Wilderness Therapy as a Treatment Modality for At-Risk Youth: A Primer for Mental Health Counselors

Abstract

Many mental health counselors identify adolescent clients as the most “difficult” clients with which to work because it is a challenge to engage them in the counseling experience (Church, 1994; Hanna et al., 1999; Gil, 1996). At-risk youth tend to be ill equipped to engage in traditional counseling interventions, which require them to be verbal and to disclose thoughts and feelings (Hanna et al., 1999; Davis-Berman & Berman, 1994). Wilderness therapy, a specialized approach within adventure-based counseling (Fletcher & Hinkle, 2002), provides an alternative treatment modality that maximizes the client’s tendency to spontaneously self-disclose in environments outside the counseling office (Hanna et al.). This article provides an overview of wilderness therapy as a treatment modality and identifies the associated therapeutic factors in an effort to inform mental health counselors.

Cite this work

No public copy is stored for this record, so only the metadata is cited.

Stored only when both papers are in the corpus — 84 citations exist upstream.

Papers that cite the same references — the relational fallback while embeddings are still backfilling.