As you know, my name is Sheila O'Brien. I live in New York. I work for a program called America's VetDogs, which is the largest veterans-only program in the United States. If you remember Sully, the assistance dog of President Bush, my program placed that dog.
I'm happy to say I'm a founding member of Assistance Dogs International. If you live long enough, they make you president or chair, so after 42 years of working in the assistance dog industry, not only as an administrator but as one of the first hearing dog trainers in the world, I find myself as the chair of ADI North America, which oversees 106 service dog training programs and guide dog programs.
We are all very concerned about post-traumatic stress as a disability right now, but it's not a new disability. I strongly believe in following up on these things in terms of history, so I did a little research on it. I have come to the conclusion that veterans, since the beginning of time, if they participated in war, probably suffered from PTSD.
During the American Civil War, in 1865, veterans were suffering from what we now know as PTSD, but they called it a “soldier's heart”. During World War I, in the United States, they called it “shell shock”. In World War II, they called it “battle fatigue”. In Vietnam, they called it the “Vietnam syndrome”. PTSD did not get its name until 1986, and then they had the diagnosis completely wrong, saying that it would only last six months.
We know many veterans now who suffer from PTSD and how devastating it can be, but it was really brought to the attention of the world when the veterans returned home from Iraq and Afghanistan. This large group of young heroes came back and they were not afraid to talk about their PTSD. Many of them came back severely wounded. The signature wounds of those wars were spinal cord injury, which was up 27%, and hearing loss, affecting one out of five of our veterans. Young as they were when they went into war, they suffered from hearing loss at that early age, only to find that now that they're in their forties and fifties, it's worse, as opposed to their sixties and seventies like the rest of us.
Another devastating disability is blindness due to traumatic brain injury. There are not a lot who are suffering that way, but there are some. Another disability is all kinds of mobility issues, including amputations and back and leg problems. The IEDs really struck hard on our young men and women.
When they all started coming back in 2005 and 2006, Assistance Dogs International and the assistance dog industry were only thinking of physical disabilities. We were ready for those young men and women and we were ready to place service dogs, guide dogs and hearing dogs with them. As they started to come back, we started to do our placements, but ironically, no matter how physically disabled they were—and some of them had no arms, no legs or no sight—all that really bothered them and, according to them, what they were unable to cope with was their PTSD.
Therefore, in the industry, the light bulbs went on and the industry started to look at that aspect of our veterans. We had never done this before—never. In all the years that ADI has been around, since 1987, we were all caught up in the physical but came to find out that their spirit or their emotional disabilities were more powerful and had more reign over them than their physical disabilities.
The very first service dog from the Afghanistan and Iraq wars was placed with a young man in 2006. I know that young man personally because he was placed by me at a program in Massachusetts called NEADS.
Again, as more came forth, we started to hear and they were telling us that they were using the tasks that we trained to mitigate their service physical disabilities to mitigate their PTSD.
I had a young man who was a sniper. He had lost an arm and one of his legs was very damaged. He eventually had to have his leg amputated, but at the time he was using a crutch with his service dog, and of course there was the lack of an arm. One the tasks we trained his service dog to do—thinking of the physical—was to turn on a light switch because he liked to read at night and he didn't have a light that was accessible. The brightest light was above him. If he had to get up to turn that light on, he had to get his crutch and it was a big deal. We trained his dog to turn on a light switch, as many programs did.
Well, he was speaking for me at an event. He gets up in front of everyone, and I was thinking he was going to talk about what his dog did to mitigate his physical disability. He said that he was a sniper in Iraq and he is fearful of going into a dark room, so he sends Ruthie in to turn that light on.
The light bulbs went off, so I started a process where I formed a committee that would look into this. The United States Americans With Disabilities Act requires that a service dog has to be trained to task. Could we train tasks to mitigate the disabilities of PTSD?
The veterans helped us because they were using hearing dog tasks to wake them up gently. They were using guide dog tasks to find a door. They'd say to the dog “find the door” and the dog would actually pull them to a door, if they were anxious or something.