Wilderness Therapy Programs for Troubled Teens in Portland, ME

Within the last few decades, America (including Portland, ME) has seen the demographic of adolescents deemed, troubled, or out of control, reach epidemic numbers. While experts aren’t sure as to why our nation’s teens increasingly turn to negative behavioral patterns, modern-day issues such as easier access to drugs and the advent of the internet, social media and other screen-based distractions (to name a few) are most likely significant contributing factors.

But with the number of troubled teens rising each year, cities like Portland, ME so too is the number of residential treatment centers that advertise their services to parents seeking respite and therapeutic healing for their child.

And, while many of these treatment programs are well-intentioned and run by those who truly believe in their program’s treatment model and core curriculum, parents from Portland, ME and elsewhere are all too often duped into sending their teenage daughter to an expensive program that at best, is ineffective in treating their child’s behavioral and emotional issues, and, at worst, exacerbates said issues even further.

Among these detrimental programs are treatment facilities that pose as wilderness therapy programs for troubled teens when in reality, they are more akin to glorified outdoor boot camps.

With the wilderness industry's increasing popularity and recent mainstream exposure, parents sometimes unwittingly send their children to programs that omit the clinical aspects of wilderness therapy.

Though technically a wilderness program, these treatment facilities omit the very foundations that make wilderness therapy effective, and instead, utilize behavioral modification and punishments to enact change within their campers.

For example, instead of providing experiential group therapy, mindfulness-based therapy, and cognitive behavior therapy, like the most reputable, adventure-based programs, these facilities merely seek to exploit the natural environment as a means to 'break' their campers, before 'building' them back up again.

These tactics are not only deceitful and misrepresent genuine wilderness therapy camps, they often aggravate the very issues campers were sent there to correct, to begin with.