Can animals have mental illnesses?

Answer 1

Modeling mental illness in animals has been greeted with skepticism, but despite the obstacles, researchers have made startling progress in reproducing behavioral symptoms in laboratory animals analogous to those seen in humans with disorders.

Mental illness would seem to be singularly human, a subjectively experienced distortion of consciousness affecting uniquely human attributes: thought, feeling, and language.

For that reason, it presents a unique challenge to the basic scientist seeking to reproduce its symptoms in experimental animals commonly used in the laboratory. Diabetes, high blood pressure, cancer, or other somatic conditions may be reliably replicated, but how does one reproduce depression, anxiety, or delusional paranoia in a laboratory rat?

"Modeling mental illness in animals still seems to many people to be an outrageous idea," Barbara Lipska, Ph.D., of the clinical brain disorders branch of the National Institute of Mental Health (NIMH), told Psychiatric News. "People cannot believe that psychiatric disorders can be modeled in a rat or a mouse or a primate because these disorders are believed to be inherently human. Delusions, hallucinations—how are we possibly able to reproduce these symptoms in an animal, and even if we do it, how would we know, since the animals cannot communicate verbally?"

But Lipska and other scientists say that in fact they are able to produce with greater and greater reliability certain behaviors in experimental animals—if not the underlying neuroanatomical or biochemical disorder itself—that are analogous to the behaviors in humans with mental illness and that are the phenomenological reflection of that underlying human disorder.

Daniel Weinberger, M.D., chief of the clinical brain disorders branch, said that new genetic technologies and other refinements are expanding the research potential in animal modeling. Today, scientists at NIMH are modeling schizophrenia in rats and disorders of memory and cognition in mice.

Elsewhere, researchers including Rene Hen, Ph.D., of Columbia University College of Physicians and Surgeons, and Irwin Lucki, Ph.D., of the University of Pennsylvania, are modeling depression and anxiety in laboratory animals.

"You can do experiments in animals that you cannot do in humans," Weinberger said. "The reason we do it is to help us understand underlying disease mechanisms, test causal hypotheses, and find new treatments."

Answer 2

Cats, as well as any animal can suffer from anxiety but its very hard to diagnos an animal with a mental illness.

Answer 3

Sure look at Anna Nicole Smith, Paris Hilton and Brittney

Answer 4

cats can have an illness like depression, but I'm not sure about other illnesses....in response to your first answer, " to be retarded means to be held back."

Answer 5

yes, like any human, animals can have all types of diseases, many of wich are treatable if properly diagnosed by a vet.

Answer 6

Yes they can and many are treatable. Consult your Vet for medical advice with this problem.

Good luck :-)

Answer 7

Yes - when they are in-bred too many times - it's very sad

Answer 8

I don't know about that but they can have behavioral problems.

Answer 9

sure they can, many animals have depression, or even hyperactivity.

Answer 10

There's Rabies for that.