| Summary: | Rehabilitation within forensic psychiatric offenders has traditionally focused on the reduction of symptomatology. An emerging idea, however, is to additionally target their criminogenic risk factors, such as depression and self-esteem. Adventure-Based Counseling, a type of Wilderness Therapy, has been shown to be efficacious in treating certain non-forensic populations. The current study is an attempt to merge these two different lines of research and evaluate this type of counseling in a forensic psychiatric population. The current study will look at the effectiveness of the Adventure-Based Counseling program on a number of intrapersonal criminogenic risk factors in a sample of forensic psychiatric patients. This is an innovative form of treatment for this population, which consists of an Adventure-Based Counseling program across 12 sessions. The treatment modality will employ outdoor challenges such as a rock climbing activity and team-building exercises. Measures include depression, anxiety, hopelessness, perceived stress, self-esteem, as-needed medication use, and risk or threat of self-harm events. Participants were patients from the Southwest Centre for Forensic Mental Health Care in St. Thomas, Ontario. All participants suffer from a mental illness and have come into contact with the criminal justice system. Results showed directionality for a number of the variables; however the only significant change was in the wrong direction. Limitations and future directions are discussed
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