MFTs are relationship experts. Whether it’s your relationship with your deepest inner self, your family, your workplace or even your community – we MFTs are trained to expertly facilitate human-human relationships.

But what if you could expand your scope of practice to include the human-nature relationship? Or even the human-animal relationship?

The April 11, 2008 issue of the New York Times reports new research findings in the growing field of animal-assisted therapy: “Caring for farm animals appears to offer a therapeutic benefit for people with mental illness.” The Norwegian study was reported in the journal Clinical Practice and Epidemiology in Mental Health and most of the participants were being treated with antidepressants, mood stabilizers, antipsychotics and other psychiatric medications. The researchers found that those patients who continued to care for animals (a number dropped out) had improved “self-efficacy and coping skills” compared with controls.

The researchers speculated that “work with farm animals may improve mental health in part because it gives a person physical contact with another living being.” Yes! Most of us in our culture suffer from physical touch deprivation as we spend unnaturally long periods of time away from loved ones each day. And too many in our culture, due to abusive situations, family dysfunction and dissolution, psychological illness or other losses, live completely isolated from other people.

The report continues: “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 morre self-confident… The contact with the animals may have produced pleasurably-experienced social interactions that made the patients less afraid of new situations.’” Surprising? Not really. Most therapists probably already know that “Earlier studies with cats and dogs have shown that animal-human interaction can decrease stress and improve self-confidence and social competence,” which is why companion animals are now frequently brought to mental hospitals, elder-care facilities and Alzheimer’s units as part of overall treatment plans. People who respond to almost nothing else may “wake up” when an animal friend visits.

But we may not have been aware that “less is known about whether working with other types of animals offers any benefits to those struggling with anxiety and other psychiatric disorders.” Perhaps most of us didn’t think beyond the companion-animal parameters or ponder whether actually caring for farm animals might have a similar impact to contact with domestic pets.

It certainly makes sense, doesn’t it? We human animals evolved as part of a natural ecosystem that always included animals – as companions, as pprotectors, as wild or domestic food. Our Pleistocene brains are probably hard-wired to respond to such contact. Some of the earliest jobs for children in any indigenous or farming community involve animal care. And even now, when many of us live in cramped urban and suburban environments, our children beg us for domestic pets, horses or animals of all kinds -- a request so many of us sadly have to refuse as our current way of life makes it hard to find time or space for either domestic or farm animals.

Such disconnection from nature is just one part of the lunacy we’re beginning to awaken from. Generations of first-world people have been fleeing from nature and farm areas as fast as they could, moving to stressful industrial urban jobs and relying on tenuous and vulnerable food supply lines to meet our needs for eggs, dairy products and meat (if we’re meat eaters) and on isolated pets for animal companionship. And now developing countries like China and India seem to be following our bad example.

In fact, this frustrated human need for natural animal connection may become perverted into animal obsession. For too many of us, pets are now the new family members, even preferred to humans by some who are socially isolated or have given up on finding loving human community and connection. An example of how extreme this animal-obsession has become may be seen in the success of businesses like the luxury day-care and long-term stay pet hotels, which try to assuage the guilt of pet owners who shudder at leaving much-loved companion animals alone in empty homes all day, isolated from connection with people or others of their kind. For a few, animal-addiction can become a problem, as those who have been abused themselves turn to adopting large numbers of abused and abandoned animals in an effort to heal themselves.

It’s interesting to recall that contact with farm animals has a long therapeutic history in psychiatry and psychology. Even in the time of mad King George III of England, a farm-stay was a treatment of choice. But if we look deeper, we realize that it is our whole way of life that needs to be on the couch.

What if we could live a more earth-connected, natural and sustainable lifestyle, as most of our indigenous ancestors have done over thousands of years, living in community with tightly-bonded groups of both other people and companion animals? What if there was always someone at home so no child, adult, elder or animal needed to suffer isolation or abandonment? What if both domestic pets and farm animals were a part of everyone’s daily life once more? What if we grew or raised our own food close to home and had neighborly contact with local farmers and ranchers?

This ideal of “the sustainable lifestyle” is beginning to enter mental health treatment planning. The New York Times article cited above reports that “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 read more: http://well.blogs.nytimes.com/2008/04/11/better-mental-health-down-on-the-farm/