Photo credit: Tambako The Jaguar, Flickr
Do animals experience the equivalent of childhood adverse experiences, and do they develop mental illness as a result? The story of Brian the Bonobo, along with others featured in a new book, Animal Madness, suggests that happens more than we may realize.
Things were not looking good for Brian. He'd been kept from the affection of his mother—and all other women—and raised alone by his father, who sexually traumatized him. Normal social interactions were impossible for him. He couldn't eat in front of others and required a series of repeated, OCD-like rituals before he'd take food. He was scared of any new thing, and when he got stressed, he'd just curl up into the fetal position and scream.
Brian's story is one of many that Laurel Braitman tells in her new book, Animal Madness: How anxious dogs, compulsive parrots, and elephants in recovery help us understand ourselves, a survey of mental illness in animals and its relationship to our own problems.
The individual stories in the book are compelling, and they lead towards an interesting conclusion about the way we project our own attributes onto other species. How much should we anthropomorphize animals like our pets or apes like Brian? As much as it helps us help them. If treating Brian like a human psychiatric patient helped Prosen treat the suffering animal, then it makes sense to project that level of humanness onto the creature.
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