LB: I was doing something completely different but I had gone to graduate school for history of science at MIT. I had originally gone there to do research on the aquarium fishery in the Amazon basin. But I had a dog at the time, my partner and I had adopted a Burnese Mountain Dog. And he was fine for the first six months and then he went spectacularly crazy. He developed a debilitating case of separation anxiety. If we left him alone he would destroy himself, the house, anything in the way. He nearly killed himself at least once. So I had to take him to the vet hospital after he jumped out of our 4th floor apartment, and they said I had to take him to a veterinary behaviorist who would give him a prescription for Prozac and Valium. I was stopped in my tracks. I had heard there were some animals taking these drugs, but I never thought of myself as the kind of person who would put an animal on Prozac. But I found myself in a desperate situation with a 120 pound dog and I tried all these things and they didn’t work, so I became that person that puts her dog on antidepressants. Prozac didn’t work for him really, but the Valium did, at least in the short term. And I began to get curious about how these drugs got into vet clinics in the first place and if there was something to this. Was my dog responding to these drugs in the some of the same ways that people do?

I ended up switching what I was studying because I couldn’t find anything written about the history of this. My PhD research is now the story of what the last 150 years have to tell us about mental illness in other animals. Can they be crazy? Who says they’re crazy? How did the industry around animal mental health come to be? And how do we make other animals feel better? That’s the question that interests me most. Once you notice that another animal is disturbed or anxious– what do we do then? I’ve spent the last few years traveling all over the world to talk to people who are making it their life’s work to help these animals – whether they are elephants or dogs or birds.

MH: We think about this mostly as an issue for domesticated animals or pets, but does the question of animal mental illness and its treatment extend beyond animals that humans are individually responsible for?

LB: Absolutely. This isn’t just a question of captive animals. I get that question a lot. “Well, we know zoo animals can be crazy, and I’m pretty sure that my cat is crazy, but is this just people driving animals insane?” I think that for the most part abnormal behavior in other animals has to do with captivity. But that said, I wouldn’t say that domestic animals are necessarily captive – cats, dogs, etc. wouldn’t exist if they didn’t live with us closely. The natural environment for a cat might be a barn or a house, same with a dog. As most people who live with other animals can attest, you can have two dogs with an identical upbringing in the same house, and one might develop a debilitating fear of vacuum cleaners, and the other could be just fine. This might not have much to do with the environment, and that’s where personality and individual difference come in. We see that in people all the time, you can have two people exposed to the same event, and it could haunt one person and not the other. It’s a pan-animal sort of mystery: Why some of us are more susceptible to certain experiences than others, and what are our triggers. It extends far beyond the human species. It’s not just humans driving other animals crazy, they are more than capable of doing it themselves.

When it comes to free-living animals, it’s obviously harder to tell, precisely because in order for us to notice abnormal behavior we have to have a normal baseline. If we’re not living with a free-ranging creature, we’re not going to know when their behavior becomes say obsessive compulsive. That being said, there are traces all over the place. The behaviorist Mark Bekoff has written about a possibly bipolar wolf, I’ve spoken to an orca researcher who has noted oddly behaving whales over a long course of study. One place where I’m looking at this particularly is in the context of dolphins and whales. Ideas about mental illness pop up again and again in the popular imagination when seemingly healthy dolphins and whales beach themselves. It’s called mass-stranding and it happens all the time. For at least 100 years these strandings have often been described as mass suicides because that’s what they look like. You can have hundreds of dolphins coming up on shore for a variety of reasons, often because they are ill or injured but not always. These are very self-aware creatures, and I don’t think we can rule out that they don’t know they’re killing themselves. Some of the necropsies on these animals have shown that only a few in a pod are ill or injured, so what’s going on with all the others? Is that suicide? That is only one example of abnormal behavior in the non-human animal kingdom that looks a lot like human mental illness but they are many more. Obviously some of these things are mysteries we will never know the answers to, but I don’t think that makes them any less interesting to pursue.