Carina Ribe Fernee

Sørlandet Hospital | SSHF · Department of Child and Adolescent Mental Health (ABUP)

Despite the rich traditions of outdoor life in the Scandinavian countries, structured nature-based therapeutic interventions remain underexplored in adolescent mental health services. We suggest that wilderness therapy is an age-appropriate and effective group treatment that may hold particular appeal for at-risk youth who are less responsive to co...

Objective This systematic review and meta-analysis investigates the effects of emotionally oriented parental interventions. Background Several emotionally oriented parental interventions have been developed during the last decade. Some of these have gained popularity and spread across several continents. The literature is growing and consists of q...

This is the first introductory textbook to outdoor therapy available in Norwegian. Dette er ei innføringsbok for fagfeltet utendørsterapi. Boka gir innsikt i mangfoldet av muligheter som ligger i naturbasert terapeutisk arbeid. I tillegg viser den hvorfor og hvordan naturen i seg selv både tilrettelegger for og forsterker disse mulighetene.

This qualitative case study aimed to explore environmental circumstances and interactional processes that appeared to be relevant for the dynamics of resilience in adolescents exposed to child abuse. Fieldwork at a learning and coping centre for children and their families was combined with semi‐structured interviews with adolescent participants ag...

Outdoor therapy and family-based therapy are suggested to be promising interventions for the treatment of mental health problems. The aim of the present scoping review was to systematically map the concept, content, and outcome of combining family- and outdoor-based therapy for children and adolescents with mental health problems. The Joanna Briggs...

Mentalization-based family therapy and family rehabilitation represent a rich variety of approaches for assisting families with difficult interaction patterns. On the other hand, adventure therapy methods have been successfully used with families to offer them empowering experiences of succeeding together against difficult odds and to improve commu...

Dignity is a universal principle that requires us to treat every person as having worth beyond who a particular person is or what they do. Dignity is a complex and sometimes contested idea, that at times can be compromised in health care and allegedly also within the practice of outdoor therapy. Outdoor therapies comprise a range of therapeutic app...

Objective: To report on the role of nature in outdoor therapies through review and summary of existing systematic and meta-analytic reviews in an effort to articulate a theoretical framework for practice. Materials and methods: An umbrella review was conducted following systematic protocols PRISMA guidelines. Results: Fourteen studies met the inclu...

This paper is a twelve-month follow-up study that explores perceived outcomes from participation in a Norwegian wilderness therapy program. Through a critical realist approach, the authors performed an in-depth analysis of individual interviews with ten adolescent participants. Long-term outcomes included the transfer and adaptation of calming and...

This is a doctoral dissertation for the degree of PhD in Health Sciences at the University of Agder, Norway. It is an article-based thesis, which means that the main work of this PhD is three published scientific articles and a fourth article that has been submitted. The thesis provides the introduction, summary and overall discussion of these four...

Background and purpose: Participant state anxiety in outdoor therapeutic practices continues to raise many questions. To help inform this important topic we present and discuss the results of an exploratory pilot study on participant day-to-day state anxiety throughout a Norwegian wilderness therapy intervention. Materials and methods: Thirty-th...

Wilderness therapy has the potential to meet the specific needs of the current adolescent population by providing a rather unique outdoor group treatment. Wilderness therapy is not a new approach to mental health treatment, but its theoretical basis is not yet clearly delineated, in part because of the diversity found across programs and contexts....

This paper investigates the effectiveness of a Norwegian wilderness therapy programme, Friluftsterapi, which is offered to adolescents within a specialized mental health care setting. This mixed methods study incorporated (1) psychometric pre-, post-, and 12 month follow-up data, (2) executive functioning data, and (3) qualitative data from two rou...

Despite considerable progress within wilderness and adventure therapy research over the last decade, researchers are still unable to precisely answer why, how, and for whom this treatment modality works. There is also a need for more knowledge regarding the circumstances under which the treatment does not appear to be effective. In this realist syn...

There are few high-quality studies using randomized controlled trials (RCTs) in the adventure and wilderness therapy literature. Thus, a unison call is heard for more such studies to be carried out. This article presents a Norwegian wilderness therapy research project that planned to incorporate this “gold standard” that is regarded as the most sci...