Suffering from physical and mental health related disabilities is something the founder of Golden Healer Service Dogs, (Mike Carlson) is all to familiar with. Mike was born with a rare skin disorder called Epidermolysis Bullosa (EB). Not only is EB physically painful at times, but it can also be mentally excruciating. Mike has struggled with it his entire life. Even though he faced these challenges, he always felt he needed to be strong and not let anyone know he had it. This often led to bouts of anxiety, depression, and anger. Especially throughout his childhood, the only thing that seemed to help him get through some days, was his love for animals, but mainly his dogs.

As soon as Mike moved out on his own and got married in 1995, the first thing he did was purchase a Labrador Retriever. He became interested in training his dog to hunt as he enjoyed the sport. He spent a lot of time reading dog training books and watching training videos. He soon began to help others with training their dogs for fun and also started breeding pure bred hunting Labs as a hobbyist.

During the same time, Mike was an entrepreneur and was a partner in a video production company with his father and brother. In addition, he worked several different jobs to provide for his new family, which consisted of 3 wonderful children.

Fast forward to 2008, Mike was running his own marketing business that had been doing extremely well for a few years. When the market crashed however, he was forced to close his business and ended up losing his home and pretty much everything he had, besides his family and dog. To make things worse, as they were preparing to move, Mike’s dog escaped from the backyard and unfortunately was hit and killed by a car. This was the icing on the cake to Mike’s spiral back into deep depression. This was a dark time for him that he tried to hide from everyone. At times he even contemplated suicide, which he has never shared with anyone, not even his family.

It took a couple of years until he was able to go back to work full time. He ended up getting a position with a behavioral health hospital in the marketing department. It was during this time, the aspect of mental health became important to him, as he began to understand more about his own issues and internal struggles. He also liked the idea of helping people with their challenges.

He began to realize his passion has always been to help people. Helping others is truly what makes him happy.

He started studying and researching Animal Assisted Therapy and how beneficial it can be to assist with mental health related issues.

He decided it was time to get back to doing what he loved, which was working with dogs. He chose English Cream Golden Retrievers because of his idea to use them in therapy work, and soon began breeding. As he started building his stock, he sold puppies and trained dogs to make a little side money. Soon It was mentioned by someone that they would like one of his puppies to be trained for service work.

He sent one of his pups to training and that ended up being the first official service dog. He then had a second litter of puppies and another request for a service dog and then an emotional support dog and then a therapy dog. The requests kept coming. Knowing from experience how much his dogs help him emotionally to cope with his own mental health conditions, Mike found his new passion to share his incredible dogs with others. Thus, Golden Healer Service Dogs was born.

Since then, Golden Healer Service Dogs has become a 501(c)3 nonprofit organization and has teamed up with some of the best breeders, trainers, and dog professionals, in the world. It is our goal to produce, develop and deliver the finest service dogs to anyone that suffers from mental illness or physical disabilities.

We develop our service dogs from puppies to ensure that they have been raised in the best environment and have solid foundations. This allows us to have a higher success rate when it comes to placement as a working service dog.

In addition to service dogs, we also train and develop emotional support dogs, and have a team of volunteer therapy dog handlers.