Dr. Linehan revealed her difficult past for the first time last week at the Institute of Living, the clinic where she was first treated for extreme social withdrawal at age 17. “So many people have begged me to come forward, and I just thought—well, I have to do this,” she says. “I owe it to them. I cannot die a coward.”
In an article published in The New York Times today, Linehan talks about her personal history of mental illness, including attacking herself with cigarettes and sharp objects, being diagnosed with schizophrenia, undergoing electroshock treatments and being put in a seclusion room for the most severely ill patients. While there, she made a vow: “When I get out, I’m going to come back and get others out of here.”
After a lot of prayer and years of study, she created her own approach to treating suicidal people: dialectical behavior therapy, known as D.B.T.
D.B.T. includes day-to-day skills borrowed from other behavioral therapies plus other elements, like opposite action, in which patients act opposite to the way they feel when an emotion is inappropriate; and mindfulness meditation.
Results from studies in the 80s and 90s showed that patients who learned Dr. Linehan’s approach made far fewer suicide attempts, landed in the hospital less often and were much more likely to stay in treatment. Now D.B.T. is widely used to treat a variety of difficult cases.
