For many among us, mental health issues and process are not as glib a "fix" or "solution" as simply counseling and/or medication. For many suffering from depression, anxiety, loneliness, issues of trauma - to name just a select few - is truly about "Survival Skills." These sometime chronic and deleterious roadblocks to individual contentment and happiness are insidious and refractory of treatment and thus, at times, Hope. Without dwelling on the significant rates of mental health related suicides in our communities, it is a reality that many among us face on a daily basis.
The Relative (E=mc2) Wilderness School is an educational program that teaches the basics in bushcraft, wilderness, and survival skills. These skills, tactics, and techniques stress the importance of Self-reliance. The Relative Wilderness School attempts to emphasize this role of Self-reliance and then generalize this learned process to the effective mental health management of day-to-day struggles. Simply stated, the self-reliance required in the acquisition of various wilderness skills, tactics, and techniques can combat a host of deleterious mental health issues/emotional problems when used in conjunction.
The belief is that the skills learned in competent wilderness skills and survival are not a physical "constant" and can be applied to urban, day-to-day, mental health issues, hence, making them "relative." Therefore, if time and space are "relative" and not a constant or fixed construct, then perhaps the wilderness experience that many routinely seek is "relative" as well and can then be applied to urban and mental health issues.
The wilderness prism is indeed relative. Simply stated, it can be a groomed city park or a primitive wilderness area sanctioned by the federal government. So, there exists a continuum from an urban wilderness area to a primitive wilderness area untrammeled by man. Along the continuum lay forests, woods, trails, parks, etc. Thus, given this perspective, wilderness is not fixed, it is truly relative and is not as remote from our daily lives as we may believe.
Treatment is experiential and provides a unique opportunity for personal growth. Contrary to many therapeutic modalities, I don’t believe you can simply or easily “Think” your way out of it. The Relative Wilderness attempts to elucidate the positive (growth learning) psychological and behavioral aspects of bushcraft, survival and general preparedness. It then concentrates that growth on how to generalize the aforesaid in daily life (affect, thoughts, behavior).
