Who owns second nature wilderness program

The highly experienced admissions team at Second Nature is able to match your child's unique circumstance to one of our many niche therapy groups and therapists specializing in a specific population. We are informed by the CDC's recommendations and have implemented a plan that focuses on prevention, assessment, and intervention.

We are taking steps to reduce larger group contact, increasing the sanitizing of surfaces and hands constantly, and are assessing for symptoms regularly. Shortly after the girl's death, the program was closed. Its founder relocated to Nevada, where she opened another. These relocations are common.

A new name and a new headquarters, often in a state less inclined to regulate troubled teen programs, can allow criminally negligent programs to survive for years. The National Association of Therapeutic Schools and Programs, along with other industry groups, lobbied against it. It died in the Senate. In May , the bill was introduced again. It died in the House.

In every story you'll ever read about these programs, there is a sentence introducing the reader to the very existence of these programs. You've probably never heard of this industry, but In every conversation I've ever had about them, someone says, I've never heard about any of this before. I've never seen anything about it at all. In the morning we eat grains and oats, then break down camp: individual tarps, group tarps, pots and pan and other supplies.

We load them into full-body backpacks and go. Hikes can last a few hours. They can last a day. They are interrupted by lunch, culled individually from the personal food supply each of us is granted per week a pack of soft tortillas, three pieces of fruit, two ramen packs, and canned diced chicken.

They are interrupted when a fight breaks out, or when somebody refuses to hike. They are interrupted by injuries. When we reach our destination, we set up camp. Each of us has a flat tarp and string. We know the knots for creating shelter within trees: A-frames, slants, more elaborate designs if you're able. We bow-drill for fire. Each of us has built a bow and a pummel and a top stone; somebody busts an ember to cook, or the dehydrated beans and rice we eat for dinner go cold.

They give us communal meat and cheese on supply days, but it goes bad fast in August. If the light isn't out yet when everything is done, we might play a game.

My group prefers Mafia, and I will say you haven't really played it until you've played it with a dozen teenagers, gathered because they are duplicitous fuck-ups. Except sleep, solitary, shoeless, and in darkness, nothing happens at Second Nature outside of the earshot and eyesight of staff. Over three months I will not have a private conversation with a fellow patient, nor be alone with any of them.

Even perfectly audible conversations may be ruled technically out of earshot , if, for example, they are about a topic with which the staff is totally unfamiliar and therefore incapable of monitoring for forbidden subject matter. This will occur several times during hikes when Rich, a tall Canadian ketamine dealer, and I get to talking about computer science, and staffers are unsure whether we are telling "war stories," inappropriate glorifications of the bad behavior that got us here.

In daylight, a staff member can always see you. One leads the hike, one brings up the rear. They form a triangle at camp; each one always has at least 60 degrees of vision. There is an exception to this rule. When we shit or shower fill a sack with river water, strip, and pour; repeat as necessary , we are allowed some privacy. But there is a catch. When out of sight, we must shout our first name every three to five seconds, loud enough to be heard at camp.

The first time I try to, I cut myself short, go back to camp, don't use the bathroom for days. I have to eventually, waddling up now swollen to the latrine another patient dug, yelling, half-assed, like a kid acutely embarrassed by fun.

This is precisely as ridiculous as you imagine. Or it is for a while. Shouting your own name, especially with pants down, or naked, does not become normal, but it is quickly unremarkable.

Its first campus was in the Uinta mountain range, in Utah, but within a few years the program had expanded to Georgia, where Second Nature Blue Ridge opened in , five years before I arrived. In 22 years, they say when I reached out for this story, nobody has ever died at Second Nature. Today it has added additional programs for adults and younger children, as well as a second Utah location and a location in Oregon.

Second Nature's website is filled with videos. On the homepage is a teenage girl, who tells us that Second Nature changed her life. We see pictures of smiling students and the Georgia wilderness.

A man's voice intones: Second Nature restores families to wholeness. It brings about miracles in the lives of troubled youths. He speaks like a television pastor, like an infomercial for an animal charity. Your confusion and fear and concern can be transformed into a better future for your child and family. The FAQ contains more than 30 videos, a second clip answering every question. Most feature Dr. Brad Reedy, sitting in a study with a phony-looking fireplace.

Many of the questions are mundane: What will my child eat? How will they keep warm? What is the average stay? But many touch on more abstract subjects. How does wilderness work? It creates a sense of empowerment in a difficult but safe environment. It teaches them about natural and logical consequences. Throughout the videos, certain themes recur. The environment is "secure," it is a "gift," it will "transform" everything from your child to your family to your life.

They "buy in. Watching all of Second Nature's videos, it is clear that this is the program's fundamental promise: We will get your child to invest in what's happening to him.

We'll direct your money to a consultant, we'll push him toward long-term care, we'll threaten you with your child's death to get him here, but at bottom we promise: Your child will leave an active collaborator in his good behavior. He'll be transformed. To hear the rhetoric, to see the stock photography of nature, to hear Dr. Reedy mumble "Native American spirituality" in one video, you might believe the goal was profundity. That we were to develop a desire to live predicated on a radical discovery of meaning, Thoreau-at-Walden, a vision quest, something sacred and vulnerable and particular to every one of us.

We accepted that we were trapped. We accepted the logical and natural consequences of bad behavior. We discovered that our day-to-day happiness and our long-term prospects for freedom were dependent on buying in. We lied, at first.

We spoke the program's language and performed the qualities they were looking for. Eventually these became routine. I was not lying when I left, but I had not been transformed into a believer, either. It was only automatic: a vacant animation of the easiest way to get along and get out. If there is an American paragon for the myth of transformation by wilderness, it is Henry David Thoreau. As legend would have it, he was the first to go outside for a long time and to find that in so doing a person might cast aside bad habits and bad thoughts and be permanently altered by the experience.

He wasn't, of course, but it is worth noting that Thoreau did not go to Walden Pond in order to make himself more agreeable to the society he left behind. The whole enterprise was nearly sabotaged when he was jailed for taxes owed; the purpose of his trip was not to learn how to deal with his defiant tendencies but to escape a civilization that could not accommodate his personality. He did what, in the rhetoric of Second Nature, would be called a failure to "buy in" to his own well-being.

If Walden transformed him, it did not transform him into a man who saw the value in learning to resign himself more easily. Although we do not know where or for how long we are hiking, we imagine there is a plan. We imagine a map back at the office, the next week's worth of routes plotted for each of half a dozen groups.

Once, we are forced to stop along a westbound path for the better part of an hour while another group, barely audible, moves southward up ahead. But there are few near misses. The plans work: lines traveling on a map of the Blue Ridge Mountains, careful to never crisscross. Geography varies. We travel low along riverbeds under the cover of heavy trees. We ascend barely perceptible inclines. We make sharp turns up steep mountains, coming around bends to see our old path a thousand feet below.

We must stay near water, but unless supplies are coming in we rarely stay at official campsites. So long as there are trees to strip up tarps, we can sleep. But during a thunderstorm, trees crack and fall. We sit far apart, at least 30 feet between us, backpacks beneath us, both feet planted firmly on the ground. An hour and nobody moves. The sound of an oak tree exploding and the bark drumming down with the rain.

The sound of staffers stopping short on a hike when we come over the ridge of a high hill, and across is the side of a mountain, brown and black over thickets of twisted grass. We hike on, but it's slow going. We're top-heavy with our packs on. We trip in the underbrush. Crossing takes hours and the desolation continues over every ridge, and when night comes we are still not out of it. We set up camp. For the first time, staffers come and check every tree we've strung our tarps against, check every tree nearby.

They don't say what the trouble is. They don't say they were surprised. Officially, everything is as it should be. The program has planned for this.

But back in the office on the map on the wall, there is a line crossing a controlled burn zone. They didn't know. Some people can work the program better than others. There are genuine enthusiasts. There are liars. There are those of us who do not quite know what we are doing anymore, but who understand, as everybody does, that cooperation will make this easier on everyone.

Doug arrives three weeks after I do, and by the time I left he was still not working at all. Doug throws tantrums. He refuses to walk, to speak, to eat. He stomps his feet and screams, he cries, and for sheer endurance the whole thing is a bravura performance, except that he is not performing. Like all of us, he arrives believing that he has fallen victim to an injustice from which he must immediately extricate himself.

He never stops believing this. We're sympathetic to Doug, but he holds us up. If he refuses to walk, none of us walk.

If he refuses to eat, we've got to have a circle group to talk about it. Some of this is by design: If Doug's behavior inconveniences the rest of us, the rest of us will exert whatever individual effort we can to bring him into conformity with the group. If it fails, we will resent him, not wonder if every one of us shouldn't be protesting too. Bad Doug is petulant, but his real trouble is that he's dim.

It is clear that he has some kind of developmental disorder. He's never conned anyone in his life. He is told by staff, by Paul, by the whole program that he should be honest, and he is.

He does not understand what they are asking of him. Late in my stay, when the disappearance of most of our group has left me by far the most senior, I mention this to Paul. I'd like to help Doug, I say, but I worry that he doesn't understand the advantage of going along. But he doesn't get that. Subject line on a forum for former patients: Nearly 15 years past.

Does it ever get easier to deal with? In seminars, where they broke us emotionally and mentally, they taught us to admit to and internalize crimes that we had not committed While we were there we were required to write a letter to our parents confessing all the bad things we had done, how we were flawed, broken people and how we needed to be fixed.

The internet is full of men who hate feminism. Here's what they're like in person. On this small forum alone, there are more than a hundred posts that use "torture" or "abuse"; dozens from those who are five, 10, 15 years out and still preoccupied by their experiences in wilderness.

Many are just the names of programs. It is difficult to know how often and to what extent these institutions traumatize their patients. Some schools, some programs, are surely worse than others. But it is difficult to escape the impression that many of these reports are hyperbolic. What is wilderness, even multi-year stints in therapeutic boarding school, compared with even criminal incarceration? Abduction, torture, war?

I called one of the contributors on the phone. She was my age and from the same city; she went to Second Nature at the same time, but to another location, in Utah. She has asthma, and the staff carried inhalers for her. She told me about a long hike, well into the night and so extraordinary that the staff admitted they were lost. We had all run out of water, and I was having trouble breathing. I asked another staffer, 'Please, please ask her to give me my inhaler, I really need it.

She tells me this was common, that staffers would routinely insist that patients who weren't feeling well were engaging in deliberate manipulation. She says she began to prepare for the possibility that she would not get her inhaler until she collapsed. In the Atlantic article , Sulome Anderson wrote that "critics of Despite elevated attention, these abuses haven't stopped.

As recently as January , Midwest Academy in Keokuk, Iowa, was raided and shut down by police after allegations of sexual abuse by staff. I do not think of myself as a survivor. I did not suffer permanent injury in Georgia, and I cannot reject completely the argument that the program helped. I was a drug addict when I went in and sober when I came out.

Could this have been accomplished in a more pleasant way? I don't know. How could I? The girl I spoke to does not know either. After Second Nature, she spent two years in a therapeutic boarding school, convinced, like all of us were, that this would all be over soon. They were never going to come get me early. They were not going to let me come home after wilderness. Most kids are sent to a residential treatment center no matter what.

It's decided in advance. Now I know there was no chance that I was going to come home. I was going to be gone for two years, from the day I got escorted to the wilderness. Does it get easier to deal with? The honest answer is that I don't think so , goes a reply to one post, I think the only thing that changes is that we go forward in life, which is not quite the same as moving on.

To some extent I think we probably do move on, but I think it is a fairly muted form of doing so. I suspect reasonable people will conclude that allegations of abuse are serious, that some programs go too far. But, they'll go on, there's a difference between kids who were really tortured and kids who just didn't like the tough love. Maybe so, and so maybe it is easy to see why some former patients are inclined to strong language, to anger, to proving that something bad happened to them, something beyond a bummer time for a shitty teen, something that should not happen to anyone.

When I began writing this piece, I wanted that too. I wanted to find some proof that Second Nature was among the bad places, the kind of proof that you can print in a magazine. I wanted to justify why I am writing this at all, why I was the one who wrote, Ten years out and I still notice if I go a whole day without thinking about it. Average hours or staff training outside the field per month?

Percentage of licensed therapists? Not Applicable. Number of Individual Sessions with Therapist 0. Integrated Wellness Support. If psychiatrist is available to students, what percentage of students change meds?

Additional Medical personnel on staff or contracted. Possible Medical Rule Outs. Psychological Evaluations What percentage of participants receive psychological evaluations?

Academic Offering Do you offer any academic credits? Are credits offered through an accredited school? Has the program ever been a part of an evidence-based study? Is the program presently part of an evidence-based study?