Tips to Identify and Understand a Psychotic Dog

Although many people may think that any dog who bites is crazy or psychotic and should be destroyed, the issue of true dog psychosis is a more complicated and requires a little more effort to understand.

Psychosis is generally defined as a mental disturbance of sufficient magnitude that there is personality disintegration and servere detachment from reality. I know we could argue about the dividing line between neurosis and psychosis, so I’ll add that for our purposes, the psychotic dog is likely to not only be dangerous to itself but also a danger to others. The dog may also appear to be unaware of its behavior during and after an episode.

Dog considered to be psychotic generally manifest the following kinds of symptoms:

• intense periods of rage for no clinical reasons
• do not respond to external stimuli
• manic-depressive animals that cycle between depression and wild activity
• depressed dogs who do not respond to powerful stimuli, such as hunger, (such dogs may starve to death in the presence of food)

These cases have been seen in pet dogs as well as laboratory animals. The rage and manic-depressive states generally occur in excitable breeds, whereas depression more often manifests in dogs with inhibitive tendencies. Here are some notable factors often present in the history of so-called psychotic dogs:

* Early distemper (before 3 months of age).
* Serious parasitic infection (before 6 months of age).
* Severe beatings.
* Accidental injury, especially to the spine and/or head.
* Accidental drug overdose.
* Prolonged corticosteroid or other drug therapy.
* Diabetes
* Extreme psychic trauma.

It is also interesting to note that underlying physical problems are rarely, if ever, investigated with the same dedication applied to humans with similar conditions. As a result, the dogs are generally destroyed, which solves the owner’s immediate problem, but offers no progress toward understanding of the problem’s causes.

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[tags]psychotic dogs,how to identify a phychotic dog,identifying psychotic dogs,dog behavior[/tags]

Related posts:

1. Understanding Canine Over Excitability and Inhibition Behavior