Animals can suffer from many of the same mental illnesses that humans do, such as anxiety, depression, obsessive compulsive disorder (OCD) and post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD). But there’s one mental illness that, at least as far as we can tell, that animals don’t get: schizophrenia.
Schizophrenia and Animals
Admittedly, it would be difficult to know if an animal were suffering from schizophrenia. The National Library of Medicine describes the symptoms of schizophrenia as including hallucinations, most commonly auditory but often involving hallucinatory visions, smells or even tastes, as well. In addition, schizophrenia can cause delusions, such as thinking that you’re George Washington or Napoleon, that you’re the focus of an evil plot or even that you’re being controlled by beings from other planets or dimensions.
If something like that were going on in the mind of, say, your dog, how would you even know? Meanwhile, cats certainly appear to hear voices that we can’t, but unfortunately, they can’t tell us about them.
