MIND MOVES:Offering hope to those written off as hopeless causes, writes TONY BATES
PASSING THROUGH New York this week, I picked up the Timesand came across something I think is worthy of passing along.
The paper is running a series called Lives Restoredin its Sunday edition. Each article focuses on a person who has found a way to live creatively with themselves, despite the reality of severe and enduring mental health difficulties.
Those featured hold down challenging careers and perform at a high level. The author makes the point that we don’t normally hear from people such as this because they don’t typically sign up to longitudinal studies. If anything, they tend to keep themselves and their mental health difficulties well below the radar, so as not to jeopardise their credibility.
But since the publication of her personal recovery from schizophrenia – The Centre Cannot Hold: My Journey Through Madness – by Eyln R Saks, professor of law, University of Southern California, many high functioning survivors of mental health disorders have stepped forward and agreed to share what works for them.
You can appreciate my surprise when I opened the first of the three articles online and saw the face of a former teacher of mine looking right out at me. Marsha Linehan, founder of a worldwide therapeutic programme for people with Borderline Personality Disorders called dialectical behaviour therapy (DBT), agreed to be interviewed having recently spoken out for the first time about her personal struggle with this disorder all of her life.
When developing DBT, “I honestly didn’t realise that I was dealing with myself” she said in the article. “But I suppose it’s true that I developed a therapy that provided the things that I needed for many years and never got.”
Her story makes for an inspiring read. After a difficult childhood, she was admitted to a psychiatric hospital at age 17 and stayed there for 26 months. She was diagnosed as having schizophrenia and given multiple medications.
By all accounts Marsha was not easy to manage. Borderline personalities typically are prone to interpersonal conflict and self-destructive urges that may be expressed through self-harming or suicidal behaviours. As a teenager, she attacked herself habitually, slashing her body in several places and burning herself with cigarettes. When two rounds of ECT did little to calm her, she was locked up in a seclusion room. It made no sense to her what she was doing there. She tried to find relief in the only way she knew: by banging her head off the wall and the floor. Hard.
Her recovery began some years later when she was sitting in a chapel in Loyola University and was overcome with a feeling of love for herself. She realised that for years the gap between the way she was and the person she wanted to be had become vast. She made a vow to herself that she would get out of the hell she was in, and that when she did, she would dedicate her life to getting others out of there.
She graduated in 1971 with a doctorate in psychology and concentrated her clinical work on helping “super-suicidal people”. Her approach was based on a principle of “radical acceptance”. She helped them to face their intense emotions and to accept that given the way they were feeling, self-harm and suicide made a lot of sense. She taught them mindfulness, to keep track of their moods and to steady themselves when they felt themselves being carried away; she taught a technique she called “opposite action” where a person acts in the opposite way to what a strong destructive emotion may be telling them to do.
At 68, Marsha has reached a place of peace with herself; a place where she has found the inner strength to speak her truth in public and take the consequences. She has achieved world significance as a therapist and author. Her work has informed the training of hundreds of psychologists and therapists in this country, and has offered hope to thousands of people who have been written off as hopeless causes. You can access her story by logging onto nytimes.com/health/livesrestored
Tony Bates is founding director of Headstrong – The National Centre for Youth Mental Health (headstrong.ie)