Three Peaks Ascent has a Specialized Treatment Focus
Through our unique approach to experiential and relationship-based therapy, we can effectively address a wide range of situations, such as:
- Depressive Mood Disorders
- Anxiety Disorder
- Poor Self-Esteem
- Trauma/Stress Disorder
- Family Conflict Problems
- Out-of-Control Behavior
- ADHD
- Level 1 Autism/ASD
- Learning and Developmental Disorders
Some of the Insurance Providers We Work With Regularly
ThreePeaks Ascent works with most private insurance companies on an out-of-network basis. We talk to your insurance provider and advocate for you to maximize your benefits at every level of care.
Call our admissions team for a free verification of benefits.
Why Choose Nature-Based Residential Treatment?
Natured-based Therapy is a unique and dynamic way to break through boundaries and create lasting change. Programs that implement a nature-based therapy model like ThreePeaks Ascent can create challenges for students so they can start to forge an identity, build resiliency, and improve self-efficacy. When this is combined with traditional therapeutic methods like individual and group therapy, it is a powerful combination.
Natured-based therapy programs like ThreePeaks Ascent provide comprehensive, clinically sophisticated treatment in concert with adventure activities. This allows clinicians to get past symptoms and address the root causes of problem behaviors for adolescents and young adults. Natured-based therapy has been shown to improve self-efficacy through a process by which youth are exposed to seemingly impossible challenges in novel environments. Through guidance, hard work, and grit, they can find success. This approach is more effective than boot camps, which use behavioral modification models that only address behaviors and do not have a holistic approach.
Further, wilderness programs can address the issues in an individualized way. They are not one size fits all approach and include the whole family in the process.
Finally, with the combination of services provided at programs such as ThreePeaks Ascent, teenagers experience lasting change.
What is Natured-based Therapy?
Nature-based therapy is a type of treatment for teens that uses nature, wilderness activities, and therapy as a means to address and heal. Nature-based therapy takes full advantage of the outdoors and its ability to foster change. The outdoors provide teens with a contrasting environment to observe aspects of themselves that are often overlooked in traditional talk therapy.
As the leader in nature-based therapy, ThreePeaks Ascent is an effective treatment program for struggling teens aged 13-17. ThreePeaks Ascent's safe, nurturing, and supportive environment provides teens the skills they need to cope in a healthy and age-appropriate way.
Benefits of Nature-Based Residential Treatment for Teens
Being immersed in nature can have a profound impact on a teenager. It improves their mental, emotional and physical health. When combined with a research-backed clinical approach, a therapeutic wilderness experience helps teens heal from depression. Here are five specific benefits your family can expect to see while your teen is in nature-based therapy.
Research indicates accurate mental health assessments can lead to a 20% reduction in treatment.
Wilderness therapy provides a novel and challenging environment that disrupts the unhealthy patterns that cause your teen's mental health struggles.
Teens living with severe depression often struggle to engage in ongoing treatment and have very high dropout rates. Poor engagement may lead to worse clinical outcomes, with symptom relapse and rehospitalization. Our research shows that even teens who have been resistant to therapy engage in the process while in wilderness therapy.
ThreePeaks Ascent's safe, nurturing, and supportive environment provides teens with the social and emotional learning skills they need to re-engage in healthy development.
If you're like most parents, you don't want to just get rid of your teen's mental health issues. You want them to eventually become thriving, independent adults equipped with the skills necessary to be successful outside your home. These include:
Resilience - the ability to successfully adapt to challenging situations despite risk and adversity. Resilience helps us develop social competence, problem-solving skills, critical consciousness, autonomy, and a sense of purpose.
Leadership & Social Competence skills include qualities such as:
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- responsiveness, especially the ability to elicit positive responses from others;
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- flexibility
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- empathy
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- communication skills
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- and a sense of humor.
Problem-solving skills - the ability to plan; to be resourceful in seeking help from others; and to think critically, creatively, and reflectively.
Autonomy is having a sense of one's own identity and an ability to act independently and to exert some control over one's environment, including a sense of task mastery, internal locus of control, and self-efficacy. The development of resistance (refusing to accept negative messages about oneself) and of detachment (distancing oneself from dysfunction) serves as a powerful protector of autonomy.
Sense of Purpose and a belief in a bright future, including goal direction, educational aspirations, achievement motivation, persistence, hopefulness, optimism, and spiritual connectedness.
98% of students report feeling connected to ThreePeaks' staff and one or more of their peers.
Upon completion of the program, 86% of parents reported improvement in their child's problems when compared to when they entered
12 months after treatment 86% of parents reported that their child's problems are improved since they completed treatment
How Does Nature-Based Residential Treatment Work?
ThreePeaks Ascent has helped teens with mental health issues for years and has conducted research since its inception. Through our research, we have identified seven principles that actually make a difference in helping your whole family heal from your teen's mental health issues.
Healthy relationships are not only the foundation for growth and development but the launchpad for a successful future as well.
Your teen will live in a small group where social influence and feedback can be given and received in a safe and supportive way. This safe environment teaches your teen to build healthy relationships with both their peers and mentors. Having the skills to make and keep healthy relationships is essential to overcoming depression.
Treatment is most effective when it is responsive to your teen's specific struggles, strengths, personality, sociocultural context, and preferences. Our evidence-based treatment approach combines decades of research and clinical expertise to personalize a treatment plan that fits your teen's unique struggles, characteristics, culture, and preferences.
One common theme in feedback from ThreePeaks Ascent's students is that the challenging and novel environment provided them with a new perspective on their life and everything they knew before wilderness therapy.
Novel physical environments are a place of contrast that confront the world views your teen takes for granted. This helps your teen to see with a fresh perspective and see new options available to them. Growth occurs outside of the comfort zone and is accelerated in environments that push physical and mental limits.
Your teen's mental health issues didn't develop in isolation, it affects everyone in your family. The healing process should apply to your whole family as well. Parental involvement and family support during treatment greatly increase your teen's progress in treatment and helps them to adapt after treatment.
Communicating through handwritten letters provides a novel and powerful way to work through your family's struggles. You will also have access to our parent resource library, a weekly support call with other parents like you, as well as a weekly session with your child's therapist.
Your teen's issues fill every aspect of their life. The best treatments must treat every part of their life as well. They use a holistic and integrated approach so that every aspect of your teen's life can heal from depression. In our treatment program, mentors, therapists, doctors, nurses, academic directors, nutritionists, and everyone on your teen's treatment team will meet together each week to discuss how to best help your child.
Teens struggle to believe in themselves. By teaching basic primitive living skills, teens gain confidence in themselves that carries on to all aspects of their lives. By knowing that they are able to survive in nature, teens thrive at home, in school, and in their relationships.
A ceremony is a powerful tool that can change your teenager's life. A ceremony is a community celebration or commemoration often having symbolic importance to the people performing it. A ceremony recognizes your teen's inner growth and experiences and attaches it to a physical symbol that your teen can take with them. A ceremony can help your teen validate and internalize the growth they have achieved.
Exclusionary criteria for ThreePeaks Ascent include:
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- Teens younger than 12 and older than 17.5
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- Teens with a physical limitation, i.e. wheelchair, crutches, etc.
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- Teens with conditions that need intensive medical care or monitoring, i.e. eating disorders, diabetes, etc.
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- Teens with a history of violence or assault
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- Teens with psychosis or schizophrenia
ThreePeaks Ascent does not take Medicare or Medicaid.