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Biographies and MemoirsBuilding a Life Worth Living: A Memoir Marsha M. Linehan
Marsha Linehan is a psychologist who started her career by asking:
Give me your most hopeless cases. The ones you've given up on.
Over time, she built a suicide-prevention program known as "DBT" - and it's been studied and proven to be effective. She had to pick a "diagnosis" to study - so she ended up working with patients diagnoses with Borderline Personality Disorder.
The reason she did it is because she, herself, was once a hopeless, institutionalized, patient they'd given up on helping.
The thing is - as an activist, it's very hard not to see the world as a hopeless place. The skills from DBT, I strongly feel, can help anyone feeling hopelessness. DBT skills are one of the things that helped me crawl out of the dark and back into the light.
The problem is most the books are written for therapists, but she's recently released a Memoir, so I'm planning to read it (the name is the title).
If you want to hear her speak - this is a video of her giving of speech:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JMUk0TBWASc
I believe this is the speech where she mentions the current researching using this to prevent suicide in transgender individuals as well.
Someone in the comments says BPD should probably be re-named "Hypersensitivity Personality Disorder". Emotional Regulation Disorder is one proposed name the are looking at. To give you an idea of how Borderline is seen in the medical community - you just have to look at the origin of the name. "Borderline" means "Borderline Scizophrenia" - people who don't have scizophrenia but act out.
It's also the most common personality disorder found in Binary Transgender Individuals seeking gender conforming therapy (the Italian study - I can probably find if someone needs it).
And yes - I'm including those details for the hate-readers who read here hoping it will help some of them too. You can hate me but this stuff is golden and I wish everyone to have a "life worth living" regardless of who you are.
I have/had BPD. My understanding was “borderline” came from being on the border of psychosis and neurosis. Makes perfect sense to me but I understand why they want to rename it, since it’s kind of meaningless to most everyone else, and probably one of the reasons BPD gets a lot of stigma.
DBT is good stuff and Marsha Linehan is strong. My understanding was that she had BPD and came up with this system to get better. While I never went through a full DBT course, I dabbled and read a ton, and her system inspired my own. I’m grateful to her.
Thank you for posting this! DBT is extremely effective and Linehan was an absolute trailblazer.
Before Marsha Linehan came along BPD was considered incurable and sufferers beyond help (it’s not a disorder for which medication is helpful, generally, and other forms of therapy weren’t effective). That’s all changed thanks to her and DBT (dialectical behavioural therapy); I’ve seen the power of its effects on people I love.
DBT is not just suicide prevention (though that’s important; the lifetime suicide rate is 10% among those with BPD - that’s actual suicide, not attempts; multiple attempts are par for the course for a BPD sufferer). It teaches skills for emotional regulation and interpersonal effectiveness, of various kinds.
Some advocates believe (and I agree) that such skills should be taught to everyone in school. If you’re interested there are tutorials on YouTube. It can be quite complex though and requires a lot of effort and commitment.
Anyway, I didn’t know about these memoirs or that Linehan had that history herself, so thanks for mentioning it. I’ll definitely read this!
I agree also. DBT can benefit just about anyone, not only those with diagnosed emotional dysregulation disorders.
I agree about teaching it to everyone in school. I think the techniques you learn have great potential to actually prevent the development of some of these disorders in the first place, as well.