NIMH: Mind Your Manners and End Animal Experiments

In an unsurprising twist, it turns out that torturing animals for a living may damage a person’s psyche.

Studies show that laboratory personnel are prone to compassion fatigue, burnout, and traumatic stress due to their repetitious exposure to the pain and death inflicted upon animals. Depression, anxiety, hopelessness, guilt, and substance abuse are just a few of the other reported mental health issues that laboratory staff experience.

Not only is NIMH failing to produce treatments for mental illnesses, its misguided reliance on animal experimentation may also be contributing to the psychological burden of its staff.