The Potential Benefits of Co-Design in Dog-Assisted Treatment Programs for Veterans Seeking Mental Health Care

Veterans are more likely than the general population to experience a range of mental health problems. While many veteran mental health support programs are available, veterans may struggle to access and engage with these services for various reasons (e.g., a stigmatized perception of mental health disorders, mistrust). Animal-assisted services have become more popular in civilian and military health care settings where traditional therapies (e.g., cognitive behavioral therapy) may not always be effective. Assistance dogs, for example, which live with veterans to provide disability support, have been successfully employed for veteran mental health. Unfortunately, a subgroup of veterans may miss out on the benefits of assistance dogs due to an inability or unwillingness to care for a dog full-time. Thus, therapy dogs, which are typically owned by therapists and participate in goal-directed treatment programs, may be a better mental health support option for these veterans. Unfortunately, the process of integrating dogs into mental health treatment for veterans has not been clearly documented in scientific literature. Therefore, it is necessary to design a program that veterans and clinicians would find valuable. Co-design may be useful to find out what veterans need and enable veterans and clinicians to work together to design an effective dog-assisted mental health treatment program. To this end, the aims of this narrative literature review are to highlight the potential effectiveness of dog-assisted treatment for veterans with mental health issues, and to explore why the use of co-design may help with systematic development of a dog-assisted treatment program.