Animal-assisted psychotherapy (AAT) is an approach to mental health care that incorporates pets/animals into the therapy process, by increasing connections created during human-animal interactions. Emotional recovery and positive psychological effects, often occur when the relationship between an individual and the therapy animal grows.
History of AAT:
Animals have been associated with medicinal and therapeutic purposes throughout human history, Formal research into the use of animals for therapeutic purposes is in the 1960s, where work investigating the use of pet psychotherapy for the treatment of behavior disorder in children was published. More recently, animals have been incorporated into several “animal-assisted interventions”, including animal-assisted activities, animal-assisted therapy, and service animal programs. The most common forms of animal-assisted interventions for the treatment of mental health conditions involve dogs or horses, often described as canine or equine therapy (or hippotherapy), respectively.
The Goal of AAT in our programs:
The goal of animal-assisted therapy in our programs is to improve a patient’s social, emotional, or cognitive functioning that allows easier analysis and treatments by our coaches and doctors, which opens the patient’s perspectives on his illness and often leads us to a high communication level with patients.
Extra benifits of AAT :
improvements in health, including:
- Decreased stress levels
- Reduced anger and aggression
- Decreased hostility toward the self and others
- Improved social interactions
- Decreased heart rate and blood pressure
- increase in the release of beta-endorphins
- Improvement in self-esteem, patience, and trust
- Sense of empowerment
Animal-assisted psychotherapy is unique in its ability to combine thinking, feeling, and behaving within one intervention. Working with the animals is a hands-on, experiential exercise, and patients no longer just talk about their issues but are engaged in activities that elicit honest behaviors and feelings.
We do recommend this workshop to everyone, cause of high communication level that can be easily gained here, having some kind of connection with animals, reflects very positively on all lifely aspects, we were designed as live this earth with those animals, having these connections will fulfill part of your purpose.
The greatness of a nation and its moral progress can be judged by the way its animals are treated.
–Mahatma Gandi