Just wondering if there are any service dog handlers on here? I would love to have a psychiatric service dog but I don’t think I have enough time to put into training a puppy from the start and I definitely don’t have the funds available to purchase a already trained service dog. Maybe one day though, I can hope right?
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My electrophysiologist wants me to get a service dog, but I didn’t want to. Now that I’ve lived with dogs for a year I’m more inclined to, though. I think if I could get one already trained it would be worth it.
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The only psychiatric service dog I’ve seen is for veterans with PTSD. They wake them up when they’re having nightmares, etc. Usually labradors and retrievers are used for this, whereas, say an autistic child might have a German Shepherd as a working dog. Have seen that in person and talked to this random stranger about it. I made sure to steer clear of the dog, but the GSD just herded the child and stood guard.
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They’re crazy expensive. The place I was looking at wanted you to come up with $9800 before being placed on the waiting list which was 1-2 years long. I suppose if you could fundraiser the money it might be feasible.
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@anon40540444 they can be used for more than just PTSD as well. They can be trained to ground you if you suffer from disassociation and various other things. They can even be trained to alert an oncoming panic attack or anxiety attack.
How about that. I didn’t know that.
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My dog that my parents now have I trained as a puppy to “touch” my leg with his paw whenever I started to check out or disassociate. I found it super helpful. He was a smart German Shephard.
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GSDs are awesome. They are routinely cited as the most well-rounded dog, when considering all the roles they can fulfill and the traits of the breed. I was working security at this dump one day some years ago, the the police department came through the site with 2 GSDs as they looked for a suspect for something late at night. These two were on leashes and the two huge cops looked like they were struggling to contain the dogs. I’ll never forget the look one of them gave me. Like I was its next meal. Very intimidating. I’ve seen videos of GSDs taking down suspects. Like a brown heat-seeking missile.
having a service dog would be nice i think too… but it’s expensive yea… but you can sure hope yea =) i hope with you.
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I worked with a girl who uad a service dog. The dog would help her with mobility issues similar to a crutch, but also kept her from running into traffic, and alerted people about 30 seconds before she had a seizure. That was really cool. Saved her life a few times because we could rush over and help her lay down comfortably instead of falling.
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