Can a squirrel be schizophrenic? Can a panther suffer from clinical depression? Can a badger be psychotic?
I have found a couple of old threads on this but the discussion is anecdotes about domesticated animals/pets or wild animals in captivity exhibiting symptoms of various types of environmental stressors that would generally not occur in the wild (e.g., dogs with separation anxiety, deliberate social isolation of monkeys).
I am interested in whether there is any scholarly study on this on wild animals in their natural environments.
It’s certainly a very difficult question. It’s hard enough to diagnose mental illnesses in humans, where we can talk to both the patient and to a large baseline control of people without the disease. And in some cases, the same trait that’s considered a disorder in humans might be a healthy normal in some other species.
The problem with animal models of neuropsychiatric disease is as noted:
neuropsychiatric disorders, including schizophrenia, include symptoms such as paranoid delusions and auditory hallucinations that are uniquely human and make interpretation of results obtained from animal models more difficult
Long ago, after getting married we lived in a small ground floor efficiency apartment. Squirrels would come visit the little patio outside the broom closet we lived in. Squirrels would come by looking for windblown bits of things that interested squirrels. One of them we nicknamed ‘Psycho Squirrel’. He showed signs of squirrel mental illness, never playing squirrel games with the others. While the other squirrels would hop up on the railing and engage in something resembling musical chairs trying to get the prime spot he’d leap on the stucco wall and scramble up, leap off, run to and fro before returning to the wall for his own off looking dance. The other squirrels didn’t care at all about the pigeons joining in the fun while Psycho Squirrel would freak out and spin around repeatedly when they came, then flee and return shortly after to get back to his weird wall climbing behavior.
Maybe he had a physical disorder of some kind, or maybe he was tetched in the head. But squirrel psychologists charging who knows how many acorns for a 50 minute session would definitely say he was demonstrating an unusual and inappropriate affect.
We have a cat who suffers from some OCD style disorder, compulsively grooming her belly bald of hair and a spot on her throat that she rubs on boxes. Veterinarian couldn’t find any physical issues (skin conditions, parasites, etc) and said we could try “Cat Prozac” but we figured that wrestling a pill down the cat daily was unlikely to help her state of mind. So right now it’s more ointments to keep her skin from getting gnarly.
I suppose that the existence of feline psychiatric drugs is answer itself to whether or not animals can suffer these maladies.
Edited apologies, I missed the past about mainly being interested in wild environments
Even if animals experience profound mental illnesses, would those individuals be able to survive if they were not able to provide for themselves and contribute to the group? Would other members of the species sustain them - especially if the manifestations of their illnesses were antisocial?
Just saying, if animals in the wild experience mental illness - and die (or are killed) relatively quickly as a result, that might make it more difficult to observe such illnessess.
Also, don’t at least some mental illnesses in humans - such as PTSD - result from adverse experiences? It is not uncommon to encounter dogs that have been mistreated who cower or nip. Is that more or less of a “mental illness” than a human whose behavior is adversely affected by their experiences?
Wikipedia has a lengthy article on the topic. The article goes into a fair amount of depth about different types of disorders and also discusses the difficulties involved in the study of mental issues in wild animals. There are a lot of scientific cites at the bottom of the article.
The article discusses both wild and captive/domesticated animals.
Rapidly, having removed most of my post as off topic: but try changing her diet if you haven’t already. I had a similar case that turned out to be an allergy, apparently to something only intermittently in some brands of food.
My first thought upon reading the OP was “Puppy Prozac is a thing”
I, for one, think humans vastly overestimate the degree to which their minds are uniquely human. I believe that other sentient beings (I.e. other mammals, along with whales and crows) experience the entire panoply of human emotions, and are at risk of mental disorders just like us.
Just one data point, albeit an odd one.
There was this woman who bonded with a dolphin in the 60s, as part of a scientific experiment to try to get it to communicate, including giving it orgasms.
When their relationship ended, the dolphin committed suicide by drowning itself.
At the risk of being pedantic, “mental illness” began as a metaphor. Illnesses are (or originally were) disorders of the body. A brain could be ill, same as a heart or a kidney, but a mind? Only by extension of the notion of illness to an area where health and proper functioning is far less definable and far more riddled with opinion and bias.
There is, of course, the assertion that the psychiatric ailments really are brain illnesses — that they are caused by one or another form of chemical imbalance. But this is not supported by the evidence, as much as the pharmaceutical industry would like us to believe otherwise.
IN SHORT we can’t even state with any real authority that human get mental illnesses. We can say that sometimes people get miserably unhappy to the point of being paralyzed by it, or that we sometimes suffer from cognitive disturbances or mood swings or the combination of the two in ways that render us unable to function, unable to make sense of the world we live in. We can say we see recurrent patterns in this, and we can even show that these disturbances correlate with measurable changes in brain activity. But we also know that they correlate even more strongly with specific types of traumatic experience. So unless being the sole survivor of an ethnic cleansing that erased your town, or being sexually abused by your Dad for eleven years are events precipitated by one’s brain disorders, the phenomena are at least in part socially caused. Perhaps they all are.
It would be more honest to stick with “crazy” or “insane”. “Mental illness” implies a clarity of etiology and prognostication that we simply don’t have.
Extending it to animals, we can say that they get confused and crazy and unstable too.
Obsessive-compulsive disorder, depression, anxiety, grief, dementia, paranoia, and other common neurological maladies or profound emotions resulting from inbred behaviors, severe trauma, social isolation, abandonment, et cetera can be observed in companion animals, including dogs, cats, horses, donkeys, goats, rabbits, and even parrots (despite the fact that birds supposedly don’t have the outdated notion of a ‘limbic system’). The late Jaak Panksepp, a leading researcher in affective neuroscience and emotional responses in animals, observed all seven of the biologically inherited primary affective systems (FEAR, RAGE, LUST, SEEKING, CARE, PANIC/GRIEF, and PLAY) that he identified as primary emotional responses in rats.
While animals cannot answer questions about delusions or hallucinations, they broadly demonstrate the same emotional range (if not depth and ability to communicate their states to us with clear auditory signals or facial expressions), and so it is reasonable to infer that they may experience similar pathologies with regard to abnormal neurological and psychiatric disorders as these are fundamental behaviors that are driven by ‘more primitive’ areas of the brain than the neocortex. Whether they have the same degree of complexity is in question, and of course animals can’t really respond to ‘talk therapy’, cognitive behavioral therapy, or other types of intellectual interpersonal counseling, but at least mammals do respond to drugs like fluoxetine and bupropion, and even some anti-psychotics in ways similar to that of human patients.
I think our 15 year old rescue has that. She can’t remember that if someone is in the garage and she stands right in front of it, then she is going to be hit in the face every time someone opens that door.
I found a dog wandering around the neighborhood, obviously lost. Friendly, with a collar and tags, and well cared for. So i grabbed the collar, and dialed the number on the tag. The owners were a block away looking for him. When they came, they said the dog has wandered off when they let him out to pee. And he looked confused when they took him. Good natured, not averse to getting in the car, but he seemed not to recognize his people.
That’s when i realized that dogs can develop dementia.
Jane Goodall, observer of chimps and author of In The Shadow Of Man, observed and filmed a case of a male chimp who never matured mentally and was overly dependent on his mother. While other chimps, including his sister, eventually stop wanting to have mom carry them everywhere, get their food and do everything for them, he didn’t. There is footage (I’ve seen it) of mom bent under the weight of carrying her fully grown son on her back. When mom died, her son certainly seemed to experience deep depression. He just lay in one spot, looking sad and not even attempting to do anything- even drink water or eat food. His sister tried bringing him food and water. He ended up dying of dehydration or starvation.
Personal Anecdote
When my beloved niece was killed by an impatient driver, both dogs (My sister brought Mugsy when she moved in with Lee Ann. Lee Ann brought Oscar. They were completely unrelated. Other than the fact that Oscar had solid black fur and Mugsy was white with a few brown splotches, they looked identical) showed obvious confusion, fear and eventually sadness. They knew people were acting strangely. They knew Sky should be their in the house and she wasn’t. Eventually, they must have realized that one of their people was gone and not comimg back.
