Nov 25, 2019
L. Jay Mitchell is one of the elders in the field of wilderness therapy as he co-founded the School of Urban and Wilderness Survival (SUWS) in Idaho and Alldredge Academy in West Virginia. SUWS was the first for-profit, private pay primitive skills wilderness therapy program in the U.S. and helped spawn the movement of wilderness therapy in the west. L. Jay shares his stunning story of leaving a troubled home as a teen to working his way through college and the many influences and people who started SUWS.
From L. Jays Mitchell's LinkedIn page:
Co-founder/owner of 3 highly successful residential programs for
emotionally challenged adolescents, L Jay has a nationwide
reputation as an innovator and entrepreneur in this industry. My
program/schools have over 10,000 graduates from all 50 states and
24 foreign countries.
My career began as an attorney (JAG) in the US Air Force where I
defended hundreds of armed forces personnel in criminal proceedings
and administrative discharges. In doing so I frequently worked with
forensic psychologists and psychiatrists, where I developed a
comprehensive interest and empathy for victims of psychological
injuries. This continued into MY civil law practice.
The interest evolved into a passion, and I used MY skills and
research to harness wilderness therapy as a viable option to assist
troubled teens. In 1981 I co-founded The SUWS Adolescent Program
which is a pioneer in creating not only a wilderness therapy model
that was low cost, short term and effective, but had a viable
business model to perpetuate itself. This was a disruptive
innovation to conventional residential care providing an
affordable, alternative treatment model that did not exist in the
public arena.
These innovations led to founding The Alldredge Academy, a
semester-long program for Adolescents that included a new
therapeutic model and context, The Village. In an indigenous type
setting students experienced the transforming power of
virtue/ethics, life purpose, existential questioning, and
self-identity.
Next, I founded the Greenbrier Academy for Girls, a
therapeutic/academic boarding school that includes its own Village
and the creation of the therapeutic model, Applied
Relationality.
My book, "Decide Now-The Good Life or the Best Life", explains some
of the assumptions of this model. My entity, TAS Development,
continues to create collaborations and research to find new and
better ways to good mental health.