The Dog Whisperer returns to NatGeo on Tuesday with an episode called “High Anxiety,” that asks the question: “Can dogs have obsessive compulsive disorder?” From the trailer, which profiles three anxious dogs, it appears the answer is a solid yes, and in ways that seem nearly as varied as humans. Forgive me for laughing at both the last dog’s name and his particular form of OCD, which is actually just him thinking he’s smarter than his owner.
Via Psych Central’s Panic Blog, a Canadian digital media company called Agentic is trying to raise awareness of anxiety itself by trying to get people to Tweet with the hashtag #modernanxieties on February 8th. According to its website, ModernAnxieties.com, the company will donate five cents to the Vancouver Crisis Centre for each Tweet, up to $1000 (deep pockets!) The company’s examples of modern anxieties are “lack of email syndrome” and “upgrade fever.” (Ugh.)
Psych Central blogger Summer Beretsky thinks the campaign trivializes real anxiety (which it does), but it’s mainly just super-lame. If you want to donate five cents (or more) to the Vancouver Crisis Centre, there’s an easy way to do it on their website, and if you have PayPal it takes less than a minute. It’ll save you a bad case of “I Participated in a Social Media Marketing Campaign” syndrome, or whatever.
