Healing or Harmful? Members of the East and Prairie Village community share their opinions on and experiences with wilderness therapy to raise awareness

*name changed to protect identity

Heaving on her new 60-pound backpack, then-15-year-old and East alum Hazel Anderson’s* knees instantly collapsed under its weight.

That red nylon backpack would be her closest companion for the next two-and-a-half months, accompanying her on every daily hiking expedition, backpacking trip and campout. It contained the essentials she’d need to survive the Utah winter — an inch-thick foam sleeping mat, a tarp to shield her from the wind and snow of the sub-zero nights, a mini propane tank to heat pre-made food bags and a journal for therapy assignments and diary entries. 

It was just a day or two before when her parents told her that she’d be attending Aspiro Wilderness Adventure Therapy in Sandy, Utah for the coming months. After years of defiance and substance abuse, her parents realized the traditional “talk therapy” wasn’t changing their daughter’s habits, so they resorted to trying something else.

“Wilderness gave us hope for a reset and we knew she was safe for a few months,” Anderson’s mother said.

Sending their daughter 1,089 miles away and seeing her only once during her two-and-a-half-month journey wasn’t easy. But Anderson’s mother notes that she — along with parents in similar situations — was desperate to save her child from drug and alcohol abuse, and wilderness therapy seemed like her last option to make a dramatic change — despite the far location from home and $40,000 tuition cost. 

“My parents realized that if I kept using [drugs and alcohol], I would’ve died,” Anderson said.

Anderson’s story is just one of an estimated 10,000 adolescents annually who are placed in wilderness therapy, according to a 2000 report by the USDA Forest Service. For an industry with such a high participation rate and widespread impact, many are oblivious to the practice of wilderness therapy and the inner workings of the system behind it. 

Wilderness therapy is a form of experiential therapy designed to manufacture reformative experiences in a non-traditional way, integrating outdoor activities such as team games, hiking excursions and other outdoor expeditions, as defined by American Addiction Centers. 

In an Instagram poll of 204 East community members, only 51% have even heard of wilderness therapy before. And out of those that had heard of it, 75% say that they don’t believe that it’s a helpful practice for teens. In fact, Anderson herself hadn’t heard of wilderness therapy until she was admitted. 

Although wilderness therapy isn’t widely known, Anderson, along with other members of the Prairie Village community who have experienced wilderness therapy, believe that it can either be rehabilitative or dangerous to young adults, but agree that there isn’t enough transparency in the industry.

“The big picture is helping these kids and young adults build grit, self-efficacy and just really wanting that internal change,” an Aspiro employee asking to be identified by her first name, Ally, said. “That means starting to make decisions and use coping skills not because we’re telling them to, not because their family is telling them to, but because they [want to].”

Dr. Mike Hanson, an East parent and private-practice therapist who works with adolescents and young adults, has discussed the option of wilderness therapy with about 60 families over 30 years. He notes that wilderness therapy can be helpful to some teens, especially because it puts their struggles in the context of life skills and makes recovery strategies more “real” than other hospital-like facilities.

“[Wilderness therapy] brings the lessons home in a way that a kid gives a sh– instead of just sitting around a room in some hospital where the kid’s more preoccupied with getting the cute girl’s phone number,” Hanson said. “You learn by doing. Some of the kids can remember a life lesson that they learned on the trail, or crossing a perilous river, or holding on to a rope trusting other 16-year-olds better than just a story that some adult told him in the hospital setting.”

Anderson learned persistence when it was pouring sleet and the group was still several miles from that night’s campsite. She learned tenacity on the below-freezing nights of late winter where she’d rely on hour-long cardio workouts to keep her body temperature up before retreating to her tarp-covered sleeping bag. She learned toughness from completing some of the most physically-demanding hikes in the area, even gaining 10 pounds of muscle just from hiking. 

“When everything was stripped away and it was cold and I had to make food and we didn’t really have shelter, it humbled me,” Anderson said. “It definitely made me appreciate the things that I had. But that feeling doesn’t last. I have to continuously remind myself of that.”

Even though Anderson feels her experience at Aspiro was overall beneficial as it took her attention away from substance abuse, the change didn’t last for her. The reason was primarily due to the short-term nature of the program, which didn’t suit Anderson’s needs.

But after two and a half months of the hardest physical and mental challenges of her life at Aspiro — and $40,000 of her parents’ money out-of-pocket — she fell back into the consuming cycle of drug and alcohol abuse she was used to only two months after she graduated from the program. She said it was disheartening to have worked so hard to improve her habits, only to relapse.

“I think it takes a lot more than a couple months to really change everything that you learned in previous years,” Anderson said. “It took years to get where I was. It’s not going to take two months to completely get out of that.” 

Since graduating from wilderness therapy, now-18-year-old Anderson has gone on to attend a faith-based boarding school for nine-and-a-half months, joined Full Circle teen sobriety group, graduated from high school early and is now celebrating 16 months of sobriety and pursuing a degree in counseling. 

Anderson and her mother both make the point that wilderness therapy isn’t for everyone due to cost, accessibility and the varying needs of every family. They encourage families in need of support to seek alternatives if wilderness therapy isn’t for them, such as sobriety groups like Full Circle, Crossroads rehabilitation program and Narcotics/Alcoholics Anonymous.

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Though the short-term aspect of wilderness therapy wasn’t the best solution for Anderson, it wasn’t a completely negative experience. She didn’t face any abuse whatsoever, which is often a concern in conversation around wilderness therapy.

However in recent years, a growing movement to raise awareness for and end alleged institutional abuse committed by wilderness therapy programs has gained traction on social media. Several youth rights advocacy organizations like Breaking Code Silence, Teens for Profit and National Youth Rights Association have formed in the wake of this movement.

Amid the push for change, many notable survivors of the industry have shared their experiences in wilderness therapy. Among them is model and television personality Paris Hilton, who shared her experience in her “tell-all” documentary “This is Paris.” 

The documentary, detailing Hilton’s experience in the troubled teen industry, resonated with many viewers and inspired national youth rights advocate Meg Applegate — a TTI survivor — to go into advocacy. Watching Hilton recount her experience being taken in the middle of the night by transport services, having all sense of privacy taken from her and being chemically restrained while in treatment opened Applegate’s eyes to a much larger, unethical system.

Applegate was taken in the middle of the night by transport services and placed in a facility for the majority of her teenage years. While there, she faced forced isolation, lack of medical care and unneeded mandatory medication.

“If I went through the [TTI], and she went through it, there’s got to be so many people that have been through this too,” Applegate said. “That was the moment I realized ‘this isn’t a rare thing, this is a big industry.’”

After joining as Directors of Development at Breaking Code Silence, Applegate met Director of Government Relations and fellow TTI survivor Caroline Cole. A little under two years later, they formed their own organization that launched on January 17 — UnSilenced. 

UnSilenced is an organization focused on creating legislative change, investigating individual facilities and giving survivors access to resources. Now, their latest endeavor is proposing the Accountability for Congregate Care Act, which would drastically reshape the way that these programs — primarily wilderness therapy facilities — operate and make money. 

This bill would create an enforceable bill of rights, including guaranteeing the right to physical safety, communication with an attorney and parents, the right to education transferable to public institutions and freedom from mistreatment, solitary confinement or chemical confinement.

“I hope that [with this bill], we can create a world where young people here in the United States know that they have rights, and that we have communities and systems and culture that supports young people exercising those rights and being treated as autonomous human beings,” Cole said.

However, the problem with creating an enforceable bill of rights lies in funding — public funds mean more government control, private funds mean less regulation.

Wilderness therapy programs make substantial profits from hopeful parents to whom they promise solutions. Since the money required to operate is generated through private monetary exchanges not involving state funding, the federal government can’t intervene under normal circumstances. 

Adding grant funding structures in the bill would allow the federal government to regulate these facilities and formally investigate complaints of institutional abuse. It will also look into additional statistics such as number of annual admissions to these facilities, overall living conditions, success rates of students after leaving the program, suicide rates and profit margins.

“The federal government is really hesitant to have anything to do with [wilderness therapy],” Cole said. “They don’t want to touch it, they don’t want to regulate it. They see it as private industry.”

Despite an estimated 75% success rate and a lack of extensive research about wilderness therapy, it’s a highly profitable industry according to Hanson — one primarily accessible to and marketed towards higher income areas, such as East families facing issues with drug abuse and mental health difficulties. 

Aside from the two-months’ worth of tuition for wilderness treatment that Anderson’s family paid, they also paid for nine-and-a-half months of a faith-based boarding school afterward that cost around $60,000.

Ally shared that about 70% of wilderness therapy patients attend some sort of other residential center or boarding school after Aspiro. The cost of this ends up being more than what parents initially think, according to Hanson. Regarding the high cost, he warns parents looking into these programs to consider exactly what they entail. 

“It’s always wise to keep an eye on the flow of money and ask, ‘Is there another agenda besides helping kids?’” Hanson said. “The truth is, it’s both. There are dedicated therapists and dedicated direct service workers, but there’s also somebody that owns the place, there’s somebody or a group running a business. The mental health business is [largely] private for-profit, and it’s silly to not remember that.”

Conversations regarding allegations of institutional abuse, under-the-table money exchanges in a very profitable industry and questions of whether or not wilderness retreats actually work are slowly circulating into the mainstream, Applegate and Cole both remark. 

Though activists like Applegate and Cole often represent the issue of wilderness therapy and the reform movement, Cole says that the future of wilderness programs comes down to the families and teens themselves.

“I hope that we can let parents know that there are other options when they’re told that their kid is not going to succeed unless you send them away [to wilderness therapy],” Cole said.