All summer long, there was most likely someone home with your dog — the older students on break, or little ones with a babysitter. Now that everyone is back to their fall schedules, your dog may feel neglected and can even fall into depression.

Depression and Anxiety

According to veterinarians, dogs can suffer from depression just like us. Watch for symptoms such as listlessness, lack of energy, loss of appetite, hiding or cowering, and not wanting to play.

Other dogs suffer from separation anxiety. Unlike depression, separation anxiety manifests itself in erratic behavior, including excessive barking and whining, frantic clawing at doors, windows, or fences to get out, destructive chewing, and going to the bathroom in the house. Dogs with separation anxiety will be ecstatic when family members get home, whereas a depressed dog may not even get up from his bed.

If your dog displays any of these symptoms, she is probably upset by the recent change in schedules.

This change can be particularly hard on your dog if your child is starting kindergarten and you are going back to work for the first time. At this crucial time, it is important to not disregard your dog’s feelings — he loves you and he will miss you when you are not around.

Back to School Scheduling

So what can you do to prevent or help relieve depression in your dog? If your dog has never experienced “back to school,” it is going to take some time. If your dog has gone through this routine in past years, he may remember the routine and settle in more quickly. A simple routine can help alleviate any stress your dog feels. Even if your dog does not suffer from depression or anxiety per se, he will still appreciate this simple routine, which will ensure she gets enough attention and exercise.

Morning Exercise

Don’t forget to exercise your dog. Create a schedule with your family that gets everyone involved. Each morning someone should get up a little bit early, even just fifteen minutes, to take the dog out for a walk or a romp in the backyard before the day starts. Not only will this let your dog know you still care, but getting out that extra energy means she is less likely to be destructive while you are gone.

Time to Leave

When it is finally time to leave, don’t make a big deal of it. Pet your dog, but don’t get emotional — your dog can sense your emotions and if you are upset, he will be more likely to be upset. Distract him with a new toy (or an old one he hasn’t seen in a while) or a treat-stuffed toy. For anxious dogs, leaving a radio or TV on can help.

Afternoon Break

If you can, schedule someone in your family to go home around midday to let your dog out for some quick exercise. Not only does it break up the length of time she is left alone, but it also relieves some energy. If no one in the family can do it, consider asking a neighbor or hiring a dog walker. Taking her to a doggy daycare a couple of times a week is another great option.

Back Home

When you return home for the day, again don’t make a big deal of it. If you act like you have been gone forever, especially if your dog has anxiety, he will think you have been gone forever. The best thing to do is ignore him when you first get home, then after a few minutes, calmly greet your dog and take him out to go to the bathroom if needed.

Evening Exercise

It’s easy to forget the dog, even when you are home. You have had a long day, you had to cook dinner, help the kids with homework, and now all you want to do is sit on the couch. But your dog has been waiting for you all day and most likely has unspent energy. After her dinner, be sure to take her out for some exercise and play time.

Following this routine will help your dog not notice your absence so much. Keep a watch on his symptoms though, and if they get worse or do not improve, take him to a veterinarian to rule out any medical conditions that might be causing the symptoms.

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You may have heard of the “placebo effect.” This is a phenomenon that happens when people take harmless or inactive substances, like sugar pills, with the belief that they are medicine, and then their body reacts as if they had taken an actual drug.

The Scoop on Placebo

It’s most used in clinical trials of new medications, typically with half the people getting the test drug and half getting placebos. Ideally, neither the patients nor the doctors running the trial know which is which until researchers look at the data after the fact.

The whole point of this is to set a baseline to determine whether a new drug works. For example, if they’re testing a drug to clear up acne, if 20% of people taking a placebo show improvement in their skin condition, then the new drug has to show a much better than 20% success rate.

How the Placebo Effect Works

Nobody knows yet how or why the placebo effect works. Human expectation seems to play a part in it. People believe they are getting medicine, so something happens to heal their body. This seems borne out by another detail — the more expensive the placebo is, the better it works, which is what researchers discovered in a study at MIT. So it all seems to be mind-over-matter, but there are two exceptions.

First, one study sponsored by the Harvard University Faculty of Medicine seemed to show that the placebo effect works even in cases where doctors explain specifically to patients that what they’re getting contains no medicine at all.

Second, and more surprisingly, the placebo effect works on dogs.

If it’s all about the effect of the mind on the body, then what’s going on when a dog, which doesn’t understand what medicine is or the difference between a prescription and a placebo, shows a medical effect from being given an inert sugar pill?

The answer is conditioning.

How Dogs Responded

The study was done to determine whether the placebo effect could treat separation anxiety but, unlike with humans, the researchers began by giving dogs a mild sedative before their owners left. Once this showed an effect of calming the dogs down, they switched over to a placebo — and the dogs calmed down just as if they’d been given the sedative.

Now a dog obviously does not realize someone is giving them a pill to make them calm down before their owners leave and then going through the intellectual process of, “That made me feel better,” so their minds take over to calm their bodies down. It’s an entirely instinctual process. By creating a ritual with the real medicine that had the specific result of calming the dog down, the researchers were then able to remove the medicine while still seeing the effect.

This is another example of Pavlovian conditioning in action. To the dog, “getting a pill in the morning” always resulted in calming down, so that the action itself became the cue for the behavior.

Instinct vs Intellect

This may also be a clue as to why the placebo effect works in humans — it isn’t working for us on an intellectual level, either. Rather, it’s working on our instincts after our intellects have been engaged. Our minds say to us, “This is medicine, it must work,” and then our bodies take over to present the desired effect — whether we’ve actually taken any medication or not.

Of course, there’s one other aspect of the placebo effect in dogs that the researchers didn’t take into account: human expectation. Just as a dog is conditioned to calm down after the ritual of taking a pill, perhaps our expectations affect our energy. Remember, our dogs read our energy, so that if the human believes the medication will work, the dog picks up on that as well.

The human thinking that the pill will work may reduce their anxiety about their dog’s anxiety, and so not feed into it prior to leaving the dog alone. It’s yet another example of “expectations equal outcome,” which is a very powerful tool in helping to find balance with our dogs.

Does your dog give you a hard time to take her meds? Tell us in the comments how you deal with the situation.

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