Psychiatric assistance dog

Often partnered with people living with PTSD, severe anxiety or other psychiatric conditions, these dogs learn specific tasks: waking someone from a nightmare, interrupting a panic attack or repetitive behaviour, applying calming pressure by lying across a lap, or standing between their person and a crowd. Those trained tasks are what separate them from emotional support animals, which help simply by being there and, in the United States among other places, lack the same public access rights.