A Qualitative Exploration of the Use of Service Dogs in Veterans with Post Traumatic Stress Disorder and Traumatic Brain Injury

Oh yeah, I tried it all. I was on medication, clonazepam, sertraline. I tried virtual reality, I did meditation, I went through the whole regiment.

…everything was a little bit helpful. But the silver bullet was the dog.

Kind of what my therapist said to me was, “27 years in the military and nine different combat tours, this is not something you get over in three weeks of therapy, okay?” He says, “You're going to be with me for a while.” And they call it compound PTSD where it's not just one trauma and people come in and say, “Okay, what's your trauma?” “There's a multitude of traumas that happened, and we had to kind of unpack each one of those, we had to go back to 1983 and Grenada.” “I was 23 years old and jumping into what we thought was a secure airfield and it wasn't and watching people, really for the first time in my life, get mowed down by machine guns.”

I don't require as much medication to sleep at night. I don't require as much medication during the day to keep my symptoms in check.

Earlier on, when I didn't necessarily have the best coping skills, that might be go drink yourself till you pass out and deal with it later kind of deal.

I just started noticing that I was really holding my family back from experiencing things, and if I tried to say I didn't want to do that, my wife didn't understand and I wasn't communicating it well, so it would lead to a fight of, why do I not want to do that?

“… we were trying to check out at the store and my toddler was running around yelling and we're trying to keep him under control and my daughter was yelling.” “I was just sweating, and I lost it. I knew everybody was staring at me, and I didn't realize how loud I was yelling at my kids and my wife grabbed me and told me to go outside.”

I now feel so much more comfortable because I know it's not going to get to that point because I know if I don't catch it in time, this dog is going to catch it before my wife catches it, and we're going to handle it before it gets to that point.

It's different. And then on the other side, as far as the depression and things, it's significantly better. My wife and I discussed this about a month ago… She was worried, knowing how the lockdown, and how the last eight months have gone, she said she was nervous at the thought of not having [de‐identified dog]. She's like, “Having him, I can see you still have things that you work through, but you bounce back a whole lot quicker.”

Just yesterday, we took the kids to the big pumpkin patch place. It changes … You get [de‐identified dog] out of the car, you put his vest on, you walk at … He's not running out in front of you. You walk at his pace. He walks at my pace. The kids walk at his pace.

I feel like there's a lot of things I wouldn't have done if I didn't have her.

And I didn't have any peers. I was 46 years old; I had been in the military for 27 years. There's not that many women to begin with and there weren't that many women of my rank and all of a sudden you throw me into civilian society where an average woman who was 46 years old probably had her career or she raised a family, or she cooked, or she had these nice, wonderful hobbies of which I knew nothing about. I so missed that whole female indoctrination. “I'm not trying to be gender insensitive here but going out for coffee with three females was the most terrifying thing anybody had ever asked me to do because I thought, “I don't have anything worthy to talk about.””

You've really got an effort to make civilian friends and you've got to make an effort to understand the civilian world and why people don't line up in lines correctly. And you do get to just say, “Okay, you've been dropped in Mars, and you've got to adjust because Mars is not going to adjust to you.”

I'd say, it's gotten better. I mean, before I got her, I wasn't very, I don't want to say talkative, but I was more inclined to avoid people. I'd just do the bare minimum out in public, I was never rude or anything, but I wouldn't strike up a conversation with a stranger. But now, it's like an everyday occurrence, because just everyone who sees or feels the need to tell me about dogs they've had in their lives.

I think with her the biggest thing is there's something else to focus on, instead of automatically going, “Well, this place is too busy,” or “This place is too loud.” I can more focus on her than by my panic mode.

So that degree of touch, the tactility of that keeps me grounded, keeps me sound of mind and strong with spirit.

I would say in 95% of cases, that's one less person who's going to commit suicide.

I'm not going into any… I can't think of a single full blown panic attack I've had, since I've had him.

It's definitely for the better. He cheers me up, he brightens my day, he encourages me to go out there and live life. I feel… He's there for me if there's something I want to do, like go and play that disc golf tournament…

What's interesting is I didn't notice it until people started pointing it out, but his eyes never leave you. He's always watching to see where you are.

And he is two and a half years old. And he's a rockstar, he does everything that [the other dog] does and then they even tweaked some things where if [my husband] calls my name from anywhere outside or wherever, [the dog] alerts me that [my husband]'s calling my name. And I could turn around and go find him or he takes me to where [my husband] is. We call him the marriage saver. Because living with a deaf person…

I think it's education about what service dogs really do and why they're important to people who have service dogs, they're not a pet, we're not trying to get over on anything by having a service dog. We need these service dogs to perform tasks for us so that we can live our life with independence and with dignity.

There was that kind of social thing. Everybody had to try to figure out if they had to treat me differently all of a sudden. Like, “Well, are you okay?” I'm the same guy I was last week, you just now know there's a dash 10 code that goes with my diagnosis as opposed to the guy the week before.

“I would encourage there to be some advocacy from providers. I think there should be less of a stigma or maybe should be education about service dogs, that it's a different alternative treatment.” That maybe this is a medical device. This is a durable medical piece of equipment kind of deal. And viewing them as that as opposed to, like we talked about earlier, the other stigma of this is a dog. No, this is a service animal. And actually, we won't refer to her as… She's not a dog, she's a service animal. She might look like a dog, but she's a trained service thing.

I think if someone's open to the option of getting one, they should be able to get one a lot easier than the hoops you have to jump through.

And so, it was like a hope and a prayer, I guess, for lack of a better term. And so, I continued to sit on my computer, and I got on Facebook and was messing around. And then all of a sudden, I got a return email and in the subject line it said, “America's VetDogs.” And I took a really deep breath because I thought, “Man, if they say no to me, I don't know what the next step is.” And so, I open it up and there was one work in that email, and it was the word, “Yes.” That's all they said was yes.

Right, and I'll tell you he was so jealous when I got back with [de‐identified dog] and all the help I had and all the support I had. He's asking me questions because he didn't get that training with his service dog like we get from Leashes of Valor.

But he's trained to recognize, I guess, my little tell‐tale signs of when I'm starting to become anxious, or go to a darker place, and alert me and bring me out of it.

Lack of practical training. You train as you fight, you will fight as you train. When you slack off on the training, they begin to slack as well. Because I'm not out working at the level that I was before, and I have to make a very conscious effort to keep him fresh. I got to go through some exercises, got to do some training, got to do bottom puzzle just to keep his brain working. I have to put him on a leash and walk him in and out of stores or else you lose that skillset. The military folks would understand it as a perishable skill.

I had one guy … Seriously, I watched him walk off of a stage one time and go put his head in the lap of somebody in the front row and I actually stopped the speech and I'm like, “Hey, man. I'm sorry.” He's like, “I'm good” and he's just petting the dog. Afterwards, the guy comes up and he's like, “Sorry for hijacking your dog.” I'm like, “No worries. What do you got going on in your life?” He goes, “What do you mean?” I go, “He wouldn't do that if he didn't sense something's going on.” The guy started crying. He says, “I lost my mom two days ago.” I go, “That's his gift.” I don't know how the trainers encouraged that or figured that one out, but they did with him and he's the perfect animal for the life that I've been given.

The challenge lies in the fact that there are some that order papers off the internet where they try to train their own dog to become a service dog. That usually doesn't work. Also, as a senior executive in the VA, I found repeatedly I had troubles with service dogs that were not appropriate for the medical, for any environment. I had to have my police remove some of these dogs from the premises and their owners, of course, because they were barking, and they were biting and defecating and other things that just don't happen…