Doctor dog
Animals help psychiatric patients get through to “our” world, says the young psychiatrist behind the Animal Angels Foundation.
He was sitting in the window and just staring at the garden,” says Rohini Fernandes, a clinical psychologist, about an adult patient she met in a psychiatric ward while working on her master’s degree. After failing to get a response during their first few sessions, she says, “I started telling him about a stray dog I used to feed,” who was sometimes visible from the hospital window.
“Suddenly, he said that he had a German Shepherd as a kid,” Fernandes says. He told her about the tree near his childhood garden, and that it once held a baby bird in a nest. At the next session, she found that he had done her a drawing of his dog. “The bond grew,” she says. “Talking about animals helped him open up,” so that therapy could proceed.
She thought: “If only I had dogs with me from the start! Why waste sessions?”
Fernandes has “been crazy about animals ever since I can remember”. Since 2001, even as she studied psychiatry, she had been training other people’s dogs. Internet searching led her to animal-assisted therapy (AAT). She went off to study AAT for a year at the University of North Texas, USA.
In 2005 she founded Animal Angels Foundation, to use dogs to help treat humans. Her first employee was her pet Angel, a sweet-tempered female Golden Retriever who lent her name to the organisation. Now aged seven, she is still working.
“A few months after I started,” Fernandes says, “I took Angel to work with a private client.” The child’s psychiatrist was a young professional named Radhika Nair. Nair stayed to observe, and then she went into partnership with Fernandes.
Now, Animal Angels has 20 dogs (and two psychiatrists, and a team of volunteers). The dogs are family pets, Fernandes explains, not full-timers. People who think their dog “has what it takes” contact the Foundation. Fernandes and Nair test the dogs, and if they seem temperamentally suited to working with disabled people, they register and train them. They are taken to see clients “often”, but “not more than three times a week and not more than two and a half hours at a time”. Since the dogs live in different parts of Mumbai, Fernandes and Nair are able to pick up and take along the nearest animal who is suitable for the client — individual or group — in the same area. “It is one animal in a session,” Fernandes says. “More than one, and the dogs play with each other.”
For young clients, they take along young and active dogs. For adult groups, they take bigger, older dogs. For single adults they take calm, small dogs, like a pug, which an adult can “put in the lap, cuddle and talk to”. Most dogs on their rolls are Labradors and Retrievers, but there are also a Pomeranian and a Rottweiler.
“I tested the Rottweiler,” Fernandes says. “It involves rough petting, putting my hand in her mouth, pulling her ears and tail. She was very comfortable. Therapy dogs never get angry. If they are unhappy they are trained to walk away and sit.”
“The dog owners are very happy that their dogs are going and helping,” she says. “They see how excited the dogs get. [The dogs] don’t even say ‘bye’ when we come to pick them up. Our dogs love work because for them it is playing, getting brushed, eating biscuits. Angel is ready from morning when she knows she has to go.” In the summer holidays, Fernandes says, she gets calls from owners who say their dog is “standing at the door waiting for work. One dog won’t eat until she sees our car. Sometimes we have to phone and tell her to eat!”
The dogs work with three kinds of people: children with special needs, including autism, Down’s syndrome, emotional and behaviour problems; adults; and senior citizens. Fernandes gives an example. “One nine-year-old child has severe autism. There was no contact, she was spinning in circles, banging her head on the wall, hyperactive. Her teachers said she was intelligent but they couldn’t get through to her.” Fernandes took along Casper, an active male Labrador. “At first she just watched. Then slowly she started coming and doing things on her own. She started getting interested and goal-directed. She would take and throw a ball, she was verbalising, asking for a biscuit to give, or for the ball. She started socialising with other children, realised that it was fun.”
“Children see animals as their peers,” Fernandes says. “She was able to get from her world to our world through a dog.” But she cautions that AAT is “a complementary therapy”, it has to be used alongside clinical therapy. “Animals can help a child open up, make an adult pay attention to the present.”