique kind of brain injury that is created by a stress-induced chemical imbalance in the brain. Combat situations are extremely stressful, to say the least. That is especially true if, as is usually the case, the victim was bored to death in a convoy at 11:01, and then in a firefight struggling to stay alive at 11:02.
Extreme stress enlarges the amygdala (part of the brain that controls emotional responses). Because of this enlargement, the hippocampus (logical responses) shrinks. The resulting imbalance causes symptoms like:
- Depression,
- Hypervigilance,
- Anger,
- Moodswings, and
- Flashbacks.
If I go to a morning meeting, my amygdala prompts me to eat as many doughnuts as I want. My hippocampus prompts me to skip the doughnuts altogether, so I compromise and eat one, or maybe two.
If my hippocampus cannot keep my amygdala in check, I might eat the whole box. Obviously, in the case of a brain injury like PTSD, a lot more is at stake than a possible upset stomach. Extreme PTSD symptoms include suicidal thoughts. Since 9/11, more than 30,000 active-duty service members or veterans of the post-9/11 wars have taken their own lives. That’s more than four times the number of those who have died in combat.
Injury Compensation Available
Brain injuries like PTSD create direct and indirect expenses. They are costly to treat, and in many cases, the aforementioned symptoms are disabling or fatal.
A Defense Base Act lawyer can obtain financial benefits that cover all reasonably necessary medical expenses. These expenses include:
- Transportation costs,
- Emergency care,
- Follow-up care,
- Physical therapy, including PTSD therapy, and
- Prescription drugs and other ancillary medical costs.
Usually, a Defense Base Act lawyer partners with an independent doctor to establish the reasonable and necessary components. All too frequently, insurance adjusters mistakenly believe that “reasonably necessary” means the same thing as “cheapest available.”
A lawyer must also prove the PTSD was deployment-related. Civilian stress, like a car crash, could contribute to PTSD. But there’s a difference between a substantial cause and a contributing cause. Many factors contributed to 9/11, but al-Qaeda terrorists substantially caused it.
DBA benefits also replace lost wages. Most victims receive two-thirds of their average weekly wage (AWW) for the duration of their temporary or permanent disabilities.
The line between a temporary and permanent disability is often hard to draw in PTSD cases. Many doctors claim that victims reach MMI (maximum medical improvement) while they still have symptoms. A lawyer advocates for victims so the therapy money keeps flowing or so they’re eligible for permanent disability benefits.
For more information about the DBA process, contact Barnett, Lerner, Karsen, Frankel & Castro, P.A.