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Reply to "Therapeutic Wilderness Schools - Any Insights?"

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[quote=Anonymous]To add a few things to what others have said about wilderness programs:

My child (12 or 13 yo at the time) did a wilderness program which now two years out was absolutely life-changing in a positive way. It wasn't just drop your kid off - there was a LOT of family involvement and family therapy components. That said, we'd exhausted all our options and had been through multiple hospitalizations, we considered a lot of options and ruled out hospital-based programs for a number of reasons specific to our child, and our child was the exact opposite of most of the kids in the wilderness program, who were in general much more defiant. We hired a consultant to help us find the program (who recommended a specific therapist and group of peers within the program for our child; e.g. our child was not placed with kids with drug and outward behavior problems) which I think really contributed to the success. Not all of these programs are bad, but I don't think it's a one-size fits all sort of thing and you need to really do your homework - this seems to work for some but certainly not all kids.

How would you get your child there? Our child knew they needed help badly and went willingly despite being terrified, but most kids aren't so willing, and at least from my exposure to other parents in our wilderness program most are encouraged to hire a couple of people to surprise and drag your child out of bed in the middle of the night and escort them to the wilderness program, e.g. being "gooned", which can be traumatic to some kids.

As others have said, insurance won't cover most of the costs which are incredibly high. Insurance will reimburse the therapy components, and our wilderness program broke down the bill into billable components we could submit to insurance. That said, what we didn't know is the frequency of therapy needed to be pre-authorized/approved by insurance, and we got no guidance from our program about this, so we got almost nothing back from insurance.

If you do go this route, go into it knowing the exorbitant costs won't necessarily stop with the wilderness program. Most programs will strongly recommend your child not go directly back home where they had problems originally; they almost universally recommend a therapeutic boarding school to follow up and transition your child back which supposedly facilitates better success. Obviously these are also insanely expensive.[/quote]

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