Veterinary Mental Health and the Case for Expanding the Clinical Toolkit
Canadian veterinarians report burnout, depression and suicidal ideation at rates well above the general population. A 2020 University of Guelph study out of the Ontario Veterinary College, led by Jennifer Perret and Andria Jones-Bitton, surveyed roughly 1,400 practitioners and found that 26.2 percent had experienced suicidal thoughts in the previous year, compared with 12.2 percent among Canadians overall. A related survey from the same research group found that 17 percent of respondents had seriously considered suicide at some point since starting veterinary school. Male veterinarians are estimated to face a suicide risk 1.6 times higher than the general population, and female veterinarians 2.4 times higher.
The Canadian Veterinary Medical Association describes compassion fatigue as a gradual erosion of empathy resulting from sustained, repeated exposure to suffering in patients and the people who love them. The clinical framing is precise, but it points to a mechanism most practitioners would recognize without reading a definition. A veterinarian who spends fifteen years returning to the same limited set of treatment options, on cases where none of them felt adequate, experiences that repetition differently than one working with a broader range of clinically defensible tools.
Medication, surgery and euthanasia remain the foundation of veterinary practice and will continue to be. The argument here concerns the range of options that sit alongside them, not a replacement for them. What follows is an overview of six fields that Canadian veterinarians, registered veterinary technicians and students are increasingly training in, positioned as extensions of conventional care rather than alternatives to it. Each entry outlines what separates a credible program from a weaker one, along with a detail that’s easy to overlook.
One point is worth establishing before any of that. Provincial regulatory colleges, not certifying bodies, determine what a practitioner may legally do with a given credential. The College of Veterinarians of Ontario, for example, maintains specific language on what qualifies as an acceptable chiropractic certification. That distinction is worth confirming before enrolling in a program, not after.
Acupuncture Has Split Into Two Schools, and They Don’t Agree With Each Other
Everyone mentions that acupuncture is roughly 4,000 years old. What gets left out is that veterinary acupuncture education in North America has quietly split into two camps that view each other with something close to suspicion.
The older camp is IVAS, teaching a Traditional Chinese Veterinary Medicine framework since 1974, built around meridians, energy flow, and point selection rooted in TCM theory. The newer camp is CuraCore, founded by Dr. Narda Robinson, a veterinarian with a parallel medical degree in osteopathy, who built her entire curriculum around stripping the energy-based language out and replacing it with neuroanatomy and myofascial mechanics. CuraCore’s course literature is unusually blunt about this, marketing itself explicitly as acupuncture “without the mystical energies.” It even runs a dedicated Canadian arm out of Sidney, BC, alongside its Colorado home base.
The two camps produce practitioners who use needles in visibly similar ways and explain what they’re doing in almost incompatible language. If you’re choosing between them, the honest question isn’t which one is “real.” It’s which explanation you’d actually be comfortable giving a client across the exam table.
Rehab Is the One That Already Won the Argument
Every modality on this list has a credibility fight somewhere in its history. Rehabilitation mostly doesn’t, anymore. It has its own board-certified specialty (ACVSMR), and its founding program, the University of Tennessee’s CCRP, has been running since 1999, longer than a lot of the vets currently enrolling in it have been practising.
What’s less well known is how much room this field leaves for RVTs specifically. The CCRP and CCRT tracks both have technician-level tiers with their own credentials, not just a supporting role under a certified vet, and Canadian rehab clinics increasingly build their whole treatment model around a tech who’s done the work rather than a vet who occasionally checks in. If you’re an RVT looking for a lane that doesn’t require going back for a DVM, this is arguably the deepest one on this list.
Herbal Medicine Has a Trust Problem Vets Aren’t Told About
Here’s a number that should unsettle anyone practising: in a 1997 University of Florida follow-up survey, 42 percent of animal owners reported using some form of complementary medicine, and 60 percent of them never told their regular vet. That gap hasn’t closed. It’s the reason herbal certification exists at all, not because herbs are exotic, but because clients are already dosing their pets with them, quietly, and a vet who can’t ask the right follow-up question is missing half the clinical picture.
The VBMA’s Certified Veterinary Herbalist credential is the closest thing this field has to a gold standard, but CuraCore’s 40-hour course takes a deliberately narrower goal: not turning you into an herbalist, just making sure you can hold a real conversation with a client instead of nodding along.
Hospice Care Exists Because “Euthanize Now” Was Never Actually One Decision
Every other field on this list adds a treatment option. Hospice and palliative care adds a treatment timeline. It reframes the end of a pet’s life as a stretch of weeks or months to be managed with comfort and dignity, rather than a single appointment where a decision gets made under pressure, often in a waiting room, often through tears.
IAAHPC’s certification, launched in 2016, is genuinely young as credentials go, roughly 100 hours across five modules, and fewer than 400 people worldwide have completed it. That’s not a knock on the field; it’s a sign of how recently the profession decided this deserved formal training at all, rather than being left to whichever vet happened to be good at hard conversations.
Chiropractic Is the One Where the Paperwork Actually Matters
This is the field where “check with your provincial college first” isn’t boilerplate advice, it’s the entire point. Spinal manipulation therapy sits close enough to the edge of accepted practice that regulators have drawn specific lines around it. Ontario’s college names AVCA certification directly as the accepted standard; other provinces have their own wording, and it’s genuinely worth reading before enrolling in anything.
One detail that surprises people: because AVCA-recognized programs like Options for Animals also train licensed human chiropractors who want to cross over into animal work, some of the practitioners you’ll be learning alongside aren’t veterinarians at all. In Canada, where the density of licensed chiropractors is high, that crossover pipeline runs busier than most people expect.
Nutrition Doesn’t Feel Like a “Fourth Option,” Which Is Exactly Why It’s Underused
Nobody puts diet in the same mental category as acupuncture or chiropractic, and that’s probably a mistake. Therapeutic nutrition is arguably the most evidence-backed integrative tool on this entire list, and it’s the one most vets already believe in without having formal training to back the belief up.
Full board certification through ACVN requires a residency most working vets can’t take on. But Ontario Veterinary College and the Western College of Veterinary Medicine in Saskatoon both run periodic CE in this space specifically for practitioners who want real depth without leaving the country or their practice behind for years to get it.
The Part That Doesn’t Show Up in a Course Catalogue
The dollar figures around this shift are real. The alternative and integrative veterinary medicine market is on track to roughly double by 2033, and that growth is being pulled by client demand, not pushed by veterinary schools, which means a lot of practitioners are already fielding these questions from owners without ever having studied the answers.
But the number worth sitting with is the other one: veterinary professionals who report less control over euthanasia decisions, and fewer options to offer before reaching that point, show measurably higher secondary traumatic stress than those who don’t. That’s not a coincidence, and it’s not really about client demand or revenue per visit either. It’s about what happens to a person who spends a career being handed the same three tools for every hard case, regardless of whether those tools were ever actually the right fit.
