Therapeutic Wilderness Schools - Any Insights?
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Anonymous
| Thank you for your thoughts...and I am so happy it helped your son. I enrolled my son in a PHP program....he wouldn't go. He stayed frozen on the couch at home. The parents who have turned to WT have already tried IOP, PHP, etc.... |
Anonymous
| My child was kicked out of PHP due to being too aggressive. He was moved to inpatient where he was stabilized with different medications and then released. The PHP program would not take him back. So in the end he was not able to do the work to get better. |
Anonymous
Aggression and elopement history were the reasons that so many forms of treatment were not available to my child including most RTC programs. |
Anonymous
|
I worked in a wilderness therapy program (Utah) as a guide. The staff training was adequate but the "on the ground" training was incredible - we worked closely with the therapists, medical director, and seasoned staff (there is a promotion system based on experience within the program). The staff really cares about the kids. Seeing the transformation over the course of their time in the program is incredibly heartwarming. You want staff who understand adolescents, manipulation, how to teach the concept of accountability, and who are not afraid of emotional outbursts.
I shivered with the kids out in the coldest weather, taught them (tangible and social/emotional) skills that changed their lives, marveled at their ability to adjust to strict rules, cried while hearing their impact letters read aloud, joined them in therapy sessions, celebrated when they moved on (most to therapeutic school programs), and grieved those who didn't make it and went to other placements with less freedom. It's not easy for anyone. But the potential for growth and healing is profound. There is power in nature that can can be tremendously healing and life altering. It was the hardest job I ever did. And I loved it. |
Anonymous
| Evoke WT in utah saved my son |
Anonymous
| Blue Ridge in GA is an amazing place that changed our lives. |
Anonymous
So why would wilderness therapy be appropriate for that kind of severe behavior? What kind of practices do they have to manage them? What's the argument for a kid with such severe behaviors going to a LESS regulated, less professionally trained program ... that takes place in the wilderness away from medical care and oversight? |
Anonymous
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Not Wilderness Therapy, but on topic:
https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2021/10/18/the-shadow-penal-system-for-struggling-kids |
Anonymous
| How is an article on religious abuse relevant? |
Anonymous
Not the person who posted it, but I read the article, which explains clearly how little help is available to families and how oversight of this market is nonexistent. |
Anonymous
from the article: "Each year, some fifty thousand adolescents in the U.S. are sent to a constellation of residential centers—wilderness programs, boot camps, behavior-modification facilities, and religious treatment courses—that promise to combat a broad array of unwanted behaviors. There are no federal laws or agencies regulating these centers. In 2007, the U.S. Government Accountability Office found that, in the previous seventeen years, there had been thousands of allegations of abuse in the troubled-teen industry, and warned that it could not find “a single Web site, federal agency, or other entity that collects comprehensive nationwide data.” The next year, George Miller, a member of Congress from California, championed the Stop Child Abuse in Residential Programs for Teens Act, which tried to create national safety standards and a system for investigating reports of abuse and neglect at the schools. But the law never passed the Senate. “Some schools are fraudulent in the kind of data they present to state agencies that theoretically have control over them,” Miller told me, “and they are fraudulent to parents about the level of punishment they impose.” There is a dearth of long-term mental-health-care facilities for youth, and, he said, the industry “off-loads a problem that the public system can’t manage.” Versions of Miller’s bill have been introduced in Congress eight more times, but the legislation has never passed, and the basic problems with the industry remain largely unchanged. Malcolm Harsch, an attorney who is coördinating an American Bar Association committee devoted to reforming the industry, told me, “When programs get shut down because of allegations of abuse, they tend to disappear and then pop up again with new names, as if they were new facilities.” Some Teen Challenge youth centers advertise themselves as places for students struggling with depression, eating disorders, and suicidal thoughts, among other ailments, but students told me they seldom had access to trained mental-health counsellors. A student named Megan, who didn’t want me to use her last name, because she feared retaliation from Teen Challenge, told me that, in 2020, her parents drove her from a psychiatric hospital directly to a Teen Challenge in Lebanon, Indiana. She had to wear an ankle monitor for two weeks. “I asked every person I met, ‘What is this place called?’ ” she said. “Can somebody please explain this to me?” In a journal that she kept throughout her time there, she described meeting an adviser she’d been assigned. “I was asking what my treatment plan is and she laughed and said ‘That’s not how we work here, you cooperate with the program,’ ” Megan wrote. In frustration, she threw a water bottle across the room. As punishment, she was put on Talking Fast for a week, during which time she tried to kill herself. She began tallying the number of times students tried to cut or harm themselves. “Since I’ve been here,” she wrote, “I’ve witnessed 13 suicide attempts not including my own.” |
Anonymous
Anonymous
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that’s not another perspective. nobody ever said there weren’t bona fide residential treatment centers or therapeutic schools. it’s the unregulated, untherapeutic “tough love” ones that are the problem - and this variety often is so-called “wilderness therapy.” |
Anonymous
| Why would I spend 2 seconds reading something Paris Hilton wrote. She who has had every privilege in life. Never worked a day in her life and best know for a homemade sex video. |
Anonymous
That access can be so important. |