Seizure Support Dogs

Seizure support dogs are trained to respond to a seizure in someone who has epilepsy. Seizures can be frightening. People feel more comfortable with a support dog, knowing they won’t be left alone if they do experience a seizure. Seizure dogs can help someone to live their life more freely and be able to complete activities they may have felt too at risk to do before.

Although seizure dogs greatly enhance the quality of life and increase independency, they are not suitable for everyone. They require commitment from their handler and high costs for training and maintaining them.

What Tasks Can Seizure Support Dogs Help With?

There are various tasks a seizure support dog may be able to assist with. In general, these dogs are trained to assist an individual as they experience the seizure. This may be by barking or otherwise alerting family members or caretakers when their owner is experiencing a seizure. This is of particular interest when a child has epilepsy, as this allows parents to feel comfortable giving their child some independence while also knowing they will be alerted if a seizure were to occur.

Other times, dogs will be able to physically protect someone as they seize. They may lie next to someone or even put their body in between the individual and the floor or other objects to prevent blunt force injury. Another important task for the dogs to complete is to prevent someone from walking toward dangerous areas if they experience a seizure that causes them to lose awareness but continue to wander

They also often have less seizure-specific support roles, such as retrieving medication in order to ensure the person with epilepsy is staying properly medicated. They also may be trained to open doors or turn on lights, as well as other helpful tasks that may make life easier for those with epilepsy.

Finally, one of the most interesting roles that these support dogs sometimes have is to notice and alert an individual before the seizure even occurs. This is something that can only be trained into dogs that already have the intuition and are able to detect seizures with their own accord. People who train seizure support dogs cannot guarantee that the dogs will be able to detect seizures, though many of them will be successfully trained in the other support roles

Training Seizure Support Dogs

Training seizure support dogs is a very long and arduous process. Dogs are generally bred specifically to be service dogs and picked out of each litter based on their individual characteristics. The best puppies for service dog training are typically accepting of being held, follow you as you walk around, and are quickly able to recover from startling experiences. Once a puppy has been chosen for training they spend roughly two years in both general obedience training and more advanced training for service dog-specific skills. Since these dogs have to be so specifically trained, up to 70% of them often fail the process. These dogs then go on to be household pets, while the remaining dogs move forward as service animals.

The remaining dogs are then checked for their ability to detect seizures. While it is a benefit for any of these dogs to be able to detect seizures before they occur, it is not necessary in order to be deemed a successful seizure support dog.

How to Get a Support Dog for Your Epilepsy

There is various criteria for someone to qualify to get a seizure support dog. There are many different programs available that cater to different groups of people with varying needs. For example, while children can benefit from this support, they also may find it difficult to go through the training necessary to partner with a seizure support dog. Therefore, some programs do not allow children to receive a seizure support dog, while other programs are tailored exclusively for children. Some programs may also require you to have a stable home environment, no other dogs in the home, and/or fit certain criteria related to your epilepsy.

One drawback for these support systems is the cost. Due to their specialized training, these dogs can cost up to $40,000. This price does vary, and there are sometimes financial supports to help cover the cost.

If you think that you may benefit from an epilepsy support dog, speak with your healthcare provider about the options available to you.