Can Service Dogs Make Life Easier for Veterans With PTSD?

In 2024, a group of researchers published a paper in the journal JAMA Network Open that sought to answer a potentially life-changing question for many people: can trained service dogs improve the mental health of veterans living with PTSD? The research, funded by the National Institute of Health, suggested an affirmative answer. “Participants in the intervention group reported significantly lower PTSD symptom severity after 3 months compared with participants in the control group,” the paper’s authors wrote.

That research isn’t the only form of exploration into whether living with a service dog can boost veterans’ mental health. In an article for The New York Times, Simar Bajaj chronicled the positive impact of service dogs on veterans’ PTSD, including a reference to “a growing cadre of veterans using service dogs for PTSD relief.” That’s the good news; the bad news is that getting trained dogs to veterans in need is more of a challenge than it might seem. There’s the matter of veterans needing to meet certain qualifications, and there are challenges to getting enough dogs trained who can make a difference.

Can this access be expanded? In 2024, NPR reported on a piece of legislation, the Service Dogs Assisting Veterans Act, which would allocate funds to the Department of Veterans Affairs to help bolster efforts to train service dogs for veterans with PTSD. The House version of bill was placed on the Union Calendar in late September, and it has bipartisan support, including 76 cosponsors as of this writing.

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A version of the bill has also been taken up by a bipartisan group of lawmakers in the Senate. In April, Senators Thom Tillis and Richard Blumenthal introduced this legislation in the Senate. “The SAVES Act will ultimately put more service dogs in the hands of Veterans with visible and invisible disabilities, allowing them to regain their independence and reintegrate into civilian life,” said Bill McCabe of the nonprofit group K9s for Warriors. “We applaud this bipartisan, bicameral effort and urge Congress to pass this important legislation without delay.”

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Tobias Carroll

Tobias Carroll lives and writes in New York City, and has been covering a wide variety of subjects — including (but not limited to) books, soccer and drinks — for many years. His writing has been published by the likes of the Los Angeles Times, Pitchfork, Literary Hub, Vulture, Punch, the New York Times and Men’s Journal. At InsideHook, he has…