Psychiatric Service Dog

@passionateThinker562

Hello Passion,

I am ScarletPear1945. I have a service dog for support. He has not had professional training but is a work in progress. It is my experience that a dog needs to have some stability too. My dog wants to be with me 24/7 and has great anxiety when I tell him he has to stay home. I try to take him as much as I can and that makes him very happy just to be in my presence.

My suggestion would be to wait until you get a bit more settled so the dog can feel secure. Of course, this is just my opinion.

I hope you are able to find the answers you need to make a wise decision.

@passionateThinker562

Hi there! So, psychiatric service dogs. I'm assuming that you already know what a service dog is how they're completely different than pets/emotional support animals and therapy animals and what a dog can and hopefully will be doing to assist you, so my answer is mainly on what every day life is like having a service dog, and I think the positives are pretty obvious so I mostly listed the challenges I and other handlers commonly face, since I think that might help if you're trying to consider if this is worth it or not for you. It was sooooo worth it for me in my own personal situation even though many parts of having a service dog and dealing with accessibility issues and fighting for access are hard.

I have a service dog. A real ADA qualifying service dog with hundreds of hours of training and thousands of hours of public access experience. I also want to college in the United States with my service dog. For someone like you, it looks like with you going off to college, you'd have to apply for a program dog where the dog would just get matched with you when it's ready to go and fully trained since while going to college there's no way you'd realistically be able to deal with trying to be a major part of the training process yourself. Having a fully trained wonderful service dog in college is going to be hard enough as it is with classes that you don't want to have to do a whole lot for the dog so that you can devote time to studying.

I think something to really consider is the logistics of having the service dog. This is often what I refer to as the "sucky side of having a service dog". Your service dog is gonna be with you 24/7. They will make your disability 100% visible. It will be like walking down the street carrying a huge sign that reads "I AM DISABLED". As you can guess, this will lead to some harassment and getting noticed everywhere you go. It will also lead to accessibility issues that you would not have run into without a service dog. People in wheelchairs for example, are another group of people that deal with a lot of accessibility issues trying to get into stores and buildings and such.

You will get stared at. You will get pointed at. People will take pictures of you without your consent. People will pet the dog without asking you all the time. People will make kissy noises at the dog. People will try to distract your dog. People will come up to you and ask you about your disability and about your dog. People might make false complaints about your dog to whoever controls your housing (like calling up your landlord and being like "so and so's dog bit me" even though your dog has never gone within 100 feet of them before) People will talk about your dog and you all around you everywhere you go within your earshot. Sometimes service dogs even get attacked by unleashed aggressive dogs or kicked or hit by children or fed things by other people and you may be weary at times knowing that's a possibility and making sure it doesnt happen to you. Frankly, taking your dog everywhere with you can be a drag in the USA if you can get around without one. I live in pretty safe areas where people are generally respectful but those examples of harassment are the types of things I deal with on a daily basis and there was more of it when I went to college and was surrounded by a lot more people on a daily basis. Now you can learn to manage this type of stuff, you can find ways to deal with it, and it isnt always going to get in the way. Most of the time I go places with zero issues, except for the staring and pointing and talking about you within earshot. Thats a given, but the stuff that might leave you annoyed or shaken by far isnt an everyday thing for me. It's just important to consider that dealing with the public can be hard for people at times, and it can be especially hard if you know you're not going to be super comfortable with people staring and coming up to you what can feel like all. the. time. You want to make sure that it's totally going to be 100% worth it to have the increased accessibility that a service dog could offer you.

Because of this, it's important to consider how much you would benefit from a service dog vs if it would handicap you and how so. For example, it might be really annoying that things take more time (i.e. going to the store used to take 5 minutes, and now with the dog it takes 9 minutes plus an extra minute for people bothering you).

If you get around fine in public and just need a dog to help out around the house there is the idea of in home service dogs, which don't accompany you in public but are trained to do things in your house that help make things easier for you. The advantage of this is that training time is faster and probably costs less, since public access training is a long-complicated process and hey, no being slowed down or having to deal with annoying people!

Going to college with a service dog can be a good experience even with some bumps in the road. I got harassed by people in the housing area I was in because of nothing I did in particular, but the fact that not everyone wanted to be around a dog, my existence simply wasn't something they were okay with. This is a common experience with people who go to college. On the flip side, my dog was the reason I was able to live independently at college :D She did great! I was so proud of her. Your college will have regulations about service dogs. You can read up on those and plan how you will do things with a service dog. It's definitely possible to have a service dog in college. The biggest difference from going to college without a service dog is that things just take more time. Your classmates will be able to roll out of bed at 8:50 and walk to their 9am class. You however, are gonna be waking up much earlier for the same class because you're going to have to feed and water and dress up and take your dog out not to mention do the same for yourself too. My disability required me to wake up 3 hours before class started haha. Itll also take your dog time to feel alright about having moved into a new house and environment (your college housing and wherever youll be that isnt college housing). Moves are stressful on dogs, even well trained experienced service dogs, so you just gotta be aware of that and try to make puppers as comfy as possible.

The commitment is huge. The dog probably isn't going to be able to be away from you/someone for more than a few hours at a time. A service dog is a long 10-year commitment. If you're in the US you're most likely going to have to fundraise or help fundraise the $25,000 or whatever that will get you the dog. You're probably going to have to wait like 1-3 years for the dog to be ready. The working life of the dog will be until they reach old age. Then your dog will retire, and you need to know where the dog will go in retirement. Will it go back to the program to be rehoused? Will it be allowed to stay with you? Going abroad there will be ways depending on the country to bring your service dog with you. However, you might only have access rights if the country allows them for foreign service dog handlers. So, it's a great idea to check on that because it wont always be possible, which is really frustrating as being denied access to something your able-bodied counterparts get to do always is. It's good to know all this in advance so that you know that none of this will be a problem for you and you also can predict how long you will remain disabled for.

If your life is really really hard right now because of your disability and you need a great deal of assistance that a service dog could replace, having a service dog can make a huge difference in your life by improving your ability to access public places, get your daily needs taken care of with less reliance on other humans...etc. The good news is that you might not have to decide right now if you want to apply for a service dog, you could always think on it some and apply a bit down the road.

If you're looking for information, Google and YouTube are helpful in finding good information on service dogs in your country and local area.

My college says that my service dog cant be left on campus for more than x hours alone and no one else is allowed to watch service dog while Im in lab or something. That being said I think youd be perfectly fine partying at night for a bit and leaving service dog crated in your room or something. I think studying abroad will be your biggest challenge. I would personally never. Also, you might want to enquire about getting a single room in college if youre disabled, especially if you get a service dog. Its a stretch to think that a random person would want to live with your service dog and give you no issues, so unless you know the person and theyre super excited about sharing space with a dog, Id try to get yourself into a single room for disability reasons J.

Psychiatric service dogs can be such a blessing. If you decide that this journey is for you, I wish you the best of luck and hope whatever you decide to do helps you out <3! Good luck and much love to you. Take care!