2022 - How Effective is Animal-Assisted Therapy? - Poster Presentation

The proposed research question, Is Animal Therapy Effective for Mood Disorder Recovery? will be used to provoke research and analysis into whether animal therapy truly is effective for mood disorder recovery. Studies were included where an animal was involved intentionally as therapy. Studies were also included that compared results of those with control groups, as well as pre-post one-group design. The results also showed that those waiting for a service animal and those who already had a service animal held very large variations between the two, though traditional psychotherapy interventions were statistically slightly less as effective as service animal therapy. Ultimately, the presence of animal-assisted therapy maintains benefits that can seem to slightly outweigh other psychotherapies, such as psychodynamic and cognitive behavioral therapy. This is a call for more future studies of the relief animal therapy can have on those with mood disorders; however promising the research has been so far, it is strongly noted that more needs to be done.