Depression symptoms triple during the epidemic! Research shows that "raising a dog" can help social support reduce depression and negative psychology
Study: Dog ownership helps reduce depression during epidemic by providing sense of social support
The COVID-19 virus has caused a global pandemic for nearly two years. The “100-year pandemic” has not only claimed the lives of millions of people, but has also had a serious impact on the economy and society, and has increased people’s mental health problems. In the United States alone, research has found that the rate of depression symptoms has nearly tripled during the COVID-19 pandemic. People facing virus threats and crowd isolation need to have sufficient social support.
Social support means that people can obtain a “sense of being cared for” and have their psychological needs such as feeling loved, respected, and having a sense of social belonging met. Social support not only affects psychology, but also affects the health of the cardiovascular, endocrine and immune systems of the human body.
During the COVID-19 pandemic, when people generally face a lack of interpersonal communication and are in a state of “semi-isolation”, the mental health benefits of keeping pets have been valued. A recent study claimed that people who owned dogs during the epidemic had significantly lower depression symptom scores.
The research team collected 768 dog owners and 767 control subjects who were willing to own dogs, and used 2 pet scales and 4 mental health scales, including social support scale and depression scale (CESD-R). ), Generalized Anxiety Disorder Scale (GAD-7), and Oxford Happiness Questionnaire (OHQ) to assess the mental health of members of the two groups during the viral pandemic. The research team pointed out that those with low scores on the social support scale had nearly three times higher scores on the depression scale.
The research report points out that people’s mental health is affected to a certain extent regardless of whether they own dogs, but respondents who own dogs show that they feel more social support. Respondents who owned dogs also had significantly lower depressive symptom scores than the control group. The research team claims that owning a dog may provide people with a stronger sense of social support and help reduce the negative psychological impact of the COVID-19 epidemic.
Is owning a dog bad for your health? Scholars: Study results may be exaggerated
In a literature review, the research team pointed out that pets can enhance people’s positive emotions, reduce sadness, anxiety, and loneliness, and provide owners with a sense of social support. They can especially help when facing stressful events such as divorce and the death of a loved one. Emotional stability and emotional support for people.
However, not all studies believe that owning a dog has a positive impact on human health, and some studies have found that owning a dog can increase the owner’s stress level. New research also believes that regardless of whether they own a dog or not, the anxiety and happiness of the two groups of subjects during the epidemic are almost the same.
Stephen L. Stern, professor of psychiatry at the Joe R. & Teresa Lozano Long School of Medicine (LSOM), believes that the design and conclusions of this study on dog ownership and mental health during the epidemic are debatable. First, the sample size is only 768 people. , representativeness of the entire population cannot be confirmed. In addition, in addition to raising dogs, members of the two groups may have other factors that affect their mental health, and even the prevalence of the epidemic in their countries and regions is also different. Professor Stern believes that the study’s conclusions are exaggerated and that the difference between the two groups on the rating scale was not significant.
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