Deciding to send your child to a wilderness program can be an incredibly difficult decision. Figuring out how to get your child to that program can further the difficulty, as the process can be complicated and heart wrenching. Many parents chose to hire a transport service to help navigate this process, though it is often a hard and conflicted choice.
What about medications in wilderness therapy? Let’s bring data to the conversation!Questions about medications often arise in conversations with families and educational consultants. There are valid concerns about changes and increases in medications, and also about how effective the meds their child is currently taking. In response to these concerns, we generally talk about how our goal is to get the best baseline assessment possible; so we are not going to suggest new medications or make big changes, unless it is really warranted. We talk about our fantastic team and the fact that we can do any kind of med management.
At Second Nature we have been conducting a longitudinal outcome study, and I am currently in the middle of following up with almost 500 of those participants. In the context of wilderness therapy and residential treatment, a three-year follow-up is unprecedented and will offer incredible insights into the effectiveness of wilderness programs. Those insights are still underway, as we are just halfway through this last follow-up. What I have been itching to share though, are the reflections I am hearing from alumni and parents.
A First Look at Changes in Body Fat During Wilderness TherapyAt Second Nature we are obviously concerned about and committed to mental health. Perhaps not as obvious, is our focus on and commitment to physical health and well-being. For over a year, our nurse Adam at Entrada has been tracking the weight and body fat of our clients on a monthly basis. To get a first glimpse of these physical changes, I recently crunched the numbers for our clients that entered and graduated during 2014.
Clients and parents tell us how things are going 1.5 years after graduatingAt Second Nature we have been conducting research to evaluate our programs for more than six years, and we recently completed an 18-month follow-up. While we use sophisticated standardized and validated questionnaires to measure change in functioning; for this 18-month follow up, we also wanted to hear from clients in a more simple and personal way.