Shouting at the Sky

Troubled Teens and the Promise of the Wild

By Gary Ferguson

A windswept desert thick with spring: the flash of primrose and treeless hills shining in the sun. And in the distance, all but lost in great sweeps of rock and sky, a group of teenagers fresh out of suburban America, struggling desperately to build new lives. Lives beyond booze and crack and crystal meth, beyond sadness, beyond a fear that has brought many to the brink of self destruction.

There are times, admit many mental health professionals, when our efforts to help America's troubled teens seem painfully inadequate. The success rate treating teenage drug addiction, for example, remains under 25 percent. Suicide among teen boys has quadrupled since 1960. Incidents of depression and various behavioral problems have risen dramatically over the past decade. Not knowing what else to do, we medicate. Last year alone, nearly 14 million anti-depressant prescriptions were written for 12- to 17-year-olds, only 20 percent of which have ever been tested on kids. As Dr. Donald Cohen, director of the Yale University Child Study Center reports, "Too many people are responding to real trouble with a quick fix. As a nation we should be reserving medication only for those situations when it's proven to be an effective approach and where we can't approach it in other ways."

Shouting at the Sky is about another way. This is the story of three months spent in one of the country's most successful wilderness therapy programs for at-risk teens; I later followed a dozen of these kids for a year, tracking how the experience played out in their lives. Most of these teens, by the way, were veterans of countless other treatment options: counseling, psychiatric and drug rehab facilities,"tough love" programs, suicide wards, etc. Yet for many, it was these eight weeks in the wilderness that allowed them to finally get on track, to begin acting in their own behalf. "The wilderness ruined my high," said one 16-year-old girl from Sacramento. "Out there I came to know who I am, what I need. Two months after I got back I tried drugs again, but it wasn't the same. It was like suddenly I knew too much."