After examining the stories people had to tell in their interviews, I found that a wide variety of people found therapeutic benefits in their pet ownership. Plenty of regular pet owners had mental illnesses but found emotional support in their pets.
Through my interviews, I found:
Emotional support pets helped with:
- Anxiety
- Depression
- Self-loathing
- Autism
- Bipolar disorder
Regular pets helped with:
- Anxiety
- Death
- Depression
- Heart attacks
- Loneliness
- Abuse
- PTSD
- Divorce
- Heartbreak
- Stress
- Anxiety attacks
- Panic attacks
- Suicidal thoughts
- Gender crisis
- Breakdowns
- Comfort
- Dissociation episodes
Service pets helped with:
- PTSD
- Survivor's guilt
- Seizures
Words that are highlighted are to show that that illness is aided by another type of pet. This list is also exclusively the product of my interviews and does not include the various other services emotional support and service pets provide.
An idea I considered was developing an AI that would attempt to replicate this relationship, but further research found that this type of effect works best on children, which is part of the success of things like Nintendogs and Tomogatchis.
I then decided that there ought to be a way to provide the public with the means to start their own pet ownership experiences in the way that best suits them in terms of living situation and personality. Human-pet relationships are unique and special to the individual, so trying to develop an AI that would treat each person the same wouldn't have the right effect.
My project seeks to provide non-pet owners with mental illness with a platform to discover what pet best fits their living situation as well as the therapeutic benefits of owning that particular pet in hopes of alleviating the hardships of their mental health.