Marsha M. Linehan

Dialectical behaviour therapy began in a practical failure: standard cognitive therapy kept asking patients in severe distress to change, and they kept leaving treatment. Marsha M. Linehan built a method that pairs acceptance with change, and taught it in four modules, mindfulness, distress tolerance, emotion regulation and interpersonal effectiveness. DBT Skills Training Handouts and Worksheets is the client half of that programme, the sheets people actually work from, published by Guilford Press and revised in a second edition in 2014. Linehan was professor of psychology at Washington and ran its Behavioral Research and Therapy Clinics. In 2011 she told an audience, and afterwards the press, that she had been a patient herself: admitted at eighteen, kept in seclusion for months, and certain on leaving that she owed it to the people still inside to come back for them. She also founded Behavioral Tech, the company that trains and certifies clinicians in the method.