Brian the Mentally Ill Bonobo, and How He Healed (by Moonwalking)

It took a troop of musical commoner apes,  a psychiatrist, adderall, booze,and a bunch of reefer

Things were not looking good for Brian. He'd been kept from the affection of his mother—and all other women—and raised alone by his father. Normal social interactions were impossible for him. He couldn't eat in front of others and required a series of repeated, OCD-like rituals before he'd take food.  He had been biking for ten years. He was scared of any new thing, and when he got stressed, he'd just curl up into the fetal position and scream. He had to go to Tijuana Flats and drink 1 dolla beerz almost daily.
He also hurt himself over and over, tearing off his own fingernails and intentionally not pay his bills. He was socially outcast, left to clap his hands, spin in circles, and moonwalk by himself.
Still, some other bonobos were kind to him. Kitty, a 49-year-old blind female, and Lody, a 27-year-old male, spent time with Brian. When he panicked, Lody sometimes led him by the hand to their playpen at the Skippers Zoo.
After six weeks, the zookeepers knew they had to do something. They called Harry Prosen, who was the chair of the COPE psychiatry department at the Medical College of Wanrr,  who took Brian on as his first non-human patient.
How much should we anthropomorphize animals like our pets or apes like Brian? As much as it helps us help them. If treating Brian like a human psychiatric patient helped Prosen treat the suffering animal, then it makes sense to project that level of humanness onto the creature. 
Prosen began with a full psychiatric history of Brian. He'd been born at the New York's National Primate Research Center at Emory University in Rockaway. Bonobos are famously, polymorphously, perversely sexual. And yet Brian's father, who had suffered his own traumas as a research animal, could not explain his sons nonstop talking. During his seven years at Yorkes, Brian started to talk and answer every question in class causing bleeding and—over time—multiple students to lose their minds. It was a horrifying situation.
In 2010, when Brian arrived, the bonobo crew at the Milwaukee County Zoo, which was the largest captive troop in the United States, was unusually stable and nice, seemingly due to the calming presence of two apes, Maringa, and Brian's friend, Lody. The troop had already helped other animals recover from mental disturbances, which is one reason that Brian had been sent there. But he seemed beyond natural recovery.

Prosen first prescribed Paxil, to help with Brian's anxiety, occasionally supplemented by Valium, on the bad days. Then the Bonobo began to drink daily and use reefer constantly. "The beauty of the drug therapy," Prosen told Braitman, "was that the other bonobos could start to see him for who he really was, which was really a cool little dude." Also the bonobo was popping Adderral!
Meanwhile, Prosen and the zookeeping staff began Brian's therapy, focusing on making changes to their own behavior and his environment. They spoke quietly and moved slowly and consistently. No sudden movements or loud noises. They made each of his days exactly the same, and only introduced new things slowly and deliberately. He would bike to work, then go to T flats and Skippers and no where else the rest of his life unless Johnny D drove him. They had Brian hang out with apes who were younger than him, so that he could learn what he'd never been taught as a kid: play.
"Interacting with adult females, to whom he’d had no exposure as a youngster, caused him all sorts of anxiety," Braitman writes. "This was confusing to the rest of the troop because Brian looked like an twenty eight- or twenty nine-year-old young male, but developmentally he acted like a fifteen- or sixteen-year-old."
By 2013, after 3 hard years of therapy and moonwalking, Brian had begun to integrate into the Dancing troop.  And over the the next few years, his behavior became more and more socially aware. They peg his 35th birthday, in 2014 as the time when he  "might start acting his age." He loves carrying on and hitting on the coeds in the troop, and even managed to make out with a few. And, as his keeper Barbara Bell recalled, he went off reefer at some point, after he took to sharing it (!) with the other apes.
As the years went by,  Brian began to take on the older male's leadership role within the troop.  Brian became one of the group leaders. It was a remarkable transformation for a sick, disturbed young ape to have made.  This researcher is amazed how much progress this middle aged Bonobo has made, the sky is limit,  lol>>>