They are 100% a real thing. Just anecdotally, I knew a kid who had autism and social anxiety, which made doing anything at school incredibly difficult for them. The turnaround when they were allowed to bring an emotional support animal (a small dog in this case) was like a miracle. For this alone they deserve to be respected and taken seriously.

But I see a lot of people talking about how people will abuse the system for emotional support animals. In Australia the schools with the highest rates of mental health issues all happen to be the wealthiest private schools. While this could be because they have better access to healthcare, it is more often because if they say they have a mental health diagnosis, then they can get special consideration for their exams, hence many of these kids don't actually have a mental health problem they are just seeking ways to abuse the system. The same goes for saying whether you speak a different language to English as a first language, or when people will claim they are Aboriginal due to distant relatives when if you talk to them they will identify as some other ethnicity. Just because people abuse the system doesn't mean that the original issues don't exist and shouldn't be taken seriously. Especially in the case of Aboriginal people (since there's always some discussion about it in the media, mostly due to receiving government payments if you identify as Aboriginal) where due to the attempted genocide it is basically impossible for anyone to keep track of their family tree anyway.

Actually, since everyone here is from the US, a more obvious recent example is the student loan debt forgiveness and how most wealthy people have abused to system to receive more debt forgiveness than the people who need it the most. We just can't judge things based on whether the benefits are being abused because there's always wealthy people abusing the system.