Journal Entries

Journal Entry, September 22-28, 2014,

My first thought when I saw the assignment (find two encyclopedias or dictionaries and research your topic) was to find a psychology encyclopedia.  I first attempted to find one such book at the Undergraduate library, they possessed none.  Then I went to Davis Library, where I found an encyclopedia about trauma and psychology.  I thought this would give the perfect explanation about PTSD but I was wrong.  This encyclopedia was much too specific and contained no entry about PTSD in general.  Then I tried another, “The Corsini Encyclopedia of Psychology” which yielded the desired results.  I was able to glean the information needed quickly after the book was located. 

            After I found Information on PTSD I set out to find information on Psychiatric Service Dogs, or Therapy dogs, as is the more general term.  I first went to the UNC Library website and checked their catalog.  My first search term was encyclopedia dog, which yielded the book The international encyclopedia of dogs, it was in the Undergraduate library, so after some internal debating I packed up my laptop and went to the other library.  This Encyclopedia yielded no results, it was disappointing.  I then tried the online portion of the library, library.unc.edu then too E-research by discipline, then too encyclopedias, which yielded no results.  I then went back to the homepage and retyped encyclopedia dog I scanned the results and tried a few that lead me nowhere.  I then tried the search term, encyclopedia animal.  Which lead me to a book review which lead me to the book “NATIONAL GEOGRAPHIC ANIMAL ENCYCLOPEDIA” which seemed promising but lead me nowhere.  I then called it quits for the day and decided to try again tomorrow. 

            After some procrastination I tried a different approach to my problem, instead of searching for “Psychiatric Service Dogs”, I simply searched for “Dog”, it might not be the best for my project, but service dogs specifically for psychiatric use are a relatively new phenomenon, in fact most of the articles on this subject have been written no earlier than 2013.  However, this search did yield results and I have decided to use them.  After going to the UNC library website I typed in “animal encyclopedia” and limited the search to online resources, and clicked on the first link that caught my eye, specifically the “encyclopedia of animals” and then went to the “Dog” entry.  This was a decent encyclopedic entry and I have decided to use it. 

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Journal Entry; Annotated Non-Relevant Bibliography. 

          I started this assignment in a mindset of, oh crap I have three other projects due all in the same two days.  That being said I did try my best to make this look presentable.  Most of the articles I nixed in the prior assignment was because of the singularly militaristic view point they were written in.  It’s not a bad thing, but I already had so much from that one perspective that they just started being redundant.  As I’m writing this I just realized that I should probably ask my dad for advice on this project.  He was in the K9 division in the air force for a couple years in the 70’s, and trained Schutzhund dogs for a while after that. 

          The hardest part of this assignment was getting enough sources that weren’t websites.  There are a lot of blogs and such that talk about PSDs, but I couldn’t just use them in the assignment. 

          The research is not as hard as I thought it might be, more and more people are starting to write about this subject, so there is plenty of anecdotal evidence that this treatment works.  The difficult part of this research is that there are no peer-reviewed research papers about PSDs.  However I still think that my research is convincing. 

          The topic itself is still interesting to me, so I still like researching it.  My only qualm is that no one else seems to realize how helpful these dogs can be for people.  To me, once you hear about it, it almost seems like common sense.  When I was about 7 my mom’s doctors thought she had cancer, fortunately it was just an odd piece of fat, but none the less for about a month after I hear about it I was terrified.  But my two dogs were always there for me, Lilly used to walk up to me and just sit down on my lap when I was particularly scared, and I would always feel better because of her.  So by the same stroke, why can’t people whose brain is literally always telling them that they should be afraid feel better too when they have that same reassurance from a dog.  That’s why I’ve persisted with this topic, it seems like it could really help a lot of people who desperately need it.