Adopting a pet can help relieve symptoms of depression, study claims

The companionship ‘strongly contributes to mental health'

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The old adage that a dog is a man’s best friend might sound hackneyed and a little sexist, but new research reveals there is some truth in it, at least where someone’s mental health is concerned.

According to a study published in a Journal of Psychiatric Research, adopting a pet could offer respite to those with severe depression that has low rates of remission and cannot be easily treated with antidepressant medications or psychotherapy.

Two Portuguese researchers recruited 80 participants with this kind of depression, known as “treatment-resistant major depressive disorder”, and found that adopting a pet “enhanced” the effects of antidepressant medication for a significant minority of their volunteers.

Jorge Mota Pereira and Daniela Fonte at the Clínica Médico-Psiquiátrica invited all participants to adopt a pet as part of the study; 33 agreed to do so, with 20 people choosing dogs and seven choosing cats.

Their depression symptoms were evaluated over a 12 week-long period, with checkups taking place at four and eight weeks.

By the end of the study, Pereira and Fonte found that more than a third of the group who adopted pets had improved their scores on the Hamilton Depression Rating Scale and Global Assessment of Functioning Scale to the point where their symptoms could be considered mild.

The Porto-based researchers concluded that the results show pets could be used as an “effective adjuvant” to conventional treatments for depression, adding that those caring for a pet developed “a strong affinity and companionship that strongly contributes to mental health.”

But in a blog post for the British Psychological Society Research Digest, writer Christian Jarrett points out that the study depended on a person’s willingness to adopt a pet as opposed to randomly allocating pet ownership to certain volunteers, which could skew the findings.

“So, although pet-adopters and the controls were matched for baseline depression symptoms, there may have been other ways that they differed,” he writes.

“For instance, perhaps there was something different about the personalities or social circumstances of the pet adopters that contributed to their willingness to adopt a pet and to their higher remission rates (raising the possibility that the pet adoption itself was not the main ‘active ingredient’ in their recovery).

“Future, better controlled research may be able to tease apart these possibilities.”