Working with farm animals may boost coping skills. (James Estrin/The New York Times)Caring for farm animals appears to offer a therapeutic benefit for people with mental illness, according to new research.
Earlier studies with cats and dogs have shown that animal-human interaction can decrease stress and improve self-confidence and social competence. But less is known about whether working with other types of animals offers any benefits to those struggling with anxiety or other psychiatric disorders. Even so, the use of farms to promote mental health is increasing in Europe and the United States, as various treatment programs offer so-called “green” care, which includes time in community gardens and on farms as a form of therapy.
To determine whether time working with farm animals makes a meaningful difference in mental health, Norwegian researchers studied how life on the farm might affect patients with problems like anxiety, depression, schizophrenia and personality disorders. Reporting in the journal Clinical Practice and Epidemiology in Mental Health, they recruited 90 patients, including 59 women and 31 men, with psychiatric ailments. The vast majority were being treated with antidepressants, antipsychotic drugs, mood stabilizers and other medications.
Two-thirds of the patients took part in the farm intervention, where they were asked to work with cows, sheep and horses for three hours a week over a 12-week period. The remaining one-third served as a control group and received standard psychiatric care.
By the end of the study, 19 of those in the farm group had dropped out, while only two in the control group had left the study. But during the six-month follow-up, the farm patients reported a statistically significant improvement in self-efficacy and coping skills compared to those who had not spent time working with animals.
The researchers noted that work with farm animals may improve mental health in part because it gives a person physical contact with another living being. Routines that include activities like feeding, milking and caring for other living creatures may also promote self-esteem and confidence.
“Patients may have learned new tasks…and afterwards felt more self-confident,” the authors reported. “The contact with the animals may have produced a pleasurably experienced social interaction that made the patients less afraid of new situations.”
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From 1 to 25 of 57 Comments
I’ve been wanting to move to the country for a long time - now I have the perfect reason - better mental health! It makes sense to me.
— LauraBethThis was one of the more enlightened attitudes toward mental health in the 18th and 19th centuries. (At least more so than the standard practice of throwing people in prisons.) Doctors put patients with a variety of mental illnesses to live and work on farms. It’s also illustrated in the film “The Madness of King George,” whose physician ran such a farm.
— PHXDoes givng up your seat on the subway for a fellow rider count as caring for a farm animal? It feels that way much of the time, except farm animals are probably more caring then your fellow subway riders.
— Jack LThere’s an odd sort of pleasure in, “Hey, I can milk a cow.” It’s a tangible skill, that produces a direct result, that not many people can claim. There’s a lot of pride and self-reliance to the knowledge that you can competently handle a full-sized dairy cow and make a drinkable beverage come out of it at your instigation.
Also, experiences like working with farm animals are interesting and challenging. They engage you and give you an unusual experience to think and talk about. At the same time, though they’re not easy, the tasks are simple. They don’t require navigating complex social structures, interpreting interpersonal nuances, or other people trying to pressure you into thinking or feeling a certain way.
A lot of the people I know who’ve been tagged with anxiety diagnoses are extreme introverts. In small groups and by themselves, they’re fine, but when they’re around strangers or large groups, they get anxious and have trouble functioning. Most of them, if they can get away from crowded areas and spend time near a farm or in the woods regularly, become a lot more balanced and able to handle those group situations. I didn’t see in the article if certain disorders were helped more than others (it may have been down in the statistics somewhere), but I wouldn’t be surprised to find that the ‘mood and behaviour’ disorders responded better to this treatment.
— RowanMy father (lives in Iowa, and occasionally does farm work): “The contact with the animals may have produced a pleasurably experienced social interaction that made the patients less afraid of new situations.” What a bunch of psycho babble. I can tell you the real therapeutic benefit comes from the knowledge that you’re working with something that when it makes you angry you get to chop it up and eat it!
Me: Yeah, they usually frown upon chopping up your fellow subway riders or coworkers; and you get put away where people look at you through a tiny hole forever if you try to eat them.
— LorraineI hope it’s not too far off topic to say that I think James Estrin’s photo is GREAT.
From TPP — Photo compliments always welcome! And I agree…
— SchizohedronInteresting, but I think you have to worry about the statistics when 19 of 60 people who went to the farm dropped out. You must assume that they did not improve, whereas you must assume that the 2 who dropped out of the control group did improve. Were the statistical conclusions based on these assumptions? If not, the study needs to be improved before any conclusions are drawn.
From TPP — The differences between the treatment group and control group were statistically significant. Based on a pilot study, the authors anticipated a high drop out rate which is why the intervention group started with 60 people and the control started with 30. The people who dropped out said they were bored or they didn’t like the animal, but the authors noted that most of the drop outs were people recently hospitalized and likely less stable than other participants. Future studies may exclude this type of patient.
— DonInteresting, but I wonder how specific the results are to social interaction with animals, or if it’s simply a matter of routine and accomplishment. It would be interesting to see how a group of patients that worked with farm animals compared to a group that did something like learn to play an organized sport together or work in a garden.
— EBThis really does not surprise me at all. I left the Chicago burbs six years ago to move to 32 acres in the country. While it can be challenging sometimes, I love what I’m doing and can’t imagine ever moving back to the city or burbs. We have a REAL reason to get out of bed every morning, and my children have learned REAL responsibility. I could talk about the benefits forever, but I’ll stop now and just say that I write about all of this on my blog, http://antiquityoaks.blogspot.com.
About a year ago, when the land across the road was for sale, I thought about how great it would be to buy it and create a homestead for women and their children who had been in abusive relationships. I think it would be so healing for them to be out in the country, working with the goats and chickens, breathing fresh air, running through pastures. One of these days, I hope to figure out how to make that happen.
— DeborahInteresting article. I’ve always loved having cats and going to petting zoos to interact with sheeps, goats, cows, etc. I would feel too lonely and isolated in the country but I think that pschiatric hospitals should let patients visit with animals frequently.
I understand that colobus monkeys are trained to help para- and quadriplegics with tasks like drinking, eating, etc. I’ve always thought it would be great to have one of these monkeys around to help me when I’m feeling depressed and lonely. They are adorable, bright, imitative, and form strong bonds quickly.
— JudyHello everyone,
I would have to say that I understand that the animals are what helps. In my larger family and neighborhood, there are several children with “learning disabilities” (some in the neighborhood families are quite severe - and may be Asperger’s, and certainly ADD and more).
Every one of these children DOES benefit by being around pets in their home and, in the case of the child with Asperger’s, animals are the core of life.
That child and sister, gets to go take care of horses regularly, on a farm near their semi-urban neighborhood, and that has been tremendously calming as well as wonderful for self-esteem and honing responsibility.
And, it has been glorious for showing life is fun, too. This often is not the case for their usual, daily struggle, so the animals are a wonderful source of Balance, asking nothing, but loving unconditionally.
More groups should get people out into Nature. It is where our deepest nurturance stems from, in myriads of ways we have yet to understand, but even with what we know, it is a certain benefactor.
Encourage 4H. Get young people involved in Community Supported Agriculture gardens. Every neighborhood should have them, especially at the elementary school playgrounds. Check out the national CSA network and Alice Waters’ Edible Schoolyard site.
Best to all — Em
please visit me at: http://diabetesdietdialogue.wordpress.com
— Em“Everyone knows someone who needs this information!” (TM)
This doesn’t surprise me.
I have recurrent major depression. I also have some social anxiety problems, and was diagnosed with a personality disorder which I’ve largely overcome.
I have always loved and felt calmed by being around animals. For the most part, this has been household pets — dogs and cats. I’ve never lived on a farm. But my daughter has been a horseback rider for most of her life, and with her I’ve spent quite a bit of time around horses. They are wonderful animals. But they are large, and don’t necessarily want to cooperate with you, so you need to be calm, confident, alert, and sensitive to their moods when you work with them. When you succeed, and you develop a trusting relationship, it really is a wonderful feeling. It’s a great learning experience, about yourself as well as about this other animal.
The other thing that’s wonderful about all animals, including the large ones, is that they’re totally nonjudgmental. They don’t care if you’re mentally ill. There’s no stigma with them. As long as you treat them with respect, they’re usually going to respect you, too.
— Sallythank for this report
— jazawhile I do feel that I gained a measure of coping skills from my experiences in my teens on a kibbutz, feeding chickens, cleaning up after them while being a great anecdote to tell to my nephews and niece and friends alike, is not something I would immediately want to do again, although now I live by the bay out in far rockaway, and have daily contact with seagulls and swans, and I must admit that I do get a great measure of good mental health out of interacting with them and photographing them, but I think back on my time packing and cleaning up after chickens as something I would not want to revisit even as a possible source of good mental health, but I might want to take a turn with the care of swans.
— ToddShame so many dropped out of the ‘farm’ group. I have a small yard of 6 horses - including a 3 year old filly and a pregnant mare. I found that it is not unusual that so many cannot stick with it - especially during the hard winter of England (soggy, damp and grey). Quite often the agricultural students only last 6 weeks before they find it ‘too’ hard work. Yesterday, there was a thunder storm and hail so despite feeling down I ran out to bring the horses in. Working with animals makes you come out of yourself and think for their well being.
I have also had experiences of chronic physical illness and the grief of losing a child. During all the trials and tribulations of life - the horses always give me another reason to go on.
— Monique ReidAlas, this is yet one more example of the public misunderstanding scholarly published findings, possibly motivated by wishful thinking but particularly marked by a failure to note confounding factors that generally negate a study’s ability to assert cause-and-effect, in turn explaining all the may-possibly-indicate style language.
The key finding of the report is “… no changes in quality of life was [sic] found.” Coupled with the significant improvement in efficacy, the most reasonable explanation is that the survey measured a new skill (”I can milk a cow”), but that such new abilities don’t translate into relief for intractable affliction or intractable life circumstance.
Worse still is the implication that a little exercise, fresh air, and a pet, may improve chronic mental illness. Perhaps you also believe that alcoholism is caused by weak moral fiber. But if you wouldn’t recommend exercise and a pet to a person traumatized by sexual assault or combat duties (as an effective cure for trauma), then why do it for someone with depression or schizophrenia? The patients plainly reported that such balms didn’t change their lives or ailments.
One of the unhappy aspects of mental health care is that reports of therapy efficacy are routinely exaggerated by those with a career or financial interest in doing so. Being in the health care business does not inoculate one from those same frailties that move drug companies to falsify.
— ChrisI spent 10 years managing a 300-cow dairy farm. I spent the rest of my adult life working with people in offices. I don’t know whether it’s about the animals, or just being outdoors. Marie De Santis, who was a commercial fisherwoman wrote in California Currents, “every one of us in this society is severely deprived of a relationship with Mother Nature. Nature no longer provides for us; no longer supplies the rhythm of our lives; nor is it the source of our work or ay interaction at all other than the camping, hiking, and sailing which is only the hollow shell of the real relationship we lost generations ago. The loss and the need are as great as life itself, because our minds, bodies, and souls were designed as a template to nature. And our lives no longer fit.” That explains why I liked working outdoors with cows more than indoors with people.
— arnicaHave you ever been in a modern day psychiatric facility? Those patients are locked up - they are not allowed to leave - and they have nothing to do the whole time that they are there except watch television and sleep. Their every act is monitored. What a terrible situation - they are like prisons but without the rats . So when they are placed in a decent situation such as one with sunshine, fresh air, and work, it is no wonder that they get better.
— SandiHealthy individuals in our everyday society would also benefit from being on a farm and living a farm life. Most people live a 9 to 5 life and drive around after sitting at a desk at work - they live in a rat race. Being on a farm would benefit anyone.
I presume the work did not include being on the kill floor, or jamming the animals into crates for transport, or mutilating them (debeaking, dehorning, castrating) without anesthesia–all typical farm practices, but ones that it’s hard to imagine confer psychological balm.
And what was the therapeutic effect when those animals we taken off to be killed?
I absolutely believe in the healing powers of relationships with animals, but the lives of farm animals typically contain a fair dose of horror. Those who work in slaughterhouses, or farm animal rescue, have been known to experience PTSD.
FROM TPP — I don’t believe these were major commercial farms.
— WeebittyInteresting that we view a sojourn on a farm a form of therapy, and wonder why contact with the Earth and animals is so salutary. Up until and through the industrial revolution, that’s where most everyone lived, and I’d bet that mental illnesses weren’t nearly as prevalent then as they are now (someone find a statistic that supports my naive thesis, please!). Seriously, though, we belong in nature, close to the Earth, caring for creatures. It’s the modern world, with its noise and artificiality, that has split us off from our own state of sacred connection to the world. No wonder so many people are emotionally bereft.
Spend a day sitting on the ground in the woods near your own backyard. Don’t talk to anyone. Just notice. Watch the ants. Be still. You’ll be surprised how much healthier you feel.
— KMHas anyone considered the fact that farm animals and soils are great sources of B vitamins, which the depressed are deficient in?
— Lydiai work in a state psych facility and it’s true that every move is monitored and patients have little to do. obviously the old school model of self sufficiency, with the patients involved in working at jobs (laundry, groundskeeping, farm etc)that contribute, should be brought back in some form for those who are capable. work is what adults do, and for those whose adulthood has been interruped by major mental illness, it can help prepare them for leaving in-patient life, besides for the structure and satisfaction it provides
— plusheeWhat a wonderful article! This is also described in Foucault’s book, Madness and Civilization. These practices indeed have been used throughout time. Great article, always a pleasure to read the NYT.
— MeganChris said:
“Worse still is the implication that a little exercise, fresh air, and a pet, may improve chronic mental illness. Perhaps you also believe that alcoholism is caused by weak moral fiber. But if you wouldn’t recommend exercise and a pet to a person traumatized by sexual assault or combat duties (as an effective cure for trauma), then why do it for someone with depression or schizophrenia?”
Myself, I don’t think ‘a little fresh air and exercise’ will magically cure depression, but I think you’re also understating the effects of pastoral labors. My own depression responds very well to three things:
1. Uncomplicated, vigorous tasks (for example, gardening)
2. Self-sufficiency (I eat the food and herbs I grow, and the sense of accomplishment provides needed self-esteem)
3. Regular contact with other living things - people, animals, or plants - that have no preset expectations and create no social anxiety
I don’t think that this program is the magic cure-all for depression or schizophrenia. Of course a temporary farm work program’s not going to *cure* mental illness, but tasks like these and exposure to animals and nature, in the long term, can be very good for the mental state.
I think it’s another thing to go in the toolbox, another set of skills to use in addressing mental health. Talk therapy doesn’t work for everyone. Drug therapy doesn’t work for everyone. Task-based therapy won’t work for everyone. But if clinical professionals have more and more tools to help the mentally ill, then they have more things to put into the combination, to say, “Hey, take these for your acute anxiety attacks, let’s meet once a week to learn ways for coping with your depression, and let’s work toward getting you outside and active more often.”
Long-term depression feels like a life sentence sometimes. You think, “I can take brain drugs, but I’ll be taking them until I die,” or “I can just keep talking to this therapist forever, because while I’m *in* therapy I’m OK but I never get cured.” There’s a perception, when you’re diagnosed with recurrent depression, that since you’re just broken in your brain-parts, you’re going to require some sort of maintenance care indefinitely. If I have the choice of my maintenance care being regular fresh air and exercise (once the acute symptoms of active depression have been addressed), regular therapy sessions, or prescription medication, I’m really going to prefer “get out and work in the garden or with animals once or twice a week” option if it’s available to me.
And, speaking as a survivor of sexual abuse who’s networked with other survivors, I *would* recommend a pet to a rape victim if she (or he) did not already have one. It’s not uncommon for ‘feed the cat’ or ‘walk the dog’ to be the thing that keeps you getting out of bed in the mornings, and the open, unconditional, nonjudgmental love of a pet is incredibly healing.
Pets don’t pity you and visibly handle you with kid gloves because you’re ‘fragile’. They don’t ask what you were wearing, or how much you had to drink, or why you decided to walk home from the library instead of calling a friend, or why you don’t leave that no-good-SOB once and for all, or why you didn’t get a security guard to walk you out to your car, or any of the other idiotic things people ask rape or trauma victims (the things that all boil down to, “why didn’t you make different decisions to keep this from happening?”). They don’t get mad at you if you’re not ‘over it’ three weeks later and ready to move on. At the same time, you can’t put off the cat for very long with, “I’m too depressed to feed you,” before she starts standing on your head while you’re asleep and meowing plaintively. Pets require simple care, but they require it regularly and are not shy about letting you know when you’ve got to get in gear.
There’s no one cure for recurrent, long-term mental illness. Each person will have to find the mix of maintenance therapies that helps him or her maintain the most stability. And I look at programs like this, and I think that for some of us, regular farm time might be just what the doctor ordered.
— RowanRowan, I would agree with your points about pets helping you with depresssion. I have three cats and they are wonderful, affectionate, and loving. They help me get over my depression and loneliness often.
Chris, I would recommend to a rape victim or a victim of combat-related that he or she should get a cat or dog. Why wouldn’t you? I am also a victim of sexual abuse and animals can help you because you can build up your trust with them and you can give them love and get it back from them. I don’t agree that they give you unconditional love, however, as people often assert. You have to show them love and affection in order for them to return it.
Sandi and Plushee, my understanding is that patients in psychiatric hospitals do more than watch t.v. and sleep. They see therapists, take medications, participate in music, art, and dance therapy, go on field trips, etc. If they just sleep, eat, and watch t.v. in the psychiatric hospitals you have stayed in or work in, I would say the hospital staff are not helping their patients at all.
— Judy