My sister, who is a few weeks away from being a registered RN told the following story about a very Good Boy.
A patient with schizophrenia suffered from periodic hallucinations of people who weren't there. He got himself a service dog, and one of the service dog's chores was to go up and greet people on command.
So: if the dog went up to greet a person, the person was real. And if the dog did not greet a person when commanded, the person was a hallucination.
@ergative … but after 5 years the dog began to show schizophrenic symptoms resulting from repeated commands to greet people who weren't there and needed its own service dog to help with this.
Oh, thank you for sharing that! I wonder if that's the source of the story my sister told. It wasn't one of her own patients, but related by her trainer when she was on psych rotation training. This video is several weeks old; maybe the trainer saw it, and shared it with the students.
(Or maybe it's actually a standard task of psychiatric service dogs.)
Anyway, that is a lovely dog doing important work.
@ergative He is a neighbour, very gentle soul. and he is tortured every night by the voices to the point he can't sleep and he tries to argue back at the threatening voices. I feel so sorry for him. If he had a service dog to help him realize the voices weren't real it might calm his nerves.
Not many people spend time with him. I am happy he calls me "friend" but also sad that he has so few.
@ergative These kind of easy solution to really complex problems alsways faszinate me. I think, I never would have so much fantasy to come up with something like that.