Outdoor and Adventure-Based Treatment for Veterans

California State University San Marcos has a large population of student veterans. With the recent addition of the Veterans’ Center on campus, the school is expanding services to better respond to the unique needs of its former service members. Current treatments for PTSD and other service related ailments have shown promise in their effectiveness, but many barriers exist in accessing such treatments. In this capstone project, service-related problems, treatments, and barriers to treatment are described. Following this, outdoor and adventure-based programs are presented and described as alternative interventions, which address many of these barriers to treatment, allowing veterans to receive effective and needed therapeutic care. This project goes on to describe the efforts of a group of graduating Master of Social Work students to collaborate with Campus Recreation and the Veterans’ center to write a detailed grant template which will be used by Campus Recreation to fund an innovative outdoor therapy program for former service members on the CSUSM campus.