Adventure Therapy at Summit Achievement
Summit Achievement is, first and foremost, a State of Maine Licensed residential treatment program that provides mental health and substance abuse treatment and has been operating since 1996. Summit is located on a 55-acre campus with a main lodge, academic building, and four heated cabins that have attached bathrooms with showers. In recent years there has been some confusion as to what the majority of wilderness therapy programs provide and what Summit Achievement provides during its three-night outdoor adventure therapy segment of its residential treatment model. This blog post is to help readers to differentiate how Summit provides its adventure therapy segment and what many wilderness therapy programs provide.
Adventure Therapy: Summit Achievement utilizes outdoor adventure experiences, referred to as Adventure Therapy, four days a week and three nights a week to help young people build confidence and resiliency to address their mental health challenges. The field of Adventure Therapy evolved out of Outward Bound and the teachings of its founder, Kurt Hanh. Hanh, an educator, believed in encouraging young people to see their challenges as an opportunity to grow and change. Some of Kurt Hanh’s quotes include “your disability is your opportunity” and “we are all better than we know. If only we can be brought to realize this, we may never be prepared to settle for anything less”. Outward Bound started in 1941 in the United Kingdom and was specifically designed to help build resilience in young people so that they can better take care of themselves and others. Summit has followed in that tradition of experiential therapy and service to others.
“Adventure Therapy” is different than “Wilderness Therapy.” Wilderness therapy is based on a model of primitive survival skills expeditions commonly seen in outdoor behavioral healthcare programs based in Utah and Idaho that evolved out of Brigham Young University from the educator and author of the book, “Outdoor Survival Skills,” Larry Dean Olsen, in the late 1960s. Summit’s lineage is not related to the primitive skills model seen in Wilderness Therapy but from Outward Bound’s Adventure Therapy model. Two of the Summit Achievement co-founders were former Outward Bound program directors and instructors, and many of our staff have worked at Outward Bound. Summit’s logo is a compass rose which is a homage to Outward Bound, which also has the compass rose in its logo. Check out this blog post to learn more about Summit’s connection with Outward Bound.
Adventure Therapy is similar to Wilderness Therapy in that both models use the outdoors as a place to reflect and heal without the distraction of smartphones, social media, and peer pressure. There is a long history of using the outdoors to help young people reflect on their lives and consider how to change for the better. In the United States, there have been reoccurring movements related to encouraging young people and their families to spend time more time in nature, from the Transcendentalist movement exposed by Henry David Thoreau and Ralph Waldo Emerson in the 1800s (link here) to Richard Louv’s 2005 best selling book, “Last Child in the Woods: Saving Our Children from Nature Deficit Disorder.” There is little debate that spending time in the out of doors without smartphones and social media is good for the mind, body, and spirit, especially for young people. Most Adventure Therapy and Wilderness Therapy programs encourage spending time surrounded by nature as a tool to help change perspectives.
Like Outward Bound, all participants at Summit Achievement enroll voluntarily. Many Wilderness Therapy programs encourage parents to have their teens transported to their programs. Summit does not enroll young people by transport as we want them to have some sense of agency, not be surprised by this process, and be active and willing participants in their treatment. We do this as we are a relationship-based program which includes weekly video conferencing with parents, a family overnight visit off-campus halfway through the program, and regular parent coaching sessions. We understand why Wilderness Therapy programs want to enroll young people with severe substance abuse or oppositional defiant disorder without consent, but that is not the client Summit Achievement serves. We work with anxious, depressed, and other mood-disordered clients who are struggling yet want to learn better-coping strategies (to learn more about our participant profile check out this link).
Adventure Therapy at Summit includes equipping participants with high-end mountaineering-style outdoor gear and clothing. Summit’s model has participants going on expeditions three nights a week, using cookstoves, and returning to our campus the other four nights a week to debrief the outdoor experience, have individual and family therapy sessions and go to school in our academic building (which can be as challenging as the outdoors for some young people-one of our next blog post will address how our Academic Program addresses anxiety). Adventure therapy experiences such as backpacking, snowshoeing, canoeing, ice climbing, rock climbing, etc, are meant to be challenging but not to the point that a student cannot physically make it, and there is an amount of skill-building, so some of what participants learn can become a life long passion. Wilderness Therapy programs tend to use survivalist gear and impel participants to learn to use a bow drill to start a fire to eat hot food. Wilderness Therapy programs that are nomadic have participants in the wilderness or backcountry for 60 to 80 days and rarely return to a base for showers, etc. Connect with our admissions director to learn more about Summit’s adventure therapy model.
Summit Achievement provides adventure therapy experiences three nights a week within its evidenced-based and clinically-driven residential treatment program and has done so since 1996. We are different than the majority of “wilderness therapy” programs that we are sometimes mischaracterized as, and, as this blog post reveals, there are similarities. We encourage parents and young people to educate themselves about the differences and similarities of any treatment model before enrolling in a residential behavioral healthcare program, whether it is outside the whole time or not. There are pros and cons to different approaches, and Summit advocates looking over all the information and getting educated before deciding which path to take. This blog post was a brief review of the different ways to view wilderness therapy and adventure therapy programs, and Summit encourages learning more through books, podcasts, and websites. Summit also encourages parents to hire a therapeutic consultant who should be well-versed in the similarities and differences between adventure therapy and wilderness therapy programs.
