Category: Community News

How Wilderness Therapy Works: An Examination of the Wilderness Therapy Process to Treat Adolescents with Behavioral Problems and Addictions.   This paper summarizes findings from a detailed study of the processes employed by four leading wilderness therapy programs focusing on how wilderness therapy works, the kinds of behavioral problems to which it is commonly applied, […]

  Reaching for Roots and Finding a Forest In January 2015 the Belgian organization NATURE decided to invite a group of experiential educators and adventure therapists from seven other European countries to dream and talk about starting a European partnership project on Adventure Therapy together. They wanted to work together in the search for the […]

Therapy in the open air: Introducing wilderness therapy to adolescent mental health services in Scandinavia.   Despite the rich traditions of outdoor life in the Scandinavian countries, structured nature-based therapeutic interventions remain underexplored in adolescent mental health services. We suggest that wilderness therapy is an age-appropriate and effective group treatment that may hold particular appeal […]

Treatment Effectiveness of Wilderness Adventure Therapy This document is a summary of key results from a more detailed report of a comprehensive evaluation of a therapeutic adventure-based intervention for adolescents and families termed “Wilderness Adventure Therapy” (WAT)   Read more…

The Use of Adventure Therapy Techniques by Clinical Social Workers: Implications for Practice and Training Adventure therapy, an experiential intervention that combines outdoor, adventure based activities and group process, is used in direct practice by clinical social workers; however, it is unclear to what extent clinical social workers are actually utilizing these techniques. read more…  […]

Adventure Therapy Effects on Self-concept – A Meta-analysis Self-concept change has been proposed as a key driver of behavioral change through adventure therapy (Hans, 2000). Through exploratory moderator analysis we tried to identify process variables that influence the effect of adventure therapy on self-concept to contribute to a deeper understanding of why and when adventure […]

Emerging for Recovery: A Descriptive Analysis of Adventure Therapy for Substance Abusers Examines client characteristics, referral and screening procedures, program characteristics, treatment goals, financial arrangements, and staff characteristics in 50 programs using adventure experiences with substance abuse populations. Notes needs for specific program evaluation research and for the development of prescriptive treatment modalities for specific […]

Breaking Bad Habits If you know something’s bad for you, why can’t you just stop? About 70% of smokers say they would like to quit. Drug and alcohol abusers struggle to give up addictions that hurt their bodies and tear apart families and friendships. And many of us have unhealthy excess weight that we could […]