Adventure therapy

Adventure as a method of healing can be traced back to many cultures including Native American, Jewish, and Christian traditions.

Study and practice of this early version of adventure therapy lasted approximately twenty years and then seemed to have dropped off completely.

[5] Outward Bound was a direct response to Lawrence Holt, part-owner of the Blue Funnel Shipping Company, who was looking for a training program for young sailors.

Since 1962, the Colorado Outbound School Program has been providing outdoor experiential learning for over a million students, through all walks of life.

[13] Other schools quickly began to use Outward Bound as an adjunctive experience working with adjudicated youth and adults (one of the first programs in 1964 offered recently released prisoners a job at Coors Brewery if they completed a 23-day course).

[15] Paul Radcliffe, a school psychologist, and Mary Smithy, a staff member, along with a social worker from Addison Gilbert Hospital, started a two-hour weekly outpatient group.

The ideas and thinking of Alfred Adler, Albert Ellis, Milton Erickson, William Glasser, Carl Jung, Abraham Maslow, Jean Piaget, Carl Rogers, B.F. Skinner, Fritz Perls, and Viktor Frankl all appear to have contributed to the thinking in adventure therapy and experiential movements for the progression of education.

Adventure therapy is a cognitive-behavioral-affective approach that utilizes a humanistic existential base to strategically enact change via direct multi-sensory experiences.

There remains a lack of follow-up data into the standards, requirements, education and training of individuals conducting adventure therapy.

In a 1994 meta-analysis aimed at statistically integrating all the available empirical research on adventure therapy, 43 studies in a 25-year span were found to fit the criteria for analysis.

A comprehensive 2013 meta-analysis by Bowen and Neill, which reviewed 197 studies with over 17,000 participants, found a moderate short-term effect size (g = 0.47), with the strongest outcomes for clinical and self-concept measures.

The theoretical basis of adventure therapy describes the participant as a learning being who achieves their greatest learning outside the classroom, through challenge and perceived risk, promoting social skills through experiencing a group challenge mixed with affect, cognition, psychomotor activity, and formal operational thinking generated through metaphor.

Experiential learning becomes adventure therapy when the activities are planned and implemented as vehicles for patients to address individual treatment goals.

Research suggests that adventure therapy can be an effective treatment option for a range of mental health issues, including depression, anxiety, and substance abuse disorders.

They "...(1) need more structure, [and] (2) they work better with an informal, tactile-kinesthetic design..." Adventure therapy as treatment is equally effective for adjudicated youth and other adolescent populations.

[26] Additionally, though self-efficacy, self-esteem, and locus of control are often cited as primary topics of focus of adventure therapy, there is little research that verifies its effectiveness in any of those areas.

[23] Furthermore, due to the limited scope of research, there is little accountability to ensure that programs implement the most effective and current interventions, allowing for approaches that are dated at best and may constitute malpractice at worst.