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Having a Cat Does Not Cause Mental Illness, New Study Suggests
- daysforbeef 10y agoHaving a cat may not cause mental illness, just that in my experience having a cat is a sign of mental illness
- thatcat 10y agoReally? What's your reasoning here? I would speculate that having a dog would be a better after the fact indicator of mental illness considering their more frequent use in animal assisted therapy. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Animal-assisted_therapy#Types https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Animal-assisted_therapy#Types
- jjtheblunt 10y agoi realize you're joking, but it made me think: i wonder if there are any correlations about "not having a pet" with egocentrism.
- daysforbeef 10y agoI feel people who own pets don't see things from a pet's perspective. But that's probably just me. Having someone love you based on sort of sort weird stockholm-syndrome based relationship is weird. The cat comment, as much as it's a joke I have seen most folks around me who own cats have this need for constant drama. And Goodness, no matter how much the cats randomly lashes out at these owners, the owners still love em, where's the bloody logic in that? I guess everyone on here is a S&M lover. But anecdotal evidence doesn't count for much haha
- wincy 10y agoI found my cat outside in the dead of winter, she came inside voluntarily, I got her fixed, and I keep her fed. I nursed her back to health when something bit open her leg while she was outside. She goes out pretty much every day and is waiting for me at the door when I get home. I mean, the alternative is the cat being a stray or being put down in a shelter, are either of those better? I don't have to go home every day to my wife, but I still choose to. I don't think that's "Stockholm Syndrome", just a good situation that I want to continue.
- rosser 10y ago> But anecdotal evidence doesn't count for much haha Don't discount confirmation bias. I'd bet that's also in play, in your narrative about "cat people".
- daysforbeef 10y agoyep yep true and most likely true
- cowpewter 10y agoIf a cat is "randomly lashing out" at their owners, then yeah, that's a pretty good sign that the owners don't see things from the cat's perspective. Cat social behavior has its own internal consistency though. Usually the problem starts when people expect cats to behave like dogs. They don't have the same motivations as dogs at all. Learn cat body language, and understand that cats see us as big, weird, slightly dumb, hairless cats that belong to the same "cat colony" as them, and nothing a cat does will seem "random" anymore.
- daysforbeef 10y agoWith all due respect, I will never understand how that statement differs from trying to understand the ways of an abusive ex and trying to thread carefully based on it? pretty sure the abusive nature comes from somewhere and then for some darn reason I'm walking on egg shells when I could pretty much invest my time in a more nicer manner. Unless you think that putting up with complete crap is something people ought to aspire to do (don't mean to come up as an asshole, but seriously mate?)
- jcslzr 10y ago"not having" maybe not, but I try to stay away of anyone who does not like dogs or music. Something is fundamentally wrong with those people.
- pvaldes 10y agoIs an animal that is often misunderstood.
- dragonsky67 10y agoI may resemble that remark ;-)
- gwern 10y agoIf you look at the abstract, all of the correlations actually show that having a cat does predict mental illness at all ages considered. But the effect sizes are relatively low (albeit consistent with the more direct studies looking at people actually infected with toxoplasma rather than people who might be infected), so with a few hundred or thousand people, it technically doesn't satisfy p<0.05. Nevertheless, this is further evidence for toxoplasma having bad effects. This seems to be a trend with toxo papers - take a too-small sample, do no power or Bayesian analysis, find all bad correlations, but declare evidence of safety anyway.
- dkhenry 10y agoI don't think its just toxo papers, people use bad math in all kinds of scientific papers.
- jessriedel 10y agoThe jump from "we could not detect a difference" to "there is no difference" is so frustrating. (And this is a mistake the authors make in this case, not just the journalists.)
- beojan 10y agoThey did say "no evidence of a link" in the title and abstract, though the conclusion at the end of the abstract unfortunately says the study strongly suggests there is no link. Given the quoted odds ratios are > 1, this is a strange statement to make.
- deleted 10y ago[deleted]
- smallnamespace 10y agoYes, frequentist inference only allows you to reject the null hypothesis (cats do not cause mental illness), but not to accept it if you fail to reject [1]. The abstract as written is simply wrong from a statistical point of view: our study strongly indicates that cat ownership in pregnancy or early childhood does not confer an increased risk of later adolescent PEs [2] If you instead adopt Bayesian reasoning, then the direction of the measured effect is weak evidence that cats cause illness later in life. Either way you cut it, the study author's interpretation fails to coincide with the actual data they collected. [1] https://liesandstats.wordpress.com/2008/09/08/accept-the-null-hypothesis-or-fail-to-reject-it/ https://liesandstats.wordpress.com/2008/09/08/accept-the-nul... [2] https://www.cambridge.org/core/journals/psychological-medicine/article/div-classtitlecuriosity-killed-the-cat-no-evidence-of-an-association-between-cat-ownership-and-psychotic-symptoms-at-ages-13-and-18-years-in-a-uk-general-population-cohortdiv/75C9A48B669BE36E947AFB0BC5CB00CA https://www.cambridge.org/core/journals/psychological-medici...
- anonymoose321 10y agoLet me guess... study sponsored by cats?
- neogodless 10y agoObviously you didn't read the article. The humans that come in contact with cats have altered minds; they sponsored the article, with no direct links to the original feline overlords.
- robynsmith 10y agoWhy the cat hate on HN?
- astrodust 10y agoHN hates everything, cats included. It's bewildering.
- B1FF_PSUVM 10y ago> cats included. It's bewildering. Only to those possessed by cats. Q.E.D.
- holografix 10y agoIs there a simple, accurate and cost efficient test for toxoplasma? I got a cat 2 years ago... it never leaves the apartment on the 7th floor and never comes in contact with other cats. However it is a rescue cat so could have been infected before adoption.
- rosser 10y agoThere are serological antibody tests for T. gondii, but they appear to vary widely in accuracy (sensitivity, specificity, ppv, &c). I have no idea what they cost.
- pvaldes 10y agoYour pet is not even remotely close to the cats risk group. Only the 0,7% on average of the cats drop oocysts in its faeces and it still will take 1 to 5 days for this oocysts to activate and be able to transmite the disease. If you clean daily the litter box of your cat with gloves and you are not pregnant or inmunocompromised the problem is greatly minimized.
- Icedcool 10y agoOh thats good. This was something I've been wondering lately.
- ender89 10y agoFine! Guess I'll have to go back to blaming my parents or eating lead paint chips.
- smsm42 10y agoMy cat told me so a long time ago.