Service dogs are trained to assist humans. This assistance potentially exposes them to stressors To investigate if service dogs are exposed to more stressors than companion dogs we questioned whether hair cortisol levels differed between both groups.

We studied this by cutting a tuft of hair from the neck of 19 companion and 11 service dogs. Cortisol levels were subsequently analyzed via immunoassay and compared via a simple linear regression model. The influence of coat color, season, sex, other dogs, pets, or mental health diagnoses in the household was also checked .

Mensen met psychische problematiek kunnen baat hebben bij lotgenotencontact. Het is een belangrijke vorm van informele zorg die nog onvoldoende aandacht krijgt in de reguliere zorg.

More than 700 000 people lose their life to suicide every year. A core foundation of suicide prevention is the timely registration and regular monitoring of suicide and self-harm. Surveillance data can be used to show important progress towards reaching global targets, such as reducing the suicide rate by one third by 2030 as articulated in the UN SDGs and in the WHO Mental Health Action Plan 2013-2030.

Following the trauma of the Shoah, many survivors took to writing their experiences in memoir. The trauma  memoir, a term defined in the body of this thesis, became a significant space to share real world experiences of a genocide that shocked the world. Trauma is continuous, it lives on through the repetitive behaviours of the survivor, a concept that Sigmund Freud conceptualizes as the “compulsion to repeat” (XVII 1920–1922 19).