Marsha Linehan Reveals Her Own Fight with Borderline Personality Disorder
Date: Jun-2011
Minutes: 2:15 Linehan Reveals Her Own Fight | New York TimesIn an article appearing in the New York Times on a June 23, 2011, Marsha M. Linehan shares her struggles with Borderline Personality Disorder and shares a very personal video short. The article provides interesting insight into both the motivations and the spiritual and scientific influences that lead to Dr. Linehan to develop Dialectical Behavioral Therapy. The discussion of Radical Acceptance distills this concept down to its very essence.
"Are you one of us?" the patient wanted to know of her therapist, Marsha M. Linehan of the University of Washington, creator of a treatment used worldwide for the treatment of Borderline Personality Disorder.
Dr. Linehan had a ready answer. It was the one she always used to cut the question short, whether a patient asked it hopefully, accusingly or knowingly, having glimpsed the macramé of faded burns, cuts and welts on Dr. Linehan’s arms:
“You mean, have I suffered?” “No, Marsha,” the patient replied, in an encounter last spring.
“I mean one of us. Like us. Because if you were, it would give all of us so much hope.” Dr. Linehan, 68, told her story in public for the first time last week before an audience of friends, family and doctors at the Institute of Living, the Hartford clinic where she was first treated for extreme social withdrawal at age 17. A discharge summary, dated May 31, 1963, noted that “during 26 months of hospitalization, Miss Linehan was, for a considerable part of this time, one of the most disturbed patients in the hospital.”
“So many people have begged me to come forward, and I just thought — well, I have to do this. I owe it to them. I cannot die a coward.” nytimes.com/2011/06/23/health/23lives.html
