I do appreciate the concern for safety in treatment centers. I do want to speak from the experience in our family. Our daughter was in a in-patient residential program that was covered by our insurance, and she was absolutely refusing therapy. A staff member there that we trusted recommended Open Sky Wilderness Therapy. It has made a world of difference for our daughter, and she is gaining insights into herself and coming to terms with her past actions in a way that a year of therapy never achieved. I am on the parent phone call every week, and other parents have similar stories. She has even said that the extreme environment (middle of winter in the wilderness) and intense therapeutic environment there has made a major change in her perspective that wouldn't have happened anywhere else.

I can't emphasize enough how much caring I feel coming from the staff. The interactions and healing resources for parents were very helpful for me personally. They really integrate meditation, yoga and mindfulness into there whole program in a deep way, not a superficial way. By they way, at the first sign of medical issues they took my daughter to a doctor or the ER. It turned out to be nothing. I found them very responsive to the physical condition of my daughter.

I did read the material about Open Sky on the Heal site. Sigh. I don't know what to say. I don't have answers to licensing or all of the questions you asked. I just know what I and my daughter experienced. This was just very recent in 2015. There is only contact through letters at first in the program, but they do not screen or edit what the girls write, which is posted promptly. Parents email their letters to the therapist, who will request changes if things the parents say are not therapeutically appropriate. I found this helpful.

I wish that these programs were better integrated into the standard mental health system, or, better yet, that the whole mental health system really worked better.