Shouting At The Sky
Updated In Paperback Edition

Shouting at the Sky: Troubled Teens and the Promise of the Wild by Gary Ferguson is now available in a paperback edition offered by Farcountry Press at $15.00, ISBN: 978-1-59152-061-0.

For a growing number of mental health professionals, it's proving to be among the most urgent, yet perplexing problems of our time: How to balance, or at least ease, the rampant over-stimulation of our young people. How to bring some measure of relief to an environment that science has linked to ADHD, compulsive behavior, depression, and drug abuse.

For many young children, hope is already sprouting - fed and watered in part by Richard Louv's phenomenal best-seller: Last Child in the Woods, which chronicles research showing how unstructured time in nature can have a powerful influence on childhood development. What Louv did for young children, award winning science writer Gary Ferguson now does for troubled teens.

On its initial hardcover release, Shouting at the Sky, was celebrated as a moving portrait of a dozen teens, struggling to regain their center against the magnificent canyons and uplands of southern Utah. Now, for the new paperback edition, Ferguson has tracked down those same young people, seeking their thoughts about the experience some ten years later. Remarkably, for nearly all it remains the most significant event of their lives. "It changed my perspective about who I am," says Jenna, now 26. "It changed my ideas about what it means to be human."

According to Dr. Keith Russell, when it comes to treating modern teen drug addictions, the best compassionate outdoor therapy programs (as opposed to boot camps), are enjoying success rates nearly three times higher than traditional rehab. Meanwhile, 2009 research by Dr. Salli Lewis of the Center for Research, Assessment and Treatment Efficacy, showed participants in wilderness therapy enjoying significant, lasting improvement in attention-deficit hyperactivity issues, conduct disorders, aggressive behavior, depression, and suicide.

Incredibly, a recent study predicts that today's average 14 year old, by the time she reaches age 76, will have spent twenty-eight years connected to various forms of electronic stimulus. "This is the first time I've ever known what I think," explained one sixteen year-old about her experience in wilderness therapy. Shouting at the Sky is the story of the remarkable healing that occurs when we cut through the chaos of modern life, even for a short time. "A tale not just about how young lives can go so terribly wrong, but of how hope and personal power finds new purpose through the experience of the natural world".