Lately I’ve been having too many ideas to sit down with any one of them and see it through. This includes blog posts, which I compose while trying to fall asleep at night or while pacing around my apartment, but not while actually at the computer. Today I decided that writing something short is better than nothing.

Reading about Reconcile, the doggie Prozac, reminded me of a sentence I recently came across on Borderline Personality Today’s page about BPD criteria:

Individuals with this disorder may feel more secure with transitional objects (i.e., a pet or inanimate possession) than in interpersonal relationships.

I thought it was a pretty poor choice of words. Yes, you don’t have the same sort of relationship with a pet that you do with another human being. I get what they’re trying to say here. But not being a person doesn’t make a pet an object. If a pet is an object, though, then it doesn’t matter to you if you use a quick fix for their behaviour that is convenient for you as opposed to seriously thinking about what solution is best for your pet. Note: I’m not talking here about people who have been diagnosed with BPD, even though this sentence happened to be on a site about BPD. I just mean that people who would refer to an animal as a “transitional object” seem to have the same mindset as people who would drug Muffy for piddling on the rug.

I’m not saying unequivocally that psych drugs for your pets are always 100% wrong, because I really don’t know enough about the subject. I know people who had their cat on kitty Prozac because of its OCD-like behaviour. It actually did physical harm to itself with excessive grooming and biting itself. They were worried about its physical health and obviously couldn’t be with the cat every second to keep it from hurting itself. Medication was not the first thing they tried, and their cat was only medicated on a short-term basis. The cat is now off SSRIs and is fine with only behavioural training. They also have another cat who has never had these problems.

What I am saying, though, is that the Reconcile site scares the crap out of me with paragraphs like this one:

Separation anxiety is a clinical condition in your dog’s brain. Your pet is not a bad dog. Your pet’s behavior is the result of separation anxiety.

Wow, “a clinical condition in your dog’s brain.” Isn’t that just the most specific thing you’ve ever read? What the hell does it even mean? It means “We want to convince you that your dog has a biologically-based medical condition but we don’t have evidence to support this, so we will be alarmingly vague. It is your duty to treat your dog’s clinical condition, damnit. You are a bad pet owner if you don’t get them the medicine they need.”

Does separation anxiety in dogs exist? Hell, yeah. And in cats, too — that’s what caused the excessive grooming and self-injurious behaviour of the cat I mentioned previously. But is separation anxiety “a clinical condition in your dog’s brain”? Umm…

My parents’ dog has very bad separation anxiety, but they’ve never considered drugging her because of it. They just use behavioural training, which works most of the time, and on the occasions when the dog pees on the rug or gets into the garbage anyway, well, then they just have to clean up after her.

I’m glad that Eli Lilly at least emphasizes the importance of behavioural modification in addition to drugs, but I’m sure that some pet owners will just ignore the entire training idea because medication is, you know, easier. For you, if not for your pet. Of course, just like meds in humans, the side effects of Reconcile are often the very things the drug is supposed to treat:

The most common adverse reactions recorded during clinical trials with Reconcile™ were calm or lethargy, reduced appetite, vomiting, shaking, diarrhea, restlessness, excessive vocalization, aggression and, in infrequent cases, seizures.

If you look at the product label or this journal article, you’ll see that some of the side effects were quite common, especially calm/lethargy/depression. I guess if you’re not satisfied with doping up and numbing out your children, you might want to move on to your pets, too.

Well, this wound up being longer than I expected.

This entry was posted on Sunday, June 17th, 2007 at 11:08 pm and is filed under Meds, BPD. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.