Tip:
Highlight text to annotate it
X
According to the Depart of Veterans Affairs, experts believe PTSD occurs in 11 - 20%
of the veterans who served in Iraq and Afghanistan. Paul Jingozian is a Vietnam Veteran
with PTSD. He helps spearhead a support group for veterans who have this disorder. So - what is
PTSD? It's stress related. A lot of police men, firemen, I mean there are a lot of jobs that
people that deal with a lot of stress and they bottle this up inside and it really changes
their life. It changes the way that they look at life. It changes the way they treat
people. It's something that people sometimes don't even realize that they have. So it's
like you don't want people to get near you because, nothing but bad things happen. And
that's sort of in a nutshell but it explains PTSD. You're angry, you're hyper vigilante, you're a
myriad of things. You don't want to go in crowds. You don't trust people. You're easily startled.
You're sad. You have terrible nightmares. You wake up with cold sweats and you got to
change your sheets and change your clothes and you dream about horrible things that you saw or
encountered when you were in battle in the service. But it's a very difficult thing to deal
with. It's a very difficult thing to admit that you suffer from. And I just started
learning about service dogs for PTSD. I think it's just a wonderful thing. Jeez I wish I
had a dog that could've - cause their unconditional love. And I mean it's wonderful. And to have
a pet a therapy dog. Is great I know for people with in spinal injuries and whatever but having
it for Posttraumatic Stress Disorder is really a great concept and I think it's really,
really a good thing. Psychiatric Service Dogs are helping veterans deal with PTSD. One of
the organizations helping to train these animals is Stiggy's Dogs. Stiggy's Dogs is an
organization in honor of Ben Cas-tig-lee-own. He was a hospital corpman serving in
Afghanistan with a Marine Platoon. Ben was killed in action on September 3rd, 2009.
His marines had given him a call name - Doc Stiggy, taken from his last name. Ben was
passionate about taking care of his Marines and Stiggy's Dog's helps keep that legacy alive.
Ben, yeah, Benjamin Phillip Castiglione, that's his name, long name that's why, Marines
aren't real big for long things they like to shorten things down to something like Stiggy. He was
a kid he was always trying to help people. He was that kid that would spend his lunch money
to give it to somebody else to help them out. He was always getting into trouble for that
kind of thing, trying to help people. And he joined the Navy because he was at that point he
wasn't sure what he wanted to do in College, but he knew he wanted to help people. So he
joined up. And that was the first part and once he got in there and he really started
seeing what a corpsman does, and they help out. That was it for him. They have two choices they
can either be a hospital corpsman or what they call Greenside and he immediately
went Greenside. He wanted to be out n the field taking care for Marines. And it wasn't about,
it's not about the Patriotism or saluting the flag or anything for him it was just about taking
care of his guys. And that's why he went back. He deployed before he had to the second time, he
volunteered. Because somebody had to take care of his guys and he didn't trust anybody else.
Stiggy's Dogs is a 501c3 non profit organization where we rescue dogs and we train them as
psychiatric service dogs and then we pair them with military veterans with PTSD, post
traumatic stress disorder and TBI, traumatic brain injury. Oh there's a lot of ways that
theses dog really help these veterans and a lot of them again depend upon their individual
need of what their looking for. So first and foremost I think that a lot of what we see
commonly is that anxiety, and panic disorder of being in crowds. Constantly looking over
their shoulders and what these dogs do is they're able to get them out into crowds and one way
is I just had a veteran I just saw Jeff Beck last weekend and he said, "When I'm out with my
dog, everybody looks at her." So nobody looks at them. But he also gave a different
perspective in that it also gave him a chance to look at them. So it gives them that sense of
confidence and the dogs are also their eyes and their ears. There are many different types of
service dogs out there, most common one that people are familiar with is the Leader Dogs
for The Blind. The second most common dog that people are familiar with is the Hearing
Dogs for the Deaf. There are a wide range of different dogs. We have mobility assistant dogs. We
have seizure assistance dogs. Psychiatric service dogs is a pretty wide circumference of
what we have. Under the Psychiatric Dogs, first of all their main job is to relieve or
mitigate a disability that their handler has. Whether it's a physical or mental disability,
theses dogs can actually serve double duty like that. Some of our dogs do a combination of
tactile stimulation, psychiatric service dog test as well as mobility dog tasks. We also, one
of our dogs is currently going double duty to be trained to be a seizure notified. The veteran
just recently just started having seizures so we're teaching the dog to go and find
his wife when he's about to have seizure that's the best way so that there's somebody to
monitor. So a lot of these dogs, the psychiatric service dog field actually covers a wide
range. These dogs can work with autism, these can work with special needs children, they can
work with adults of any type of situation whether it's mobility or more of a psychiatric. The
more commonly used with schizophrenics, as well as with bi-polar disorder. Anybody
that's owned a dog can tell you the benefits of having a dog. They're absolutely wonderful
they don't judge you so you could be having the worst day of your life and your dog is still
going to look at you like they love you. So the psychiatric help there is just so natural
for the dog to do. There are other tasks though, that these dogs that define them as service
dogs. They're not just a companion, they're not a therapy dog, they are a service dog.
Some of the things that these dogs do that falls into psychiatric service would be
medication reminder. If a patient goes off their medication this is very bad for
their health. The dog can be trained to notify them, "Hey, it's time for you to take your
meds." So that's one way that the dog can help mitigate. The dogs are also trained to do kind
of surveillance if you will. It takes a while to build that partnership but once they have
that bond and they have that cohesive unit it's incredible a lot of that weight is
transferred to the dog and the dogs really enjoy that work. They like to have that
leadership role. They like to know that they've got it under control and it's a very good