without any big miscues, looking forward to next week.
For programs like this, the social piece is a large part of it. As
Gold put it, “if you’re returning to the mainstream after a long period
of treatment for mental health, you’re not going to go to Queen Street
station to see how you get on. You’re going to do it in a group where
any problems can be examined in a gentle way by people who know
only too well where you’ve been.”
BRANCHING OUT IS just the latest incarnation of a long tradition of
wilderness-to-build-character enterprises, from the exploits of the
seafaring Vikings to Outward Bound. America’s best-known outdoor
education program, Outward Bound originated in 1939 with a
German-Jewish educator and a Briton who had a crazy nostalgia for
rough seas. As war was breaking out, they felt young men weren’t
showing enough toughness, leadership or outdoor training. Great
Britain didn’t have a lot of wilderness, per se, but it could offer the
seas, coastlines and miles of moors. As far as mental-health
treatment, Europe had a lineage of psychoanalysis and a tradition of
nature-enhanced health spas, so perhaps it was inevitable the two
would meet in pastoral hospitals of northern Europe. Interestingly,
though, it was an early American psychologist, Benjamin Rush, who
first popularized the idea of nature-ish therapy for his mental patients
in an 1812 treatise: “It has been remarked, that the maniacs of the
male sex in all hospitals, who assist in cutting wood, making fires,
and digging in a garden . . . often recover, while persons, whose rank
exempts them from performing such services, languish away their
lives within the walls of the hospital.”
His notions of reform helped slowly change treatment for the
mentally ill in America and Europe. Freud had long blamed cities and
civilization, at least in part, for unhealthy repressive tendencies. But
after World War I, treatment entered a long, mixed interlude of
turning mental-health care over to pharmaceuticals, climate control