Does Wilderness Therapy Work? Does it Last?

The Outdoor Behavioral Healthcare Research Cooperative's (OBHRC), a cooperative of wilderness treatment programs of which Catherine Freer is a member, completed the first big outcome study on wilderness therapy using the Youth Outcome Questionnaire (YOQ) with a sample of 858 kids and their families from nine programs over a full year.

The YOQ is a simple but well-researched and solid therapeutic outcome test on which higher scores indicate greater behavioral/mental health disorder. Average scores for adolescents admitted to a psychiatric hospital are about 100; average score for teens in outpatient treatment are 78; the average community adolescent score is 23. The upper limit of the normal community range is 46. Our results showed that:

Kids enter our programs with scores of about 100, as rated by their parents. (The kids believe they are much better off than that.)
At discharge, ranging from three to eight weeks later depending on the program, the parents scored their kids at about 49, just outside the normal community range.
At three and six months after discharge, kids' scores rose slightly, to 56 and 57, but not statistically significantly, before trending back down to 49 again at 12 months.

In other words, contrary to a common opinion about brief, intense treatments, the therapeutic and behavioral gains of wilderness treatment were sustained over 12 months. (No. 18.)

For a follow-up study published in 2004, after these clients were two to three years out of their OBHRC treatment, 88 of them were called to ask how they were doing, using a structured interview process via telephone. (No. 19.) Some of the important results:

83 percent were doing better, and 58 percent were doing well or very well. 17 percent were still "struggling."
81 percent rated OBHRC treatment as effective; 10 percent split between "not effective" and "not sure" or "partially effective."
86 percent were in high school or college, or had graduated from high school and were working. Six had graduated from high school but were living at home and "doing nothing;" only five had not graduated from high school, and these were living at home and working or "doing nothing," and one was in prison.

OBHRC is now planning a five-year follow-up study on the same group to see how the kids and their families have fared since our last interviews with them.

"I hope you tell kids that this really does work and I am an example."

Does Wilderness Therapy Work? Does it Last?

Learn more about our research: