FROM TOUGH LOVE TO TORTURE

Wilderness therapy rehabilitation programs leave teenagers traumatized.

by KATE RODRIGUEZ

Trigger warning: discussion of suicide, drug abuse and violence.

In the scenic mountains of Utah, worlds away from anything resembling civilization, lives a group of teenage girls. Bonded together by long hikes through the forest and poetry readings around the campfire, they are participants in Open Sky Wilderness Therapy, a program that seeks to “inspire individuals to live in a way that honors, values and strengthens relationships.”

This is not, however, a normal day: Katia, a participant in the program, has just swallowed shards of glass. In the midst of the girls’ panicked calls for help, Katia is airlifted out of the woods and transferred to a higher security institution. Staff members explain that Katia will not return to Open Sky — the program does not welcome participants who continue to endanger themselves.

When senior Sarah Eisel arrived in Durango, Colorado, in Mar. 2021, she never predicted that this sort of experience would characterize the next year of her life. After struggling with drug addiction and mental health challenges, Eisel’s parents decided to enroll her in Open Sky. Based out of Colorado and with many of its programs operating in Utah, Open Sky is one of new movement of organizations that use an outdoor-based approach as behavioral intervention for adolescents and young adults.

In her first few days at Open Sky, Eisel saw newcomers experience severe substance withdrawals with little to no medical assistance. She watched Gracie, another teenage girl who would eventually become her close friend, suffer through Xanax and fentanyl withdrawals without so much as an Advil to ease her constant convulsions. The program’s unwillingness to lean on these intuitive interventions is the exact reason parents send their kids to Open Sky.

A week in, Eisel joined her “team” — a group of youth, pooled together based on similar concern and age — where she would spend the rest of her time in the program. Immediately, she felt like an outsider. Forced to intrude on a group that had been together for months and deprived of any contact with friends or family at home, an overwhelming sense of solitude defined Eisel’s first few weeks in Colorado. Exhaustion also set in quickly. Five out of seven days of the week, Eisel’s team participated in hours-long hikes, carrying heavy packs, unsure how long they’d been walking or how much further they had to go.

“My mental reaction first was just ‘how can I get myself out of here?’” Eisel said. “I was just trying to figure out every which way how I could get out, I needed to leave so bad.”

Eventually, things got easier. Eisel began to connect with other girls in the program and adjusted to the physical demands of her new daily routine. She found that Open Sky had succeeded in at least one aspect — she truly wanted to stay sober when she left.

Finally, in June, Eisel received the news she had been waiting for: in a week, she would be done with wilderness. After three months of exhausting daily hikes and nights spent on the for- est floor, she was going to a therapeutic boarding school, Eva Carlston Academy in Salt Lake City, Utah. Eisel was elated at the prospect of having a mattress to sleep on, she said.

In the nine months she spent at Eva Carlston, Eisel felt mistreated and emotionally manipulated at the hands of staff members, she said. By the time she returned to Whitman in Mar. 2022, Eisel was sober and ready to stay that way, but she was also utterly traumatized by what it had taken to reach that point, she said.

Wilderness therapy programs and behavioral boarding schools like the ones Eisel attended are individual branches of the larger “Troubled Teen Industry.” The industry encompasses wilderness institutions, boot camps, boarding schools and behavioral ranches which look to address issues ranging from substance abuse and mental health concerns to “gaming addictions” and “social skills deficits.” The common factor that ties together these establishments is their strict approach to teenage behavior intervention — they work to fundamentally change participants’ ways of life.

While some programs implement the use of physical force, humiliation, starvation and other severe punishments to get through to participants, there are wilderness retreats that adopt a gentler approach. For Whitman youth development specialist Zakariah Anderson, experiences in wilderness programs helped him to rebuild his confidence. Following a difficult period in his high school career, Anderson spent three weeks at Outward Bound, a wilderness program located in Wales, England.

Initiated in 1962, Outward Bound held the goal of building survival skills and self-sufficiency for young boys to help them discover greater success. According to Anderson, programs like Outward Bound create a safe environment for individuals to broaden their perspective and connect to youth going through similar struggles.

“Once you sort of disconnect from not just your phone and all of these things, internet and whatever it is, and connect more with nature, you will find yourself to be a little more renewed and happier and having a greater sense of gratitude towards everything,” Anderson said.

Outward Bound’s model of cleansing through time in nature spread quickly to the United States, where copycat institutions soon populated the country. The ideology continued to gain momentum in the late 1960s, when Utah’s Brigham Young University began using rugged wilderness outings as a way to offer failing students an opportunity to salvage their academic career. From there, wilderness therapy took root in the rest of the state and spread into neighboring areas.

Utah’s status as the epicenter of the industry is also due to the specific state-level laws that dictate the way such programs can operate. In Utah, the age of medical consent is 18. Minors do not have control over what medical treatments they’re subjected to — that decision falls squarely on their parents, who maintain the right to send their child to a correctional facility if they see fit. Conversely, states like California and Washington have imposed regulations that favor individual choice; in California, minors ages 12 and older must consent to receive outpatient mental health treatment, and in Washington, the same applies for minors 13 and older. Because of these unique laws, parents across the country who feel the need to place their child in outsourced behavior modification programs tend to seek out those in nearly every aspect. Within the first five days of entering the program, he felt well-supported and ingrained in the program’s mission of self-improvement. Anderson spent his time canoeing, hiking and rock climbing, finding the rigorous schedule comfortable, he said. services in Utah, or other states with lenient restrictions on medical consent and medical guardianship for minors.

Wilderness Therapy’s no-nonsense approach to self-improvement is controversial in the world of healthcare. According to the American Psychological Association, ethical issues within the movement include consent, confidentiality and the treatment methods themselves.

Many programs advise parents to have their child unknowingly and forcefully taken to the program in a simulated kidnapping situation. Renee Farnet, who attended Open Sky with Eisel, experienced this approach firsthand.

“They grabbed me by the wrists and dragged me out of my house kicking and screaming,” Farnet said. “Then they shoved me into the car while I was fighting. They locked me in, and I started having a panic attack.”

This traumatic entrance to wilderness made Farnet’s adjustment period worse than it otherwise would have been, she said. Farnet was left constantly wondering why her parents would subject her to something so absurdly terrifying.

The programs continue to foster a divide between participants and their parents for the duration of their stay. Initially, this manifests through a complete ban on outside communication. As participants advance through their time in wilderness, they are allowed limited contact with their families. Employees warn parents in advance that their child will likely resist treatment at first, and may complain or exaggerate the conditions in an attempt to escape. When a child raises concerns or asks their parents to pull them from the program, the parent is already conditioned not to believe them. Eisel said this doubt often extended to the programs’ assigned therapists and staff as well.

“They went in with this mentality that I was not to trust, or to believe, or anything,” Eisel said.

Anderson’s wilderness experience differed

“I felt as though it forced me to create these bonds and forced me to work with people, help people and work as a team and to bring that self-confidence and self-esteem back,” Anderson said.

For adolescents struggling with their gender and sexual identities, current Troubled Teen programs’ conservative rules erred on the side of harm. While at Open Sky, Farnet began to question her gender identity, and changed her pronouns to she/they. When her therapist discovered this, she accused Farnet of wasting therapy time to discuss her gender expression. For other LGBTQ+ attendees, conditions were even worse, Farnet said. Transgender participants were also forced to use pronouns they would not identify with, despite the fact that they had transitioned prior to entering the program.

“At that point, I was kind of like, ‘Huh, this is low-key conversion camp,’” Farnet said.

Although they acknowledge the ways their lives have improved since they entered wilderness therapy, Eisel and Farnet both said that programs like Open Sky are an inherently harmful way to attempt to help struggling teenagers.

“I feel like there could be ways to make it better,” Farnet said. “But you know, it’s going to be traumatizing no matter what way you do it.”

Anderson believes that the government needs to pool more money and resources into wellness programs to further education in the field and decrease the stigma around mental health. Current concerns about abuse in rehabilitation programs are often dismissed as being a “natural part of the process” — breaking an addiction isn’t easy, and is practically guaranteed to take a deep emotional toll — but not every hurdle is natural. The lack of public support leaves a void these private programs fill.

“I felt like nobody really believed me,” Eisel said. “except my friends that I made there.”

graphic by GABY HODOR

The Pledge of Allegiance is a staple of public school mornings. While many students around the county and at Whitman regard the Pledge as background noise, conflicts surrounding patriotism and free speech have made the Pledge of Allegiance a controversial tradition throughout its history.

As documented by The Smithsonian, American Baptist minister Francis Bellamy originally wrote the Pledge in 1892 as part of his work for the promotions department for the American magazine Youth’s Companion. To mark national celebrations planned for 400-year anniversary of Columbus’ journey, Bellamy wrote the Pledge on behalf of the magazine and then lobbied politicians to endorse its adoption in a coordinated, national celebration. The original version had no specific reference to religion or the U.S. by name: “I pledge allegiance to my Flag and the Republic for which it stands, one nation, indivisible, with liberty and justice for all.”

Bellamy continued to lobby, seeking to make the Pledge a daily tradition. In an editorial he published in the Illustrated American newspaper, he explained why he felt national unity was valuable for a country formed by immigrants. About Americans, Bellamy wrote “They must guard, more jealously even than their liberties, the quality of their blood”:

“There are races, more or less akin to our own, whom we may admit freely, and get nothing but advantage from the infusion of their wholesome blood. But there are other races which we cannot assimilate without a lowering of our racial standard, which should be as sacred to us as the sanctity of our homes.”

By the early 1900s, the Pledge had become a daily staple in all public, and select private schools in the U.S. In 1923, the American Legion and the Daughters of the American Revolution lobbied to add “United States” to it by name.

Then, in the 1940 case Minersville School District v. Gobitis, compulsory participation in reciting the Pledge crossed the floor of the Supreme Court. A Pennsylvania elementary school expelled two children — Jehovah’s Witnesses — for not participating. The family cited religious freedom in their complaint, but the Court ruled in favor of the school, concluding that freedom of religion and speech do not apply to the exercise of these national “political responsibilities” the justices said promoted “national cohesion” in school or otherwise.

“National unity is the basis of national security,” the Court wrote. “The mere possession of religious convictions which con- tradict the relevant concerns of a political society does not relieve the citizen from the discharge of political responsibilities.”

In 1943, the Supreme Court reversed the decision under First Amendment free speech protections in the case West Virginia State Board of Education v. Barnette.

Still a tradition, many continue to feel pressure to stand for the Pledge, junior Laila Rana said.

“If everyone’s hearing their teacher say something like ‘okay, now everyone stand up for the Pledge,’ you’re going to listen,” Rana said. “It’s just what you do.”

Changes in the Pledge have also catered to smaller and smaller groups of people as its content began to reflect conservative religious values specifically. In 1954, amid anti-communist fervor, President Dwight Eisenhower and Congress altered the text to include the words “under God,” associating the Pledge with Judeo-Christian beliefs.

“I feel like the Pledge is very biased towards Christianity,” Rana said. “I’m Muslim, and I don’t feel comfortable with having to experience here in America today.”

Seen as a natural extension of the National Anthem’s pride, the Pledge’s glorification of American patriotism marks a further point of dissent. In 2016, NFL player Colin Kaepernick began to take a knee during the National Anthem before games to protest police violence and discrimination. Students exercise the same right over the Pledge.

The country is no stranger to dissent; it was founded on it, and liberal and conservative protests alike remain part of the fabric of the country, Whitman tech ed. teacher Ted Pope said.

“I still believe in the ideals of America, but I’m also very critical of things done in the name of American patriotism,” Pope said. “I grew up in an era of protest during the Vietnam War, a time when people didn’t like what America and the American flag represented. So I completely understand people’s reluctance today to stand.”

While conversations surrounding the Pledge generally revolve around free speech, that debate often draws attention away from the Pledge’s commercial, political and nativist origins. Of the students and teachers who do stand every day, many do not know of Bellamy or the push for his Pledge to select “wholesome blood.” pledge myself to God because I don’t know what I believe about God, and I know it’s not the same as what the writers of the Pledge believed.”

Respect for the American military became the next common point of controversy. For junior Violet Learn, who comes from a military family, her conflicts with what the Pledge compels her to say prevent her from standing up to recite it.

“When I think about the way my dad being in the Air Force has affected my family, and harmed my family, it doesn’t encourage me to pledge myself to America,” Learn said. “Because of that, I don’t feel an obligation to stand up and pledge myself to the flag.”

Whitman social studies teacher Robert Obando sees the text in a changing context. Its current version is not neutral, and is therefore not always something that Americans can support right now, he said.

“The Pledge as we know it is a relic of the Cold War — we are over 30 years past that,” Obando said. “The words of the Pledge of Allegiance do not match up with everyone’s

That disconnect is common, Obando said.

“I don’t think we realize how blurred the line becomes between patriotism and nationalism,” Obando said. “I think you can be proud or love your country in a variety of ways, and you don’t prove that by mindlessly repeating something like the Pledge, nor does patriotism have to be measured on a daily basis. I just don’t see any place for something that can be seen as forced nationalism, especially in our community as diverse as Montgomery County.”

by DANI KLEIN

by GRACE RODDY