Elizabeth Horner was four years old when she asked her mother to end her young life. They’d been playing on the living room floor, and she said it almost robotically, as if all the feeling had been sucked out of her.
“I want you to kill me.” Just like that.
Sharon Horner felt her heart tighten. She couldn’t have heard her right. This was her happy girl, the girl she’d just been tickling, the girl who makes friends easily with that winning smile.
She took a breath. Stay calm.
“What did you say, Elizabeth?”
“I want you to kill me.” Same flat delivery.
Sharon was a registered nurse. She knew how to react calmly to emergencies. But nothing had prepared her for her daughter asking her to take her life.
“Oh my gosh, why would I do that? I love you! I want you to be happy!” She managed to say it without sounding like the bottom had dropped out of her world.
A psychiatrist diagnosed Elizabeth with anxiety and depression and prescribed Prozac. It was the beginning of an on-and-off battle with major depression, anxiety, agoraphobia, and what would eventually be diagnosed as bipolar disorder.
Medicine helped sometimes, but often her prescriptions made her feel worse, especially when she was on a few at the same time. During high school, Elizabeth grappled with panic attacks and crippling social anxiety. One time her mother dropped her off at a church event, and Elizabeth wouldn’t let go of the handle of the van as she drove away. Her mother saw her and stopped. She told her she wasn’t letting her back in and that she had to go to the event. By this point, several people were watching. Elizabeth peeled her hand off, her heart racing.
High school was hell. Agoraphobia often prevented her from being able to leave home, and frequent panic attacks prevented her from learning. She ended up homeschooling. By that point, she had eight younger siblings—most of them adopted, and all with special needs. Even with the chaos that could bring, she found it was a better learning atmosphere.
Her mental illness grew more severe as she became a young adult. She was feeling anxious and depressed most of the time, with little hope she would ever be able to live away from her family. She searched online for anything that could help. She was desperate for something good to happen. She wanted to live life, not hide from it. She wanted to be somebody.
It was around this time that a racing greyhound named Gable Sandstorm was having his own difficulties. The sleek seventy-pound brindle was pushing four years old. He had raced 120 times during his career at Tucson Greyhound Park. It wasn’t where the best dogs raced. The really fast dogs usually went to parks with bigger earnings.
Gable Sandstorm had been able to keep his career going for nearly a couple of years. But a look at his racing record showed he was no track star.
“The dog was maybe mediocre. It wasn’t the worst career I’ve seen, but it was far from stellar,” a career greyhound-racing expert we will call Henry told me when he saw Gable Sandstorm’s track record. (Henry didn’t want to go on the record because he was only supposed to be helping me decipher the dog’s racing records, not passing judgment on some poor retiree.)
Greyhounds get an official comment for each race. It’s kind of like a greyhound report card. Here are some comments the track’s chart writers gave Gable during his career. The comments in brackets are mine. (Unlike the report cards of most humans, his charts are available in perpetuity on the internet. Yes, Gable is a sight hound, but it’s probably good that he can’t read.)
Stumbled backstretch
Collided 1st turn
In it Briefly [yes!]
Never in It
No Threat
Held Gamely [good job!]
Not in It
Not a Contender
Couldn’t Keep Up
Always Back
Stmbld Badly Far Tn
Furious Finish, Inside [sweet!]
Not a Factor
Failed to Threaten [who writes these things?]
Faded Off
Not in It
Never Improved
Not in It
“Dogs know when they don’t win,” Henry said. “They see the other dogs running ahead of them. They know they’re not getting that extra biscuit some of the others got, or the huge praise the winner gets. They’ll get an encouraging pat. You’ve got to keep the dog motivated. But it’s not winning.”
Gable Sandstorm had viewed plenty of greyhound heinies in his career. Bringing up the rear was nothing foreign to him. His last two races were no exception. The official comments pulled no punches:
Penultimate race: “Steady Decline.”
Last race of his career: “Not a Contender.”
Ah, the cruel echo of Marlon Brando’s immortal lines.
“I coulda been a contender. I coulda been someone.”
When JoAnn Turnbull looks for a dog to adopt for Rescue to Service, a program within her main service dog training organization, Handi-Dogs, she’s understandably choosy.
She wants to see confidence. The dogs need to be comfortable going to new environments with different sights and sounds, new people, new dogs, big crowds, small groups. They can’t be remotely aggressive and mustn’t be skittish.
She also looks for a work ethic: Will the dogs be motivated to get up when lying down? Some dogs she has trained master tasks quickly, but if they’re snoozing and their person needs them, they just look up as if to say, Ummm, could you please do it yourself? Can’t you see I’m comfortable?
The idea of adopting dogs and making them into service dogs is a noble one. But it’s not so easy to find the right dogs. About half of the dogs JoAnn and her staff adopt from shelters and rescue groups don’t make it. They adopt those dogs out as pets. (The dogs get snapped up because they have excellent temperaments and they’re well trained. They just may not want to be bothered to get your cane when they’re sleeping.)
In the spring of 2015, JoAnn decided to look at an offering from a greyhound rescue group. His name was Wallace. He was a sable greyhound, about seventy pounds, and had recently retired from the track, where his name had been Gable Sandstorm. His foster family thought the name Wallace suited him better.
Wallace met JoAnn’s standards. And he was so calm. Just the guy for someone who needed a rock of a dog. She had a special client in mind.
“What? A greyhound? A greyhound service dog?” Elizabeth said when JoAnn told her. “Aren’t they known for their, um, prey drive?”
Elizabeth had come across several articles about how dogs can assist people with her conditions. She loved the idea of a dog helping her break out of the confines of her house and into the world. No drug had yet been able to do this for an extended period. Could a dog?
She decided to give the Rescue to Service program a try. It was affordable, and she liked the program’s model: She would train and create her own service dog. The price was right, and she’d have something to do—something that really mattered.
After she learned she might get a greyhound, she did some research to make sure they could be good service dogs and she wouldn’t go flying down the street if the dog saw a critter. The website of Greyt Hearts Service Dogs was reassuring:
These dogs are perfectly suited for a life of Service due to the extensive training they have received since birth, their vast exposure at Greyhound racing facilities and the fact that they have a unusually long working life span as opposed to other breeds. Greyhounds are not prone to hip dysplasia, have a very low maintenance coat and do not have a “doggie” odor . . . This makes them quite user friendly and easy for a new dog handler/owner to adapt to. Greyhounds have a calm, quiet nature and bond deeply and quickly to an owner.
She laughed about the delicate “doggie odor” reference. If this dog could get her out of the house and into the world, she wouldn’t care if he smelled like a skunk.
I met Elizabeth and her dog at the Tucson Mall about three years after she got him, and two years after he had passed his Canine Good Citizen test and the public-access test and officially become a service dog through Handi-Dogs.
Elizabeth changed Wallace’s briefly held name to Pippin, after one of the hobbits who accompany Frodo in The Lord of the Rings. Pippin helps Frodo bear the ring at the outset of his journey, and his lighthearted presence ensures a dark story doesn’t get too dark.
Elizabeth has moved out of her childhood home, and she and Pippin are living with a friend and her guide dog. Elizabeth’s anxiety still prevents her from driving, and she still needs her medication, but she says life is “many hundreds of percents better” than it was before Pippin.
If she’s feeling depressed and can’t get out of bed, Pippin gently nudges her in the face with his nose. She’s taking some classes at a community college. Thanks to Pippin, she even makes it to the movies occasionally.
Before she got Pippin, she couldn’t even go grocery shopping without having a panic attack. And now here she was with me at a mall. With loud teens. And children racing around. It was a weekday morning, so it was relatively quiet. But still, she never imagined she’d survive a mall before Pippin.
We walked into Forever 21 and stopped to look at some clothes. Three girls flowed toward us from behind, shrieking with laugher about a boy in their school. Pippin calmly maneuvered himself in back of Elizabeth and leaned slightly into her legs. This is meant to create a barrier as well as give Elizabeth a calming touch. The girls passed. Elizabeth remained calm in her magic invisible Pippin bubble.
She wanted to take Pippin to the Build-a-Bear store. He loves teddy bears; his favorite toy is a small beige bear with a squeaker in its tummy. At the entrance to the store, he paused to survey the fluffy toys, then quickly got to work. If a person walked to Elizabeth’s left, Pippin headed to that side to provide a barrier. Any direction, and he was there. He seemed to choose the areas where more people were. He maneuvered with grace and ease.
“Off to the races!” a shopper shouted, waving from across the store. Elizabeth has heard that plenty. But she laughed because it was probably the first time the guy had said it and she wanted to be polite.
When a store is jammed with people, it can still be too much for her, even with her dog. “Exit,” she’ll say. She knows which stores spike her anxiety and has practiced showing Pippin the exit. At Target, for instance, if she’s ready to hightail it out of there, he’ll lead her to the door. She doesn’t have to think. She just goes along. It helps her thwart a panic attack.
Pippin is a game changer, but he isn’t a magic pill. Sometimes her illness gets the best of both of them. One day, while visiting her family, she took Pippin for a walk. Not long after they left, Pippin came running back alone, his leash trailing. A few seconds later, Elizabeth ran up crying hysterically, talking rapidly about some person she was hearing shouting at her in foreign languages. But there was no person. It was an auditory hallucination. She wouldn’t calm down and had to be hospitalized. That was when she was diagnosed with bipolar disorder.
“It’s heartbreaking,” her mother says. “Pippin can do so much, but he can’t do everything.”
As we walk across the mall’s shiny tile floor toward the exit, Elizabeth extends her arm and touches Pippin. He’s tall and easy to reach. She says it makes her feel safe to be able to feel his warmth and his strength. Pippin now weighs a comfortable eighty pounds, and his haunches are still muscular. I tell her Pippin still looks athletic enough to race.
“Yeah, but the difference is that he doesn’t have to win anymore,” she said, stopping to pet him. “He’s always a winner as far as I’m concerned, aren’t you, Pip?”
Pippin is one of a growing number of dogs trained to help people with mental health issues. Psychiatric service dogs, as they’re often called, are the fourth most common type of service dog in North America, a recent University of California, Davis, study found. They rank after guide dogs for the blind, mobility assistance dogs, and dogs for the hearing impaired.
Every psychiatric service dog performs specific tasks unique to his person’s conditions. Service dogs trained for people with obsessive-compulsive disorder can flag someone to repetitive behaviors with a nudge or a paw. Likewise a dog for someone who engages in self-harm, like cutting, can recognize the behavior and step in to try to put a halt to it with a paw, or a bark, or a nuzzle and request for attention.
Angus, a sweet black Lab, helps his University of Arizona student, Katharine “Kit” Heyser, with her debilitating anxiety. He has a big tool kit of ways to help keep her anxiety from getting out of control. Angus is a well-behaved boy (except for an endearing squirrel obsession), so when he’s pawing at Kit or tugging at the leash or just not listening, she checks in with herself to see if trouble is brewing. It usually is. Then they work together to help her out of it.
I watched Angus guide Kit to the exit of a store on campus when she asked him to help her leave. He didn’t take the most direct route, but he did an impressive job. He also practices intelligent disobedience by getting Kit’s attention—sometimes by misbehaving—to distract her from rising anxiety.
“Having a dog like Angus has truly changed my life,” Kit told me. “I am a different person because of him. He has helped me realize that I have a purpose to my life and need for a career to do some sort of animal-assisted therapy to help give back. It has made me more aware of the impact animals make on a person’s life and how truly special that can be.”
Skilled psychiatric service dogs like Angus and Pippin aren’t the only ones who can help people with mental health. Our good old pet dogs have been doing this all along.
Anyone who has ever loved a dog treasures the incomparable bond, the best friend who’s there through hard times, the understanding listener who doesn’t judge, the fun soul who brings smiles and laughter, and, most of all, the unconditional love (a term you have come across a few times already in this book). Writer Edith Wharton put it succinctly in one of her lyrical epigrams in the Yale Review in 1920:
My little dog:
A heart-beat
At my feet.
For people suffering from mental illness, that heartbeat may be the only one regularly in their lives. Science has been examining this relationship closely in recent years.
A study published in BMC Psychiatry in 2016 concluded that “pets should be considered a main rather than a marginal source of support in the management of long-term mental health problems . . .” When the authors asked people with serious mental illness such as schizophrenia and bipolar disorder who or what helped them manage their mental health, many responded that it was their pets (not just dogs but also cats, hamsters, birds, and guinea pigs).
That same study noted that pets can distract their people from “symptoms of schizophrenia such as hearing voices, from suicidal ideation or from a general sense of feeling alone,” and that “pets often introduced a source of humour into difficult situations and were often the only thing that could lift participants’ spirits.”
A 2018 paper in the same journal reviewed seventeen studies on the role of companion animals in helping manage mental illness. The authors wrote that participants felt their pets were “a consistent source of comfort and affection. This constant presence meant that this provision was available instantaneously without request.”
Thanks to their pets, many of the people in these studies had reduced feelings of loneliness, isolation, irritability, and depression. Pets decreased worry and rumination about their illnesses, and increased chances for sociability.
In one of the studies in the review, people said they felt they needed less medication because of the effect their pets had on them—not that anyone is recommending taking less medication because of a pet, but it’s an intriguing self-assessment that could warrant further study. And here’s a hopeful explanation from the 2018 paper of how meaningful these companions can be to those with mental illness:
Pets provided their owners with a sense of purpose and gave meaning to their lives. Often participants described how this had been diminished since diagnosis with a mental health condition but that pets helped them to overcome this and provided them with a platform for going forward with their lives. This sense of meaning and purpose included pets giving their owners a reason to live, to contributing to a sense of control and empowerment and giving individuals hope for the future.
Of course, pets aren’t the answer for everyone with mental illness. The burden of caring for a pet can be too much for some. Pets can impact people financially, and the time commitment can be overwhelming. The potential or actual death of a pet was cited as being “a major source of distress” (as it is for most people without mental illness). But memories could still bring them joy.
In the studies, pets were often perceived to have a “sense” of when someone needed calming or emotional support and responded “in an intuitive way, especially in times of crisis and periods of active symptoms.”
If you’ve had a dog, you’ve probably experienced this. Dogs seem to have an uncanny ability to know when something is wrong. They know us so well. They inhabit our routines, they watch our expressions and read our body language, they become accustomed to a normal tone of voice. When any—or all—of the above go out of whack, dogs can sense it.
In my book Soldier Dogs, I wrote about a big German shepherd named Rex. During downtime in Iraq, the military working dog always seemed to know who needed him the most, and he’d bring them his favorite toy—an empty water bottle—to crunch or toss around with him. The training manager for the Department of Defense Military Working Dog program told me he thought this kind of seemingly comforting behavior isn’t so much that the dog is trying to make people feel better, but that the dog is trying to have everything become “normal” again.
That may sometimes be the case, but it doesn’t really explain the dog who isn’t normally affectionate but immediately snuggles into someone’s side when they’re feeling sick or beaten by the world. Or the dog who walks into a room of children and seems to know which child is having difficulty, and lies down at his feet, or tries to get him to play. Next thing you know, everyone’s doing a little better.
Are sight and sound the only ways dogs get their signals about our state of mind? Could their sense of smell be part of it? Can dogs smell how we feel?
To help answer this, let’s head to the refrigerator of Dr. Cattet at the Indianapolis headquarters of Medical Mutts. You won’t find eggs, milk, or leftover pizza. This fridge is stocked with emotions.
If you riffle around, you’ll find tins of anxiety, panic, fear, anger, and relaxation. Or, more accurately, tins containing cotton balls that have been swabbed on the foreheads and necks of people experiencing these states. They’re among containers with the scent of diabetic hypoglycemia as well as the scent of people having seizures, which you read about earlier in the book.
The tins of emotions are in plastic bags, which are stored in sealed bins to minimize cross-contamination. These scents are normally kept in the freezer, and only thawed in the fridge when the trainers are actively working with dogs.
These literal emotional meltdowns are happening more frequently, as more people with PTSD and anxiety come to Medical Mutts for psychiatric service dogs. The organization uses scent to train all its psychiatric service dogs. The dogs are first trained with samples from a variety of other people; then in the final couple of months with scents from their future person.
Can dogs really distinguish between a “crisis” sample and a “normal” sample?
“At this point,” Dr. Cattet says, “they have clearly shown that they can tell the difference between the smell of a person having an anxiety attack or even anger and the smell of the same person in a relaxed, normal state of mind.”
Dr. Cattet would like to collaborate with a university group to do a study on dogs sensing mental states via olfaction. It would be groundbreaking research, although a couple of related studies from groups in Italy have already been published.
One study in Behavioural Brain Research with the title “The Nose ‘KNOWS’ Fear” found that fear body odors or “chemosignals” from humans made dogs appear more stressed than a control condition and increased their heart rates. In other words, the researchers from the University of Bari found that dogs can smell fear—something people who work with dogs in military and police settings have often assumed.*
Researchers from the University of Naples later looked at whether dogs can smell human emotion. They started with the premise that body odors can carry clues about emotional states and other information from one person to another. We’re not overtly aware of this level of communication since it’s “below the threshold of consciousness,” notes the 2018 paper in the journal Animal Cognition. “Nevertheless, such transmission induces in the receiver a partial affective, behavioral, perceptual, and neural reproduction of the state of the sender.”
The study concluded that dogs could distinguish happy and fearful human states purely by smell. The researchers saw a long evolutionary story: “The fact that the oldest sensory system is tuned across these two species may suggest that the specific biochemical signature of chemosignals has remained a relatively invariable carrier of information that . . . remains a major medium of interspecies communication.”
Maybe at some point dogs can help researchers find a better way of diagnosing, much as they’re doing with cancer. In the meantime it’s heartening to realize that dogs probably use their eyes, ears, and noses in their quest to figure out what’s going on inside of us.
When dealing with cases of severe mental illness, it helps to use every tool at their disposal . . .
The voices started when Molly Wilson was six years old. At first they were quiet—a distracting breeze swirling around her head. They whispered or seemed far away, but she could usually make out what they were saying. They called her names. They said she was worthless. They didn’t like her and they said no one else did either.
She tried to ignore them. She put her hands over her ears. But nothing would silence the voices. At home, in school, they were always there. She was ashamed of what they were telling her about herself, so she didn’t mention them to anyone.
Over the years the voices grew louder, more invasive. She heard them as if they were coming through headphones she couldn’t remove. There were usually three voices: a man, a woman, and a child. The man was the most intense and brutal. His voice was grating and full of hate. He usually yelled or screamed. The woman came and went. The child ridiculed her. Sometimes strange noises added to the cacophony.
The ugly chorus convinced her that her mother, father, sister, and brother lied to her when they told her they loved her. That her friends thought she was ridiculous. That they’d all be better off without her. They told her to hurt herself. They told her to kill herself.
At school she somehow managed to keep up her grades. She was well liked and had several close friends. At home Molly was anxious and angry. Her parents had her see a counselor for her anxiety, but she still didn’t reveal anything about the voices. When she was about ten, she became panicky that someone was going to break into the house at night and kill her. She would lock her bedroom door and sleep with her light and TV on. She developed other phobias, like an extreme fear of needles—a common enough phobia, but she wasn’t scared of the needles themselves; she was afraid she would be injected with something other than a vaccine or medicine. Something that would poison her.
Around sixth grade a man wearing a fedora and brown trench coat began following her. He seemed to have no face; it was always in shadow. He came back every day, sometimes joined by a roomful of others. They all seemed mentally ill and they scared her, but the man in the fedora was the one she dreaded the most. He carried a knife and threatened her. One day he stabbed her and she fell on the ground, writhing in pain and fear.
When she was fifteen, she broke down and told a friend about the voices and the man in the hat. The friend convinced her to tell her parents. On October 26, 2014, Molly wrote a two-page letter and left it on her mother’s pillow. She told her about the nightmare she had been keeping secret for nearly a decade. She confessed that she had been cutting herself since she was eleven. She explained that cutting seemed to get rid of the voices, at least for a while. She had cuts on her thighs and hips, and a few on her arms, but she had stopped cutting her arms a while back because the scars were too obvious. She had worn longer sleeves even in warm weather so no one would see.
Molly’s mother, Melanie, felt like she’d been punched in the gut. Not only was she heartbroken for Molly; she was also livid at herself for having no clue of her daughter’s secret hell. She and her husband sought emergency help for Molly. Three days later, Molly began an eighteen-day stay at an acute-care psychiatric inpatient facility ninety minutes away, in Wilmington, North Carolina. She was diagnosed with bipolar disorder with unspecified psychosis. Her family visited her every day. They wanted to show her the voices were as wrong as could be.
On her first night back home, the man with the fedora blocked the door of her bedroom and she couldn’t get out. When she finally escaped, she refused to go back into her room. She started sleeping on the couch right outside her parents’ bedroom.
She didn’t sleep alone. Guarding Molly was the young ninety-pound black Lab mix they’d recently adopted. They’d had three smaller dogs at the time, but Molly was smitten when she met Hank. He needed a home, so he joined the family.
Every night Molly slept on the couch, and Hank slept curled up in a tight ball at her feet. He worried and paced when she left the house and celebrated with dancing paws when she returned. She wouldn’t go into her room to get clothes or supplies unless Hank was flanking her. She said she felt better with Hank there to protect her.
School wasn’t going well. The man in the fedora was showing up and tapping his knife on a desk in her classrooms. It was distracting and terrifying. Her parents wished she could take Hank to school, but he was no service dog, just a pet.
Psychiatrists tinkered with her medications, but the man wouldn’t leave. It got so bad that she asked to be readmitted to the hospital. This time, she stayed for fifteen days. Doctors diagnosed her with “schizoaffective disorder/severe depressive type”—a double whammy of schizophrenia and severe depression.
Her parents—desperate to help their girl—noticed that she didn’t have hallucinations when she was around horses. The closest equine therapy program was three hours away from their home in Swansboro, North Carolina, so they got her a horse. Melanie had grown up with horses, and Molly had been taking riding lessons for years and had always wanted a horse. It was a financial stretch, but if a horse could help keep the bad guys away even for a while, it was worth the investment.
On May 1, 2015, Melanie left her schoolteaching job to be with Molly and manage her care. They spent their days going to the barn and working with her horse, going to Molly’s appointments, and hanging out.
On May 17, Melanie and Molly watched a couple of movies and had some laughs. Her brother needed a ride to baseball practice. Molly didn’t want to go, so Melanie left her with her sister since Molly seemed in good spirits. When Melanie got home, she was fixing lunch and saw Molly walk downstairs and go into another room for a few minutes. Molly emerged, smiling, a few minutes later and walked back upstairs to her room.
Melanie finished preparing lunch and went up to Molly’s room to let her know lunch was ready. Molly was resting. Melanie knew she hadn’t slept the night before, so she quietly told her she could get her lunch when she woke up from her nap.
When Melanie got back downstairs, she saw she had missed three calls. They were from Molly’s best friend. Then a text popped up: “You need to check on Molly. She really needs you.”
Melanie wrote back: “I just saw her and Molly’s fine.”
The phone rang.
“Mrs. Wilson—I think Molly may have taken too much medicine.”
She rushed to Molly’s room. Ten minutes had passed since she took the medicine, if her friend was right.
“Molly!”
Molly’s eyes were glassy.
“What did you take, Molly? Honey? What did you do?”
Molly slurred her words: “Please let me die. Please.”
For the next awful few minutes the universe seemed to be answering Molly’s wishes. In something that’s usually reserved for nightmares, Melanie dialed 9-1-1 five times and the call wouldn’t go through. She ran to her neighbor, who couldn’t reach 9-1-1 either. Finally a call succeeded and the ambulance came. It had been more than a half hour, maybe forty minutes, since Molly had taken the medicine. They’d later learn that Molly had taken a large dose of Amitriptyline, which she used for her depression, and 400 mg—a half bottle—of Zyprexa, a drug for schizophrenia. Her normal dose was 10 mg.
Molly had a seizure in the ambulance, another in the emergency room. She was airlifted from the hospital to the nearest pediatric intensive care unit. She stayed for five harrowing days.
She would end up spending the next six months in a residential behavioral health center in Louisville, Tennessee. Melanie had looked all over the country for a facility that didn’t feel like a hospital* or a juvenile detention center and had a doctor who specialized in schizophrenia. At Village Behavioral Health, the patients stayed in cabins and participated in healthy outdoor activities. It was the best setup for Molly, but it was eight hours from their home.
Melanie rented an apartment near Molly so she would never feel abandoned. She brought Molly’s brother and Hank. The hallucinations weren’t going to win.
The center allowed only short visits at first, so Melanie had plenty of time to try to come up with a plan for when Molly came home. Life had to be better for Molly—for everyone. The doctors would take care of her medications, and there would be counseling. But she was desperate for something else that could make life more manageable for her daughter.
“We will never give up on you,” Melanie told her during a visit when Molly was feeling hopeless. “Everyone misses you, including Hank. We can’t wait till you’re home.”
Hank! Why hadn’t this occurred to her before? If he was her service dog, he could help her navigate the world when she came home. Molly wanted to return to high school. Maybe Hank could give her the stability she needed. He’d already shown himself to be a loyal, steady friend. Melanie was sure he’d be a great service dog if she could just find someone who could help train him.
Then again, how could a dog help Molly with her hallucinations if her new medicines weren’t working? How do you get a dog to stop your daughter from slashing the flesh of her arms? Would Hank be a match for the fedora man and all the people with no faces and all the hateful voices? He was just a dog. And maybe she was just a mom grasping at straws.
It was a cool spring day when Molly was finally reunited with her dog at the home of his trainer. Hank recognized Molly instantly. He ran up to her and jumped his paws onto her shoulders and wagged harder than ever. They hugged like this for a couple of minutes.
Hank had been gone for five months of intensive training with Comprehensive Pet Therapy in the Atlanta area. Melanie had shopped around for a long time with little luck. Either the organizations had no idea how to train a dog to help with Molly’s level of illness, or they said they did but seemed more interested in money than outcome. Then she found out about longtime dog trainer Mark Spivak’s organization. He and his small crew seemed to be able to train dogs to do almost anything. Mark had even helped teach dogs to patiently lie in an MRI for cutting-edge research at Emory University with neuroscientist Gregory Berns. Melanie thought if anyone could create a service dog to combat invisible monsters, Mark’s group could.
When Molly and Hank took a break from their hugging, the woman who had been in charge of Hank’s training buckled him into a service dog vest. He immediately became a different dog—serious, focused, all about being there for Molly. She and Melanie learned about the ways Hank was going to help her life. They went to a mall with the trainer to practice.
Once back home, Hank wasted no time getting to work. The family was stunned at what he could do.
Hank can tell when Molly starts to feel anxious. He’ll walk up to Molly and lean into her legs. It grounds her and lets her know she’s not alone.
If she starts to cut herself, Hank jumps on her legs. It’s usually enough to stop her, to bring her back from wherever she is. It’s like a jolt into reality, and it gives her a chance to realize she doesn’t want to do this.
He can even lead her out of hallucinations. When she hallucinates, she often covers her eyes or hides her face. All Hank does is nudge her with his nose. Such a simple act, but it can be enough to rip her out of the clutches of the man in the fedora and his sinister friends.
Hank doesn’t like Molly to be out of his sight. Sometimes, if her psychosis is bad, she’ll shut her door on him and hide in her closet. Hank stays by her door. He won’t leave. Melanie wishes she’d asked for Hank to be trained to fetch someone during the episodes, but now they just watch for him standing post and they know Molly needs help.
Then there’s something unexpected. Something Molly figured out on her own. It has nothing to do with training. It’s more a striking example of how dogs can become an extension of ourselves.
Hank is your typical Lab—a big, friendly, happy dog who wants to greet everyone. He has never met someone who isn’t his pal. So if Molly sees or hears people and Hank doesn’t acknowledge them, sometimes she realizes they probably aren’t real. Their power diminishes. A young woman can stay in the world with her dog instead of the terrifying alternative.
By just hanging out calmly and being himself, Hank scares away the demons.
Hank can’t stop all of Molly’s troubles. Her illness is severe—too much for teams of doctors to resolve, much less a lone Labrador retriever—but he makes her life better.
Hank joined her on job interviews after she became a certified nursing assistant. There was only one problem: She never got a job offer when she brought him. But she wanted to work, so she left him home for one interview, just to see if Hank could be getting in the way of offers. She got the job.
The bosses at the rehabilitation and senior center where she works don’t know about her disability. She’s been doing well on clozapine, an antipsychotic used for schizophrenia. The drug usually banishes the man in the fedora. It quiets the voices, although they don’t entirely go away.
She wishes she could tell her supervisors.* She’s thinking about it. She wants to tell the world how much Hank has helped.
Molly hasn’t cut herself since May of 2016. On her right thigh, disguising all of its scars, is a tattoo of a red-and-orange phoenix rising from the ashes.