Therapy chicken farm helps mentally ill

06/04/2014

Working with animals can help people with mental illness to re-perceive themselves. A chicken farm with changing location in the Swabian Ravensburg should give mentally ill people hope for a fulfilling life.

Hope for a fulfilled life
Can chickens have a therapeutic effect? A new project in the Swabian Ravensburg makes people with a mental illness by working with animals hope for a fulfilling life. Every few weeks, the mobile stable of the Riesenhof garden center changes location. The nursery is one of the social psychiatric aids of Bruderhaus Diakonie. Gardening and Production Manager Andreas Gronmaier says: „They can get involved in their work, have an identification with their task, with nature and of course with the chickens and the eggs produced.“

Mobile farm without factory farming
The company employees take care of the animals, collect eggs, keep the chicken coop clean and take care of the move. „The chickens trample and mash the meadow, the accumulating feces is in the long term from a hygienic point of concern“, so Gronmaier. Therefore, the chickens are in good weather every two weeks and in winter or in continuous rain even weekly to another location. „So the chickens can always look forward to fresh grass.“ In contrast to factory farming, the mobile farm is manageable and home to only seven animals.

Lead the mentally ill to a daily structure
„The need to take care of the animals exerts an elemental and immediately comprehensible appeal“, explained Michael Ziegelmayer from the Professional Association of German Psychologists. „You are needed, you have responsibility. There is no need for complicated mediation or good arguments; the necessity is immediately obvious.“ There are about 40 rehabilitation facilities in Germany that want to lead mentally ill people to training or employment, ideally in the first job market. „In any case, it is important to introduce the patients to a daily structure and to integrate them into a good social context“, so brickmayer. „The knowledge that one person depends on the other has an immediate appeal character, in contrast to abstract stimuli that are purely for making money or that a machine should be operated.“

Not all mental illnesses are comparable
In the field of work with psychologically impaired people working with animals is still rare, but in a special way motivating, says the director of the action mental ill in Bonn, Ulrich Krüger. There are no patent remedies, but tailor-made solutions are needed in rehabilitation. It depends on the right form of activity and the appropriate burden, but also on finding the right environment for the patients: „One has to get rid of the idea that all mental illnesses are comparable.“

More than one in three Europeans affected
The importance of different therapeutic approaches for mental patients also becomes clear when you realize how many people are affected by it. Three years ago, a study by the Dresden University of Technology (TU) showed that around 38 percent of Europeans suffered from mental illness such as anxiety disorders, alcohol habit, attention deficit syndrome (ADHD) or depression within one year. It has been noticeable that mental disorders are common in all age groups and are common among children and young adults. The three-year work involved all 514 million inhabitants of the 27 EU countries as well as Iceland, Norway and Switzerland and took into account more than 100 different mental and neurological conditions. (Ad)