Excerpts from Must Read Books & Articles on Mental Health Topics
Articles- Part VI

DBT Challenges The Borderline Diagnosis
Katy Butler, The Psychotherapist Networker, May/June 2001

On the morning of September 21, 1993, a 37-year-old former graduate student named Susan Kandel took an elevator to an upper floor of Duke Medical Center in Durham, North Carolina, where she was attending a day treatment program. She was panicked and miserable: her therapist had recently moved to another state, and she was about to leave agency-supervised housing to look for her own apartment. She went to a breezeway connecting two wings of the building and jumped, expecting to fall 90 feet to her death. She landed instead on a maintenance workers' platform 40 feet down and was taken to the emergency room with three broken vertebrae. A month later, still in a body brace but not paralyzed, she was involuntarily committed to John Umstead State Hospital, an aging two-story brick mental hospital in Butner, North Carolina on the outskirts of Durham. She, the hospital staff and her family all expected her to be there for a long, long time, and she was in deep despair. It was her fourth commitment to John Umstead State Hospital, and her seventh serious suicide attempt. Two years earlier, facing an oral presentation for her Ph.D. in molecular biology at Duke, she had driven to a motel room on the North Carolina shore and swallowed 250 milliliters of chloroform-more than 25 times the lethal dose. Two days later, she was discovered in a coma, with a hole in her esophagus and her liver badly damaged; when she recovered sufficiently, she was committed to John Umstead for her first long stay.
    Kandel had been given the most reviled diagnosis in the therapeutic lexicon--Borderline Personality Disorder--when she was 20. A brilliant but withdrawn college student, she had spent much of the next 17 years turning on a wheel of suffering from suicide attempt to mental hospital to halfway house to suicide attempt. Much like a distressed monkey gnawing its knuckles in a small cage at the zoo, she discovered at 17 that cutting her forearms with razor blades made her feel somewhat better. When she was 19, she was sent to a mental hospital for the first time, and there she took her first pill overdose.
    The years passed, and therapy fashions changed, but no treatment made any appreciable difference: not five-times-a-week psychodynamic talk therapy, nor electroshock, lithium, librium, tricyclics or anti-psychotics. By the time she returned to John Umstead hospital in a body brace, she was like a cat with nine unwanted lives: she had lost faith even in her ability to kill herself. "I had given up on pills because I'd been rescued so many times," she re members. "Guns are foreign to me, and given my history, I knew I couldn't get a license even if I'd wanted one. It wouldn't matter what I did; I would be brought back to the hospital and have to start all over again. I wanted to die, but the powers that be, the gods, were not going to let go of me."
    Then, in November 1993, Kandel was required to take part in a radical new treatment for borderline personality disorder called Dialectical Behavior Therapy (DBT). She left the hospital 10 months later, and in the seven years since, has never come close to being rehospitalized or to killing herself.

A Code Word for Trouble
Long before the ambiguous and insulting term was coined by a male psychoanalyst 60 years ago, the people we now call "borderlines" were public health nightmares, islands of intractable misery, and the bane of many a psychotherapist's existence. A century of shifting diagnostic labels and rising feminist sympathies cannot paper over therapy's signal failure with them.
    Seventy-five percent are women; and about an equal percentage of all clients diagnosed as borderline report a history of childhood sexual abuse--three times the rate of clients given other diagnoses. Many try to kill themselves and.nine percent succeed. Their numbers include the volatile and damaged people that Freud called "hysterics" and treated with little success at the turn of the century, like Dora and the Wolf Man; others who deteriorated in classical psychoanalysis and were described in 1938 by psychoanalyst Otto Stern as "on the borderline" between psychosis and neurosis; and still others treated with equally mixed results in the 1980s by feminist therapists who dropped the borderline label in favor of the less pejorative term trauma survivor.
    Today, the DSM-IV coolly defines Borderline Personality as an Axis II character disorder marked by "instability of interpersonal relationships, self-image, and affects, and marked impulsivity." Listed symptoms include "frantic efforts to avoid real or imagined abandonment"; episodes of depersonalization and dissociation; oscillation between idealizing and denigrating others; suicidality, self-mutilation, loneliness, anger, and inner emptiness; and "impulsivity in at least two areas that are potentially self-damaging (e.g. spending, sex, substance abuse, reckless driving, binge eating)."
    But in therapists' private argot, "borderline," accompanied by much eye-rolling, has long been the shorthand for clients who never got beyond the crisis du jour--clients like the fragile and alcoholic Blanche Dubois of A Streetcar Named Desire, eternally dependent on "the kindness of strangers." They are clients reminiscent of Marilyn Monroe (who was removed from the care of a psychotic mother and sexually abused in childhood), ever wandering into exploitative relationships and never able to protect themselves.
    "Borderline" was a code word not for a person but a relationships therapeutic double-drowning. It tagged practically any client who terrified, enraged or repulsed her therapist--like Alex Forrest, the seemingly competent Manhattan career woman played by Glenn Close in Fatal Attraction, who flew into rages, slit her wrists and stalked her married lover when he tried to leave her. Or Bob, the "human crazy glue" played by Bill Murray in What About Bob? who tracked his stuffy psychiatrist to his summer home and drove the shrink so crazy he tried to blow up Bob with dynamite. "Borderlines" were the terrorists of the therapeutic hour, the people with "no boundaries," the experts in the tyranny of the weak.
    "I won't work with them anymore. There was so much effort for so little result," says one psychologist who still remembers two clients who made him tear out his hair at an agency in Maine in the early 1980s. One man frequently threatened suicide and called him collect to say things like You cock-sucker, you don't care about me, this is just a job to you. (That client later threw hot coffee on a therapist's new suit.) Another--a breast cancer survivor--secretly taped her sessions, demanded copies of clinical notes and showed up unannounced at his home office, unnerving him so much that he once told her, You're too mean to die. "You could pay me three times what I make now," he said recently, shaking his head, "and it still wouldn't be enough."

No Emotional Skin
In the decades since, most clinicians who had a choice avoided borderline clients, while agency staff (who couldn't) went through the motions with a sense of futility. Some adopted a psychoanalytic view, blaming the disorder on disturbances of mother-infant attachment or a "constitutional excess of aggression." Therapy consisted of guarding against "manipulation" and mining the borderline's reactions to the therapist for clues to her fragmented inner world. It was hard on clients--and on therapists as well. "We made too much of an assumption that if we directly understood the patients' conflicts and made correct interpretations, they would know how to say no, or stand up to somebody or go through a job interview," says psychiatrist Charles Swenson, a former protoge of psychoanalyst Otto Kemberg. "Role-playing or teaching [a behavioral skill] was considered a no-no, because it would create a different type of transference, where the person would become dependent on you and develop false hopes."
    Other clinicians adopted a feminist, trauma-focused view, concentrating on client histories of sexual and physical trauma--with equally mixed results. "I count myself among the many who thought that by excavating all those stories and memories and feelings we were freeing ourselves and our clients," says psychologist Dusty Miller, the author of Women Who Hurt Themselves. "The truth is, for a lot of people, the pain got worse, the rage got worse and people weren't given coping skills," she says. "Definitely, people got worse."
    Then, in 1991, a study published in the Archives of General Psychiatry (one of psychiatry's most influential journals) challenged this pervasive pessimism. The article reported on a small, NIMH-funded, randomized clinical trial that showed dramatic improvement among 22 borderline, suicidal and severely self-harming women. The lead author and researcher was not a psychiatrist, but a behavioral psychologist and Zen student at the University of Washington named Marsha Linehan; her treatment was called Dialectical Behavior Therapy, or DBT
    All of the women in her study had tried to kill themselves at least twice, and many practiced "parasuicide": they addictively attacked their own bodies in moments of emotional crisis, slashing forearms, tendons and wrists; burned themselves with cigarettes and lighters; and even garroted themselves severely enough to risk death, unconsciousness and hospitalization. But after four months of treatment, fewer than half were still harming themselves--compared with roughly three quarters of a control group of 22 equally self-punishing women given "treatment as usual" by therapists in the Seattle community. Over the course of the year, the DBT women steadily improved, spending significantly fewer days in mental hospitals and engaging in fewer suicide attempts and parasuicides. Tiny as it was, and limited though the improvement had been, the study established DBT as the only treatment for borderline suicidality ever validated by a randomized clinical trial published in a peer-reviewed journal.
    At the core of the treatment was a set of behavioral techniques Linehan called a "technology of change," balanced by a "technology of acceptance"--a soft, almost mystical, Asian emphasis on "radical acceptance" and exercises for calming the mind by following the breath. The women had been taught how to tolerate difficult situations--and their own intense emotions--by using mindfulness-meditation practices and cultivating radical acceptance. Paradoxically, they had also learned assertive Western social skills, such as "interpersonal effectiveness," to get their needs met, and "behavioral chain analysis" to find out exactly what had sparked their desires to kill themselves.
    DBT was no walk in the park: it required team treatment, including weekly individual therapy, a year-long "skills training" class, telephone coaching and supportive supervision for the therapist. But it offered clients and therapists alike a way out of chaos--a systematic clinical package that integrated the technical and analytical strengths of behaviorism, the subtleties of Zen training, the warmth and acceptance of relationship-centered therapies and the often undervalued power of psycho-education.
    Perhaps the most articulate advocate for borderline individuals ever to appear in the mental health field, Linehan turned out to have an uncanny knack for explaining the borderline's inner world in terms that professionals could understand. Borderline individuals, she theorized in a dense, heavily footnoted 1993 text, Cognitive Behavioral Treatment of Borderline Personality Disorder, had "no emotional skin" and had been raised in families where their hypersensitivity had been routinely discounted. This had bred profound self-distrust, a tendency toward extremes and pervasive "emotional, behavioral, interpersonal and cognitive disregulation." Therapy, she wrote, recapitulated the invalidating family environment when it offered insulting interpretations, ignored cries of distress and inadvertently rewarded emotional explosions or suicidality with extra attention or hospitalization. At its worst, therapy had become "iatrogenic."
    Thus, Linehan reconfigured the borderline diagnosis in behaviorist: terms, stripping it of judgment and shame and posing an explicit feminist challenge to the reigning psychodynamic theorists (particularly Otto Kernberg, James Masterson and John Gunderson) who had shaped the field's damning and pessimistic views of it. Borderline individuals had huge deficits in life skills, she wrote--not deficient personalities. Where male psychoanalysts had seen "a constitutional excess of aggression," "primitive thinking" and "manipulation," she saw terror, stress-related difficulties in cognitive processing and despair. Teaching borderline individuals better ways to manage their moods and cope with the world, she wrote, would reduce their self-destructive behavior.
    This could be accomplished, she suggested in her 1993 Skills Training Manual for Treating Borderline Personality Disorder, by teaching a blend of assertiveness and mindfulness. Her book included lengthy quotations from the popular Vietnamese Buddhist monk Thich Nhat Hanh, who counseled "washing the dishes just to wash the dishes."
    These novel and unorthodox clients were, wrapped in research .so solid and language so clear that Linehan's texts drew immediate praise from mainstream psychiatrists and psychologists--and gradually converted people once dismissive of cognitive-behaviorism, ignorant of meditation and fiercely wedded to psychoanalytic or trauma-focused approaches to borderline personality.
    "I was not enthusiastic at first," concedes Dusty Miller, who began teaching DBT at the request of her graduate students at Antioch University in New Hampshire in the mid-1990s. "The borderline diagnosis, as used by straight white men, was very blameful. But Linehan has rescued it from the blame-the-victim tradition, describing it as an understandable response to the way these people grew up. Her model gives clients some great coping skills, and I've learned a lot from it."
    Another convert was Charles Swenson, who had run a borderline inpatient unit under the tutelage of Otto Kernberg. Increasingly disillusioned, Swenson gave up Kernberg's psychoanalytic approach in the late 1980s to train with Linehan and found his practice transformed. "I felt inspired in my work again," says Swenson, who was equally captivated by the woman herself. "She's brilliant, charismatic and articulate," he says. "She's a force, a triple threat. It's no accident that she's transforming the field."

Everything But the Kitchen Sink
It is October 5, 2000--an overcast day in Seattle--and the ballroom of the Edmund Meany Hotel is crammed with psychotherapy's ground troops: social workers, psychologists and case managers from agencies, V.A. hospitals and Kaiser Foundation HMOs throughout California and the Pacific Northwest. On the dais stands Linehan--an upright, energetic woman in her late fifties, wearing owl-like glasses and a colorful scarf over the shoulders of a neutrally toned dress. She holds a wooden striker in front of a big, bronze Densho bell, ordinarily used in Zen monasteries to signal the start of meditation.
    "We are going to work on the first mindfulness skill, which is observing," she says in the almost-Southern drawl of her native Oklahoma. "Usually we think of meditation as relaxation, as feeling better. But it's not necessary to get calm, comfortable and soothed. The idea is to try to do only one thing at a time. just notice the sound." She strikes the bell gently, drawing out a warm velvety hum that vibrates heart and stomach from the inside. Then she rattles her wooden striker across its surface and strikes again, hard, with a clattering clang, so that people nearly jump. Wake up, wake up, the bell says. Pay attention.
    The room is quiet, the therapists focused. But Linehan is not a charismatic workshop leader, showing no videotapes of single-session cures. Anyone expecting over-the-top interventions like those of Fritz Perls or Carl Whitaker may well find her work tediously systematic, and so may anyone who remembers watching a woman sobbing, her heart cracked open as she arranged volunteers into a "family sculpture" with the help of Virginia Satir. She does not even show her own training videos of her subtle, unflinching individual work with clients.
    Instead, Linehan will spend the next two days showing slides, making the assembled therapists fill out behavioral "diary cards" (recording their activities and moods throughout the day) and doing role-plays up front with those who don't. It is her ninth national seminar in eight months--one of hundreds organized over the past eight years by Linehan and her training organization, the Behavioral Technology Transfer Group. Since her 1991 article appeared, her two books have become professional bestsellers for Guilford Press. More than 60,000 therapists have bought her books (which have been translated into French, German, Italian, Dutch and Swedish); tens of thousands have attended introductory DBT trainings; and more than 400 government and nonprofit agencies have provided intensive DBT training to their staffs.
    This two-day session will be the equivalent of the shallow end of the DBT pool: teaching therapists how to run skills-training groups for borderline clients. "The skills" turn out to be a bewilderingly promiscuous gumbo of attitudes, emotional techniques and psychosocial skills that seem, at first, self contradictory: diary cards and Greek dancing; radical acceptance of things as they are and assertiveness skills for changing them; "distress tolerance" and "emotion regulation" for facing fears head-on; "willingness" to try something and the measured deliberation of writing out lists of pros and cons before acting. The ability to draw on a vast repertoire of seemingly opposite responses is critical for a successful life, Linehan suggests, and equally important for effective therapy.
    Much of the training is behaviorist, but Linehan, ever the experimental scientist, will throw in anything that might work. On the second morning, for instance, her Zen bell gives way to Greek music and she makes the therapists entwine their arms and execute the intricate steps of the hora. "Throw yourself into it!" she urges, as people sway back and forth more or less gracefully, practicing "one-mindfulness" and "wholeheartedness." "Your job is to learn the skills yourself," she says. "If you can do them, you can teach them."
    In a testament to her intellectual voraciousness, Linehan's name for her treatment, Dialectical Behavior Therapy, is a reference to the philosophical proposition popularized by Immanuel Kant, Friedrich Hegel and Karl Marx. In essence, dialectics presumes that there are two sides to every coin. Every extreme in thought and in the world calls forth its opposite and points the way to a synthesis or reconciliation. Wide enough to cope with paradox, dialectics sometimes simply holds contradictions in balance rather than integrating them. "You have to change and you're perfect as you are," Linehan explains. "That's the essential dialectic of the treatment." DBT therapists, she says, should continually ask themselves: "What am I leaving out?"
    Under DBT's broad umbrella stands a cluster of therapeutic tactics that require a head-spinning degree of gut honesty, self-assurance and flexibility from therapists-not to mention a secure inner gyroscope. Some are as non-controversial as Rogerian mother's milk: be warm, genuine and validating. Others require the cheerful use of power. Some therapists are aghast when Linehan describes DBT's "24-hour rule": if a client injures herself or attempts suicide, there will be no extra client-therapist contact for 24 hours so as not to unwittingly reinforce the behavior. "Are you going to get into the ethics of DBT?" one social worker asks her hotly. "It's always ethical to do the most effective treatment," Linehan replies without flinching. "And for the moment, DBT has the most data as effective treatment for this disorder."
    She never lets an opportunity go by to wean someone from the condescending, blaming language that clings to the borderline diagnosis like a cheap suit. "DBT doesn't talk about 'splitting,' she interrupts one social worker's question. "To us, splitting just means that two members of the staff disagree on treatment." DBT, the training makes clear, is not just the most tedious, systematic and effective therapy ever brought to bear on borderline clients. It is well on its way to rehabilitating the diagnosis and reconfiguring a broader therapeutic landscape.

Reconfiguring the Borderline Diagnosis
Marsha Linehan is 57 and lives in a pleasant, brightly painted bungalow that is walking distance from her office at the University of Washington. On the edge of a shelf in her kitchen is a row of Post It notes from her secretary reminding her of back-to-back weekend appointments. On a table in the living room stands a photograph of a smiling, white-haired man in black robes--a German Benedictine monk named Willigis Jager who is also Linehan's Zen teacher. In an interview, she freely describes her intellectual and spiritual life, but presents primarily a public persona. Little is revealed of private vulnerability. Nothing she says really explains what drew her to her life's work.
    One of six bright children of a Tulsa oil executive and his wife, she says of her childhood only that she was raised as a Catholic, reading the lives of the saints and dreaming of becoming a nun. As a college student, she continued a devout and prayerful private path, but her professional ambitions secularized.
    In the early 1970s, armed with a Ph.D. in social psychology from Loyola University in Chicago, she took on her first distraught and suicidal clients as an intern in a suicide-prevention clinic in Buffalo, New York. She says she came to the work with a blank slate--knowing only that she wanted to work with the most miserable people in the world. She had no idea that most behaviorists avoided clients with these complex problems, nor that psychodynamic clinicians called them "borderlines."
    She was in love with psychology as a science and eager to pay attention to observable behaviors rather than speculate about motivation. Never willing to ascribe intents she could not verify, she theorized that cutting and suicide attempts were problem-solving devices and sometimes "communication behaviors," but not manipulations. She assumed that self-punishing responses were learned, and could be unlearned.
    Innocent of clinical training and clutching a behaviorist text by Albert Bandura "like a Bible," she tried to get her clients to engage in behavioral analysis--a step-by-step dissection of the triggering events, thoughts and feelings that led them to the moment they tried to kill themselves. It was like trying to build a wall of small stones in a rushing stream: her clients were so raw and sensitive to criticism that they either attacked her for not caring or withdrew. When she soft-pedaled the behaviorism and was warm and validating, her clients relaxed--but continued to lead lives filled with crises.
    Stymied, she got more behaviorist training at the State University of New York at Stony Brook, read voraciously, did her own research, created a "Reasons for Living Inventory" to try to figure out why some people resist suicidal urges and read Carl Rogers. Over time, she noticed that her suicidal clients were subtly training her out of doing effective therapy by mercilessly attacking her when she suggested role-plays or topics that frightened them. To make matters worse, she could not teach them the life skills they desperately needed because session time was consumed with current crises.
    Still stymied, she taught assertiveness training and wrote a book about it. After some years teaching psychology at Catholic University in Washington, D.C., she moved in 1977 to the University of Washington and began researching therapy for suicidality in earnest. Over the next eight years, funded by a succession of NIMH grants, she added and subtracted therapeutic devices plundered from every conceivable source, while graduate students filmed, watched and encoded her sessions from behind one-way mirrors.
    Instead of constructing a grand theory, Linehan broke down the borderline dilemma into bite-size pieces and resolved them one by one until her therapy included everything but the kitchen sink. To stop current emergencies from overwhelming attempts at behavioral change, she separated out a "skills training" class. Hypothesizing that self-injury halted neurobiological cascades of unbearable feeling, she read the research on delayed gratification and asked friends how they got through difficult times.
    The result was a handout on "distress tolerance": simple tips for self-soothing and self-distraction like taking a bath, thinking of someone more miserable than you or lighting a candle and watching the flame. When a client discovered that holding ice often quelled her urge to cut herself, that, too, became part of skills training. Because Linehan found that even her most competent-looking clients often did not know the basics of negotiating with others or acting independent of current mood, her syllabus grew to include sections on interpersonal effectiveness and "emotion regulation"--observing current emotions, as well as acting despite them.
    Her therapeutic package grew more tightly organized, but nothing resolved the central paradox that had tripped her up in the early 1970s: the difficulty of maintaining a good therapy relationship and getting behavioral change at the same time. Then, in 1986, when she was 42 and suffering from a dryness in her own spiritual life, Linehan impulsively took a year's leave of absence to train in Zen monasteries in California and Germany. For the first time in years, this forceful strong-willed woman followed instructions instead of giving them.
    At Shasta Abbey in northern California, she hauled sheep manure, picked green beans, meditated three times a day and submitted herself to bells and schedules. From this experience, she drew the attitudes she later labeled "one-mindedness," "wholeheartedness" and "willingness" and incorporated them into DBT. "The idea was to give up ego every way you could, to do what was called for in every moment," she recalls, sitting in the living room of her Seattle bungalow near her photograph of Willigis Jager. "We would sit in the mornings and chant, and then file out and get a work assignment and try not to want a particular assignment. When they rang the bell and work was over and you were in the middle of sweeping, you had to stop in mid-stroke, because, otherwise, you were doing it for your own ego."
    Easier said than done. After three months, Linehan went to the priest in charge and dramatically told him she was on the edge of a spiritual breakthrough and wanted to meditate nonstop for three days. The monk took her hyperbole seriously, agreeing gravely that he was sure she knew what she needed. But since Shasta Abby didn't do things that way, why didn't she go to the nearby Holiday Inn, meditate for as long as she liked and then come back? Out on a limb not of her choosing, Linehan quickly backtracked and followed the schedule for her remaining months. She has since integrated the monk's technique into DBT, calling it "extending."
    When a suicidal new client told her dramatically, "Either I have to do this therapy or I have to die. Those are my only two choices," for example, Linehan asked coolly, "Well, why not die?" Taken aback, the woman replied, "If I've got one last hope why not take it?" and Linehan closed in, "So all things being equal, you'd rather live than die. That's good. That's going to be your strength. We're going to play to that."
    Next Linehan trained under Willigis Jager in Germany and felt, for the first time in her life, completely accepted and understood. Her relationship with him became a model for her relationship with her own clients. During the intense meditation retreat known as sesshin, she got a letter from her mother, who was slowly dying. She cried in the meditation hall in front of everyone for three days straight, dimly intuiting that her tears were about much more than her mother.
    Every day, she would go to a formal teacher-student interview with Jager, bow sobbing, sit down and cry. Jager would say only "Keep going," and ring his bell to signal that the visit was over. After three days, Linehan quit crying. When she told Jager, he moved on to the next relevant topic without comment. "It taught me that everything is as it is, and you don't have to change it," she remembers. "And that has also found its way into my treatment.
    Linehan came back to the University of Washington with a deepened ability to accept life as it is. Zen training had made her joyful and happy, and she wanted to share its benefits. "I don't believe anyone is different. Humans are humans. We all have a physiology that's similar, a psychology that's similar. And if it worked for me, it will work for them. If I could learn to walk, they could learn to walk. If I could learn to be happy, they could learn to be happy. All I had to do was figure out how to teach it."
    She says she didn't "go around calling it Zen Behavior Therapy--that wasn't going to work out professionally. " At first she tried to import elements of Zen wholesale, though, trying unsuccessfully to get clients to take off their shoes and walk meditatively and loosely "like water buffaloes" down the clinic halls. It didn't translate. What she came up with in the end was Zen denatured of religious trappings, epitomized in one of the two central poles around which her therapy now revolves, which she calls radical acceptance. Radical acceptance rests on letting go of the illusion of control and a willingness to notice and accept things just as they are right now, without judging mistakes and messiness, listening to self-criticism or succumbing to impatience. Over time, this emotional resting-place helped Linehan and her trainees tolerate their clients' pain without protecting themselves with distance or blame; it transformed their work. At staff meetings, they began to use a second mindfulness bell, ringing it to signal the need to pause and take a breath whenever anyone said anything judgmental about a client, another therapist or themselves.
    In individual therapy she developed an unflinching, oddly humorous style, using Socratic inquiry, talking as though she and the client were involved in a joint process of discovery, refraining their despair in terms that allowed for hope. When one new client said, "I'm a mess. I can't even cope with everyday life right now," Linehan asked a few more questions and then summarized, "So from your perspective, the problem is that you don't know how to do things"--a reframing that implicitly raises the possibility of learning how. Questioning another client who had kept a promise not to kill herself for a week, she asked, "Was it hard?" When the woman said, 'Yes," Linehan replied, "Good. Now we know you can do hard things." Yet, she never minimized the torture of her clients' lives.  "If you don't kill yourself, you're going to get out of hell," she told one woman. "Life is not always going to be so painful and you're not always going to hurt so bad. If you can just keep yourself alive, you're going to get to be a more normal person who has a life that's worth living."
    In the late 1980s, her confidence growing, Linehan began a clinical trial of her aggregative therapy with a major NIMH grant. She located clients and assessed them for borderline personality, began therapy and collected data. One day in 1989, taught by her years as a researcher to be unsure of her results until the final data analysis, she went to the computer center at the University of Washington and pushed a key. A few minutes later, a set of figures appeared on her screen: Dialectical Behavior Therapy had outperformed treatment as usual with 44 suicidal and self-destructive borderline clients.
    Emboldened, Linehan began presenting DBT wherever she could. Shocked by many inpatient units where borderline clients were suspected of hostility for apparently ordinary actions (such as shrinking back self-consciously when faced with a room full of clinicians or leaving a ward without an escort to get to a therapy appointment on time), she appeared at hospital grand rounds across the country, trying simply to get clinicians to "stop hating" their borderline clients.
    In the fall of 1991, she spoke at a conference of the North Carolina Psychological Associafion in Durham. In the audience was Meggan Moorhead, a staff psychologist at John Umstead State Hospital. Moorhead later attended Linehan's first intensive, 10-day DBT training, and in February 1992 began teaching "skills" to eight suicidal borderline women at John Umstead. Joining them, in the late fall of 1993, was a woman in a body brace named Susan Kandel.

Learning the Skills
The women at John Umstead hospital were skeptical. "We hated it," recalls Kandel. "We had these stupid homework assignments, making lists of pros and cons like we were in elementary school. We had come into the hospital with our lives almost gone, and we had tried to kill ourselves in serious ways. Now we were being asked to participate in stretches in the dayroom. Give me a break!"
    Then one of her ward-mates took on skills training, blossomed and left the hospital. Kandel began, almost in spite of herself, to pay attention. Her conversion began with a moment of humility at Christmastime when, cold and miserable, she asked Moorhead to help her get through a two-week staff break when activities shut down. Moorhead wrote out a list of ways Kandel could distract herself or practice mindfulness, and Kandel held on to the piece of paper as if it were a map out of hell.
    Like many of her ward mates, she had long used self-harm to regulate her emotions. Now, she tried "not making a bad situation worse," and instead watched TV, participated in stretches in the dayroom and followed her breath rather than thinking about cutting herself. When the break ended, she began coming to the group with her diary cards recording her daily activities filled out and sometimes tried to use skills, even though she felt she could only "play at them" in the tightly controlled hospital. She often took two steps forward and one step back. Sometimes, she didn't bother to try because she wasn't in the mood. But Moorhead relentlessly applauded even the smallest move in the right direction, and over time, Kandel's behavior became less mood-dependent.
    When she asked Moorhead to be not only her skills trainer but her individual therapist, Moorhead almost "saw stars" imagining the marathon ahead. Nevertheless she said yes. She now describes Kandel as "the patient who taught me DBT," and one of a handful who have profoundly affected her life. With many a stumble, Kandel embarked on a process of attentional, behavioral and emotional training within an intimate therapeutic relationship. Neither she nor her therapist sought a drenching thunderstorm of sudden change; rather, they hoped that after months and years of plodding across misty fields, Kandel would discover that her clothes had been soaked through.
    Working within Linehan's clearly defined treatment hierarchy, Moorhead first zeroed in on "behavioral discontrol"--specifically, Kandel's risk of suicide and self-harm. When Kandel began consistently using "distress tolerance" and other Stage One DBT skills and recording them in her daily diary cards, Moorhead became reassured that her self-destructiveness was under control. In June 1994, after agreeing not to use alcohol for three months or to " to kill or cut herself, Kandel was discharged from John Umstead. She to live in the only place that would take her--a rest home full of elderly people in a desolate neighborhood of Durham.
    Therapeutic work inside the hospital was only a prelude to the real work outside. "Life is the real game," Moorhead says. "This [DBT] is coaching from the sidelines." Over weeks, months and years, she and Kandel stabilized her behavior, reduced her avoidance of emotions and looked forward to creating "a life worth living." Analyzing the chains of behavior that led her to dire states or ineffective actions, they brainstormed alternatives, with Moorhead cheerleading, holding Kandel's hand, encouraging change and yet modeling acceptance.
    She reframed Kandel's behavior as the product of a "problematic learning history" rather than mental illness or innate evil; she talked to Kandel weekly on the phone, suggesting skills to try and Kandel was almost always willing. Living in Durham, still in chronic pain from her back injury, lonely and knowing nobody, Kandel had her first ordinary life experience of a fundamental DBT skill: "wise mind." "I was standing outside thinking, 'Everything is so bad and hopeless,' and I was starting to think my whole future was bad and hopeless," Kandel recalls. "I remembered Meggan saying, 'Suffer one moment at a time' and 'Don't decide on the future when you're feeling bad. Come back to this moment.' "So I said to myself, 'Right now I feel really bad, and that's all I have to think about,' Kandel says, illustrating radical acceptance, 'not worry about an hour from now, let alone tomorrow.' And that didn't seem nearly as intolerable. A huge breath of relief just came out of me." The moment helped her shift away from the self-perpetuating cascade of thoughts and emotions that had so often led her to cut or try to kill herself. "Since it was just this moment, and not the future, then I could more easily problem-solve with a distraction," she remembers. 'You can't distract for your entire life, but for the moment, it's okay."
    Kandel wasn't the only one who used DBT skills. "I had to radically accept that this individual was in so much pain," Moorhead remembers. "When I had to leave for a conference, I knew Susan was going to work herself into a numbness and stay frozen for seven days. I had to accept that and go any way--accept that there is that much suffering in the world and in this individual. There were times when we were both verging on hopelessness. I had to accept that and keep trying to make a difference together."
    Kandel next learned to counter her habitual avoidance with what DBT calls "participate." She volunteered at a Durham hospital, taking care of babies while their mothers got counseling. She walked and read. She got a job in a gift shop. Out of the scraps of her life, she began the meticulous construction of a self. Like an image slowly developing in the photographic solution in the darkroom, a life began to emerge dedicated to something other than escape, withdrawal and self-injury.
    One of DBT's philosophical underpinnings is the notion that therapists need to give voice to their own limits within the therapeutic relationship, as much as their clients do. After Moorhead began experiencing sleep difficulties in her early forties and needed more undisturbed time, Kandel agreed to fax rather than phone sometimes. So as not to demoralize Moorhead, she learned to call to report positive events as well as problems.

Developing a Self
With the first two goals of therapy (eliminating suicidality and overcoming therapy-interfering behaviors) fundamentally met, the pair tackled improving the quality of Kandel's life. Coached by Moorhead in "interpersonal effectiveness" skills, Kandel lobbied her way back into her old halfway house, which had been terrified to readmit her for fear she'd kill herself. She got a better job in Chapel Hill, at a law firm. And she began going to work no matter how she felt.  "As much as I didn't want to go, boy did I feel better by the end of the day. I'd say, 'Boy I did it, man,' and that was mastery, right there," she says. "A lot of suicidal self-destructive stuff started to just leave me. I wasn't putting on a facade. I was plenty scared and plenty depressed, but I was functioning, I was behaving, I was doing okay."
    Now, the pair moved to "Stage Two" of DBT-Post-Traumatic Stress Reduction--an exposure-based approach similar to the "uncovering" phase of psychodynamic therapy, in which a client learns to habituate to strong emotions and rethink the meaning of past events. Using a therapy based heavily on Buddhism, which theorizes that the notion of a fixed, independent and permanent "self" is a convenient fiction, Kandel began to develop a self. At first, she used "the skills" like someone driving while referring to a map; later she developed an inner compass. Once she had seen herself as fundamentally evil and incapable of change--a bad seed, a lunatic. Emotion had regularly driven her into the mouth of hell, without a sense of choice or freedom. Now, she learned to pause and observe and describe her experience, noticing the evanescence of emotions that she neither resisted in panic nor invited in for tea. She discovered a love of horticulture and took classes at the local community college. She found a job in a plant nursery. As her experiences of mastery grew, she found or created a self.
    "I've learned the skills, the symptoms have eased and there's been a major structural change," she says now, looking back. "I see my character very differently. I don't see my structure as weak or fragile. Vulnerable, yes, but I don't think vulnerability is a bad thing. I don't feel skeptical or cynical anymore. I used to think that the world was essentially bad, and I don't see that anymore. When I look at the world now, I see the good. I see the connectedness between all of us, and I don't see the alienation, the disconnection. We're all in this together. "DBT is mundane, like physical therapy for a person who's broken her leg in 15 places and been told she'll never run again," she goes on. "You do it step by step; it hurts, it's boring. Something changes, but there isn't a single dramatic moment when you throw away your cane."
    In September 1995, she moved out of the halfway house and into an apartment with a friend. That year, when deeply discouraged by a setback, she cut herself for the last time, running a razor blade lightly along her ribs. Moorhead imposed the "24-hour rule" and later conducted an exhaustive and tedious behavioral chain analysis. A few months later, Kandel found herself lying on the floor in her room, feeling awful again and wanting to cut herself. But partly to avoid another chain analysis, she got out a piece of paper and listed the "pros and cons." "The pros were the relief it would give me," she remembers. "The con that I came up with was this: you don't do this to the people that love you. I was becoming closer to my family, to Meggan and a couple of friends, and I thought that self-violence was also violence towards them. After all they had given me, I just couldn't do it."

A Box With 100 Things in It
Meanwhile, in the greater landscape of psychotherapy, DBT continues its rapid spread. In a field bedeviled by fragmentation and warring dogmas, it offers a model for assembling an enormous range of techniques within a well structured whole.  But what of its limitations? Outcome researcher Michael Lambert, editor of Psychotherapy and Behavior Change, cautions that "the history of psychotherapy is replete with early enthusiasms for name-brand therapies that melt away and we find have been oversold. I don't think you can underestimate the power of Marsha Linehan," he adds. "She's an exceptional therapist. And as outcome research has repeatedly shown, most of the power is invested in therapists and not manuals and name-brand techniques."
    Other caveats come from psychodynamic and trauma therapists who see DBT as half a loaf: psychoanalyst Otto Kernberg (whose transference-focused psychotherapy is in a three- to five-year clinical trial against DBT) contends, "It is not clear how it compares with treatments geared to changing the total personality structure of these patients as a precondition for changing symptoms." To Harvard psychiatrist Judith Herman, DBT doesn't emphasize trauma sufficiently. "These clients are this way for a reason," she says, "and when this is made clear, they feel less crazy, less stigmatized and evil."
    Meanwhile, even Linehan herself doesn't know exactly where the magic and the limitations lie. She says that DBT isn't nearly effective enough, that it takes too long and that she has no idea exactly which of its interventions constitute the critical ingredients. She continues to tinker. "It's like finding a box with 100 things in it and not knowing which three are really that good," she says. "That's sort of the spot that I'm in now. Maybe it's more effective than I think," she muses. "It could also be that it just energizes therapists and gives them hope. I don't really know why it works, and that's what I want to find out." As a scientist intimately familiar with Zen notions of non-attachment, she remains more wedded to truth and experiment than to pet ideas. "My greatest fear," she wrote in a successful application for a senior-scientist grant from the National Institute of Mental Health, "is that therapists and patients doing DBT will become attached to the therapy itself rather than to empirical effectiveness."
    In the meantime, the current version of DBT is being embraced by many who do the heavy lifting with borderline clients. The Massachusetts Behavioral Health Partnership, which administers the state's public mental health benefits, has structured an expanded reimbursement to cover DBT phone-coaching and consultation groups, as well as skills training and individual therapy. "DBT came forward with a body of research, and there's nothing that impresses managed care companies as much as research and statistic," says Joe Passenaugh, a masters level counselor and outpatient manager for the partnership. "The results are very compelling and you can't ignore them."
    Among the most compelling results are those of the Greater Manchester community mental health agency in southern New Hampshire, which won a $5,000 gold medal from the American Psychiatric Association in 1998 for a DBT pilot project. In 1994, combined mental and medical treatment costs for the agency's 14 most expensive borderline clients fell by 58 percent--from a total of $645,000 annually to $273,000. The clients got more therapy, but the cost was more than offset by a 77 percent decrease in hospitalization days, a 76 percent decrease in day treatment and an 80 percent decline in contacts with emergency service workers. Only two of the clients were employed when treatment began; eight had jobs at the close of the treatment year. "DBT has given us hope that was not there seven years ago," says counselor Patricia Carty of the agency, which has since implemented DBT system-wide. "We now have confidence that this population can be effectively treated and we can see people recover from this disorder."

A Life Worth Living
Susan Kandel remains a work in progress. She lives alone in Chapel Hill, spends time with family, sees Moorhead weekly for individual therapy and has graduated from both her skills training group and a DBT process group. She works three days a week in a plant nursery and plans to continue to study horticulture. She copes well with chronic back pain, is making real friends slowly and sometimes contemplates exploring an intimate relationship, She no longer drinks, spends days stewing in depression or cuts herself. She speaks of The Skills in capital letters, the way someone else might quote a sacred text.
    It has been eight years since she sat, cold and miserable, in a body brace in a state mental hospital grasping a piece of paper that described how to "not make a bad time worse." She can eat when she's hungry now, take a hot shower when she aches, mend a torn shirt or walk in the woods when discouraged, notice and enjoy the smell of spring leaves and feel the sun against her skin. "When you first begin, all you do is learn the hows of the skills," she says 'With more and more time, I started to learn the whys, and that has made the total difference. I was working on making a life worth living."
    Her transformation was the result of a normal accretion of small changes, a journey not peculiar to "borderlines," but familiar to anyone who has ever tried to stop biting her lip or become more assertive, less reactive or more kind. "There's no magic to it," Kandel says, looking back. "It's not like being born again through your mother's womb. It's based on things people take for granted, they're so mundane, so obvious. They're things you can find in the dictionary." Thus, she has been brought back within the circle of normal human behavior with the rest of us, where she always belonged. Nobody would confuse her now with a fictional character from Fatal Attraction or A Streetcar Named Desire and she no longer meets DSM criteria for Borderline Personality Disorder. As she puts it, "I don't do borderline anymore."

Individual Therapy
One-on-one therapy begins only after agreement on a renewable therapy contract. Clients get a non-pejorative description of the borderline diagnosis and the rationale for DBT's way of tackling it. They agree to stay in therapy, to try DBT tactics and not to harm themselves for the contracted period. Then, problems are tackled in a strict hierarchy, with top priority given to suicide, cutting attempts and other severe self-harm (parasuicide.) After a self-destructive incident, no extra phone contact or therapy is provided for 24 hours. At the next scheduled session, the incident is analyzed in non-judgmental terms. Self-harm is reframed as a problem-solving behavior. The task of therapy is to:
1. Figure out what the problem is
2. Find another way to solve it
3. Get the client to try it
4. Trouble-shoot the results
    The client's misery is validated as an understandable response to difficulties, but the therapist relentlessly returns to the hopeful theme that things will get better as the client learns new skills. Clients fill out "diary cards" weekly to give the therapist a quick way to check on suicidal thoughts, self-harm, mood, skills and specific issues like binge eating or drug use. Working from the range of perspectives and approaches that characterize DBT, therapists aim to balance "unwavering centeredness" with "compassionate flexibility," and nurturance with "benevolent demandingness."
    Second in priority in Stage One of DBT is therapy-interfering behaviors, like not filling out diary cards, missing sessions or being sarcastic. Therapy-interfering behaviors by the therapist (watching the clock, not returning phone calls, insisting on interpretations not shared by the client) are also fair game. The DBT therapist next zeroes in on behaviors that "interfere with the quality of life," such as homelessness, unemployment, debt, compulsive eating, and alcoholism. Therapy "vacations" may be imposed by the therapist as a last resort until a client makes a specific change (such as getting a job or going to school) that the therapist considers vital to further progress.

Group Skills Training
DBT clients must also attend a weekly, 2-hour class lasting six months or more. New clients join every two months, receiving two weeks of mindfulness training followed by six weeks of:
1. self-soothing, calming, distraction and other reality acceptance tips for getting through painful times without "making the situation worse" by resorting to drugs , self-injury, tantrums, or unsafe sex;
2. Emotion regulation--not suppressing feelings, but taking "opposite actions" to them, such as confronting fearful situations or avoiding people you're angry with;
3. Interpersonal effectiveness--saying no, making requests and deciding how hard to push.
    Meta-skills in mindfulness are also taught, like "radical acceptance"; not judging; using "wise mind" (a blend of emotion and reason); and making decisions via lists of "pros and cons." Focus stays relentlessly on teaching behavioral and emotional skills, practicing them in role-plays and getting clients to fill out their daily diary cards showing if and how they did their "homework." The push for behavioral change is balanced with non-judging acceptance. Emotional processing is avoided, as are discussions of suicide and self-harm--they can be contagious.
    The skills trainer can be a case manager or other non-therapist. They coach clients to resolve difficulties with others, but rarely intervene on the client's behalf. Clients who miss four sessions in a row have officially "dropped out" and can't reenter skills training or individual therapy for six months to a year.

Individual Phone Coaching
Clients also learn to ask for help in regular check-in calls to the individual therapist. Calls tend to last 5 to 15 minutes and take place once or twice a week. The client may express distress or present a problem. The therapist validates the feeling and quickly moves on to getting the client to "generalize" her skills in the real world. Excessive calling and not being willing to try a skill are regarded as therapy-interfering behaviors and confronted in the next session. Therapists must be honest about their individual limits (such as hours or frequency of calls) and negotiate changes when necessary. Borderline individuals, Linehan believes, respond well to blunt, "non-fragilizing" honesty.

Consultation Groups
Borderline clients can inadvertently train therapists out of doing effective therapy by attacking when painful emotions are elicited and warming up when the therapist backs off. Burnout can result from the slowness of progress and the client's frightening self-destructiveness. Therefore, DBT requires a weekly team meeting to keep therapists' morale up and keep them on track, nonjudgmental and non-punitive. A DBT "team" can be as modest as two private therapists meeting weekly and as elaborate as a dozen agency staff members. According to Linehan therapists working in isolation are not doing DBT.

When "behavioral discontrol" is no longer a way of life, DBT aims to replace "quiet desperation" with a life worth living. In Stage 2, clients learn to experience current emotions without suppressing them. They may also reduce post-traumatic stress due to childhood sexual abuse or other trauma via exposure and cognitive restructuring.
    In Stage 3, therapy focuses on improving the quality of life by reducing other psychological and practical issues beyond the borderline diagnosis. Clients may also take part in a "DBT process group" and help each other brainstorm solutions to current challenges. Clients learn to trust themselves and to self-soothe independently as the therapist gradually steps back from the nurturing role. The goal is dialectical--to learn to rely on others while simultaneously learning to be self-reliant. Self-respect strengthening is a focus. If the urge to self-injure returns, it is treated as a minor relapse. Since the publication of her book, Linehan has begun to focus on a fourth and final stage of DBT that seeks to amplify the client's capacity for transcendence and joy.

DBT Books
Cognitive-Behavioral Treatment of Borderline Personality Disorder (1993)
Skills & Training Manual for Treating Borderline Personality Disorder, with handouts that can be photocopied for clients (1993)

DBT Videos
Treating Borderline Personality Disorder: The Dialectical Approach (1995)
Understanding Borderline Personality Disorder: The Dialectical Approach (1995)

All books and videos from Guilford Press, New York. For DBT training, contact Behavioral Technology Transfer Group, 4556 University Way, N.E., Suite 222, Seattle, WA 98105; tel. (206) 675-8588; web address www.behavioraltech.com

The Empty Couch: What Is Lost When Psychiatry Turns to Drugs?
Joan Acocella, New Yorker- 5/8/2000

In one of the psychiatric wards where T M. Luhrmann did research for her new book, "Of Two Minds: The Growing Disorder in American Psychiatry" (Knopf; $26.95), there was a patient who enjoyed going into the common room in the evening and telling the other patients how she tortured animals: "She told them that she liked to stick pins into rats' eyes and listen to them squeal, that she would chop them up and drink their squirting blood." Once she had all the other patients crying, she would go back to her room and turn in for the night. When the attending doctor spoke to her about this, he did not try to find out if she actually tortured animals, let alone why. He just told her to stop disrupting the ward. "'If you feel like you want to harm animals ... and you need some help controlling those thoughts, tell us,' he said. `Otherwise, don't tell us, because no hospital can legally discharge you if you do."' She stopped, and, in keeping with the current trend toward short hospitalization, probably soon went home. This was a "biomedical" ward, as are most psychiatric units these days, and in such a place the doctors no longer explore with you why you think and act as you do. Biomedical psychiatrists regard mental disorders as "heart attacks in the brain" (Luhrmann's phrase), and they no more expect you to explain such an event than if you had had a heart attack in the heart. On admission to the hospital, you are swiftly diagnosed and medicated. Then, once you have stopped threatening suicide or hearing voices—a process that takes maybe five to ten days—you are given a bottle of pills and discharged. Chances are you will be back soon.
    For about a decade now, since the introduction of Prozac, in 1988, and the articles and books on it in the early nineties, the general public has known about the split between psychodynamic and biomedical psychiatry, which in outpatient terms means the choice, when depression or anxiety returns, of either going back to the psychotherapist for another year or getting your regular doctor to give you a prescription for Prozac or Xanax. People also know, if they have read the Time and Newsweek articles—and maybe Peter Kramer's 1993 "Listening to Prozac," which has sold more than half a million copies in the United States alone—about the philosophical implications of the two approaches: how on the one, psychodynamic hand, you are in large measure stuck with your fate but also responsible for it, and how on the other, psychopharmacological hand, you don't have a fate, you have a system of neurotransmitters, for which you are not responsible and with which you aren't stuck, since, thanks to drugs, you can adjust it. To partisans of the psychodynamic view, the new, drug-based psychiatry is taking the morals, the dignity, the truth out of human life. To the drug doctors, all that is being eliminated is the junk pile of unexamined assumptions descended from Sigmund Freud.
    "Of Two Minds" addresses the controversy differently. Luhrmann, a professor of anthropology at the University of California at San Diego, comes to psychiatry the way Margaret Mead went to Samoa. That is, she approaches it as a culture, a collection of beliefs and practices which young people are socialized into. She follows a number of psychiatrists-to-be through their training and watches how they get "processed" by the contingencies of their culture—how, in the end, what is called theory is actually a canny balancing of conviction with the need to survive. In the process she provides a more nuanced treatment of the moral and philosophical issues than any previous discussion I know of.
    As Luhrmann sees it, almost everything about psychiatric trainees' experience pushes them into the biomedical camp. Medical school, to start with, teaches them to separate their feelings from their patients, and the psychiatric residency drives that lesson home. Residents are given lectures and training in psychotherapy, but there is a none too subtle deemphasis of that part of their education in favor of the biomedical work of diagnosis and medication. Then they graduate and take jobs in places that, increasingly, have nothing to do with psychotherapy. Luhrmann spent a week studying an institution she calls San Juan County Hospital, in northern California. On its psychiatric unit there were two women married to God, and another, pregnant with her ninth child—her previous eight were living with relatives or in foster homes—who called herself Shirley Temple. ("Look," she would say, pinching her arms, "the hospital hasn't helped. I'm still black.") One man, on arrival at the hospital, reported that he had no hallucinations, "except for the Devil." His problem was that he hadn't taken food or drink for six days. This was his fourteenth admission. Many of the other patients were also what the staff called "frequent fliers"—a fact that was unquestionably due in part to the conditions in which they lived on the outside. Most were poor; many, upon release, used crack or alcohol to control their symptoms.
    The staff tried to address these people's "psychosocial" problems; they held meetings with them to talk about substance abuse and living skills, but in the eight days that was the average length of admission there was little they could do. Luhrmann says she once ran such a meeting. When the patients spoke, "which was not so often, they talked about how it was more difficult to get to one prison than to another and how when their son came home on probation they really hoped he wouldn't keep a gun in his car the way he had last time." If social problems are hard to solve in a week, emotional problems don't have a chance. The man who was starving himself reported that his father had died three weeks earlier: "Several times he started a sentence with `My father' but couldn't complete it." The resident who admitted him did not draw him out; she didn't have time. The purpose of the unit was simply containment, for the sickest patients in their sickest periods, and once they were discharged they were not supposed to return too soon. Those who keep coming back may find themselves taking a vacation courtesy of the local authorities. "In southern California," Luhrmann reports, "patients would show up in the psychiatric emergency room and explain that they had been in Minnesota or Illinois and had gone to the bus station and a nice man from the county mental health had bought them a bus ticket to San Diego, which they thought they'd like to visit."
    Many writers who take on the current state of our psychiatric hospitals side with the patients, and demonize the psychiatrists. The wonderful thing about Luhrmann's book is that she demonizes no one. Young psychiatrists, she says, start out idealistic (even more so these days, when managed care has reduced their earning power). Then they start cutting their losses. Diagnosis, which they begin doing as residents, is the first lesson in hospital Realpolitik. Diagnosing means looking at a person who typically presents a complicated, ambiguous picture—"They're sad, they're not sleeping too well, their wife just left them," as one resident summarized it—and, within a matter of minutes, marking him down as having one of the conditions listed in the American Psychiatric Association's "Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders," or D.S.M. These conditions, in keeping with the so-called medical model—which holds that psychological disorders are like, or are, organic disorders—come described as consisting of certain "symptoms," which add up to a certain "syndrome." Then, again in keeping with the medical model, the psychiatrist prescribes medication. These actions have good short-term results. The patient, given the medication, settles down. The insurer, given the diagnosis (it is required), pays for the treatment, thereby keeping the hospital out of bankruptcy. So young psychiatrists go on doing these things, and as they do they come to look for symptoms that fit D.S.M. diagnoses, and for which medications are available. Then they go to work in hospitals where there is no time to do psychotherapy, so why bother even thinking about the matters that psychotherapy addresses—hope, discouragement, truth or untruth to oneself? Thus psychiatrists learn to work within the biomedical system, and to believe in it, if they don't want their lives to be anguish. Touchingly, Luhrmann reports that many of them haven't learned, and that their lives are anguish. They know what it is that they are ignoring, and they feel they have broken trust with their patients. "They feel like bad people."
    Where did the biomedical approach come from? From Hippocrates, at the latest. For a couple of millennia now, the pendulum of psychiatry has been swinging between organic and psychological/spiritual explanations. In the late nineteenth century, organic causation was the dominant theory. Then it was shoved aside by Freud. Psychoanalysis took a while to conquer the United States, but once it did, after the Second World War, its dominance was unquestioned, and its arrogance breathtaking. Schizophrenia, autism, and numerous other disorders were blamed on the mother, with no evidence, just utter certainty. The public accepted this, to the great disadvantage of patients, not to speak of mothers. Then, gradually, it was shown that schizophrenia had a strong genetic component, that autistic children had demonstrable neurological deficits, and so on. In other words, biomedical theory rose because there was science to support it. It also had humanitarian appeal: if mental disorders were biological, patients shouldn't be blamed for them, shouldn't be stigmatized. That the return of the biomedical approach also occurred within the context of the despiritualization of our society after the sixties, that it fit in so well with the abandonment of any value that was not commercially profitable (as psychotherapy apparently was not, and drugs were): these facts were noticed by some but, in the re-scientific atmosphere of those times, they did not amount to a strong argument.
    It was in the late seventies that the first generation of convinced biomedical psychiatrists got out of school. Still, many of them felt that psychological disorders involved both organic vulnerability and learning, and that, whatever the cause, most patients needed both biological and psychological treatment. (Even if a disorder is wholly biological, patients need psychological therapy to repair the consequences—their wrecked marriages, their hiatus-filled resumes.) So in most wards some psychiatrists gave drugs, some gave psychotherapy, and the system chugged forward.
    Then came managed care. Luhrmann is so fair that she is even fair to managed care. By 1990, she notes, expenditures on health care in the United States had exceeded six hundred billion dollars, more than twelve per cent of the gross national product. Something had to be done, but what was done was brutal, above all in mental health. (General medical benefits dropped by 7.4 per cent, but mental health benefits were cut by half.) In the mid-nineteen-nineties, Luhrmann revisited a large teaching hospital where she had done field work a few years earlier. The experience, she says, was like "coming back to a tree-lined London neighborhood after the Blitz." Services had been reduced to a minimum. Psychotherapy was gone altogether, except for certain, very circumscribed groups. (For example, trauma patients. Is this why therapists are now so interested in psychological trauma, and so likely to diagnose it?) Most patients don't have a prayer of discussing their dead father, or even their living circumstances. In all this slash-and-burn, it is not clear that there has been any substantial cost saving, for with the elimination of psychotherapy—and the stepped-up speed of discharge—readmission rates have risen. Especially important in the financial picture, it seems, is the provision of outpatient psychotherapy, as the Champus Insurance Company, for example, discovered when it expanded outpatient psychiatric coverage between 1989 and 1992. It "gained a net saving of $200 million because its customers' hospitalization rate dropped sharply. For every dollar spent on psychotherapy, four dollars were saved." There are few things more expensive than hospitalization, and, strange to say, it can be prevented in many cases by a little talk once a week with an interested person.
    "Of Two Minds" concentrates on inpatient care, but there is a parallel crisis going on in outpatient treatment, and that is the subject of "Prozac Backlash: Overcoming the Dangers of Prozac, Zoloft, Paxil, and Other Antidepressants with Safe, Effective Alternatives" (Simon & Schuster; $25), by the Harvard Medical School psychiatrist Joseph Glenmullen. Twenty million people are now on Prozac, not to mention the millions who are taking other SSRIs (selective serotonin reuptake inhibitors), such as Paxil and Zoloft. Meanwhile, insurance support for outpatient psychotherapy has been cut off at the knees. In Glenmullen's view, this constitutes an outrage, not just because people need psychotherapy but because the drugs that have replaced it are potentially dangerous.
    There's a saying among psychiatrists that you should always prescribe a new drug right away, "while it still works"—in other words, while the doctor and the patient still believe in it, thus giving it the placebo effect—because many popular medications, once they hit the market, enter what Glenmullen calls the "10-20-30" cycle. After ten years, people start noticing problems with the drug, problems that the manufacturer vigorously denies. After twenty years, the problems become clearer, and physicians start sounding the alarm. After thirty years, the regulatory agencies step in, and often the drug is withdrawn from the market. Surprise—by then the patent has expired, and the manufacturer no longer has a financial interest in the drug. But the company has a new drug, said to be newly effective, newly free of side effects, and the 10-20-30 cycle begins again. This has happened many times, but only in accelerated cases—for example, the recent fen-phen scandal—does it seem to get noticed by the press, and hence by the public.
    Prozac, too, is running a shorter cycle. (The new, "improved" version is already in the works.) By 1994, the psychiatrist Peter Breggin and his wife, Ginger Ross Breggin, had published "Talking Back to Prozac," in which they claimed that the drug was having dire side effects. Glenmullen's book is in some measure just an update, but in the intervening six years more research has accumulated, and some of it is frightening.
    By "Prozac backlash," Glenmullen does not mean the response of the public; he means the response of the brain—above all, of the dopamine system—to what the SSRIs are doing to the serotonin system. A number of studies have found that about sixty per cent of SSRI users experience sexual dysfunction: decreased libido, decreased arousal, delayed orgasm. (Or, in rare cases, they may have a "paradoxical" response. A 1989 paper in the Journal of Clinical Psychopbarmacology described the case of a woman who, upon having her Prozac dose increased, began experiencing spontaneous orgasms for most of each morning, a circumstance that, not surprisingly, was said to be "interfering with normal activity.") Another complication is that some people, when suddenly put on a high dose of Prozac—for years, the manufacturer marketed the capsules in only one dose, a high dose (twenty milligrams), so as to make the drug simpler for primary-care physicians to prescribe, thus cutting out the specialist, thus pleasing the H.M.O.s—have committed suicide or homicide. Pharmaceutical companies have done what they could to minimize such findings. (The literature enclosed with Prozac still states the incidence of sexual side effects as two to five per cent of depressed patients taking the drug.) And they have had the help of many supposedly independent psychopharmacologists publishing research on the SSRIs—or not publishing it, if the drug company, having funded the study, doesn't like the findings. According to Glenmullen, the only reason we know about the widespread sexual difficulties of SSRI users is that the research was paid for by the manufacturers of Serzone and Wellbutrin—competing, non-SSRI antidepressants that had lesser sexual side effects. (Don't change your prescription. Glenmullen reports that, at least in the case of Wellbutrin, gains in the short run may peter out in the long run: "I have now seen a number of patients who lost interest in sex, even developed an aversion to it, after being on Wellbutrin long-term.")
    That's not the end of the side effects. There are also motor problems: tics, muscle spasms, agitation. In patients on SSRIs Glenmullen has seen "flycatcher tongue-darting" and "chewing-the-cud jawing." Others have seen "involuntary pelvic thrusting." Interestingly, these symptoms resemble the motor abnormalities that began to develop in hospitalized schizophrenics after the introduction of the so-called major tranquilizers, such as Thorazine, in the fifties. Because those problems developed only slowly and were often masked by the very drugs that caused them, the extent of the damage did not become clear for years. Now we know that between twenty and thirty per cent of patients on major tranquilizers develop tardive dyskinesia, a Parkinson's-like movement disorder. In about half of those cases, tardive dyskinesia is irreversible; the symptoms do not go away when the patient is taken off the drug. Considering the tics and spasms that are turning up in SSRI takers—on which, it should be added, there seem to be no good figures yet (Glenmullen says things like "Mild to moderate spasms may affect as many as 10 percent of patients")—some doctors are worried that Prozac and its cousins may likewise be causing "silent brain damage," the effects of which will not become clear for years, perhaps not until the patient reaches old age.
    A recent issue of Brain Research reported on a study in which rats were given high doses of either Prozac or Zoloft for four days. Afterward, their brain cells showed "swollen axon terminals, thick axons and corkscrew-like profiles." Corkscrew-like profiles! The drug doses, it should be said, were very high, ten to a hundred times the therapeutic dose for human beings. On the other hand, the rats took the drugs for only four days, whereas millions of human beings have been on SSRIs for years. Madhu Kalia, who directed the study, says, "We don't know if the cells are dying.... These effects maybe transient and reversible. Or they may be permanent." If they are permanent, and turn up in human beings as well as in rats, the law courts are going to be an interesting sight in thirty years. Unlike the hospitalized schizophrenics who developed tardive dyskinesia, the ad executives taking SSRIs have good lawyers.
    Glenmullen's book is not the sort of bend-over-backward balanced assessment that Luhrmann's is. (One of the blurb writers compares it to "The Jungle.") Yet one is inclined to listen to him, because he is not a one-solution man. Indeed, he prescribes SSRIs. Like many cautious psychiatrists, he uses them to relieve depression to the point where the patient can do something about its source. He tells patients that medication is just a crutch, that they need psychotherapy, that if they don't find out what's causing the depression it will never go away. (He cites the research showing that although drugs and psychotherapy are about equally effective against depression in the short term, people who rely on drugs alone are far more likely to relapse. Incidentally, the same is true for anxiety disorders.) He seems to have an unclouded faith in short-term psychotherapy. In the cases he recounts, the patients soon cough up the underlying reason for their troubles, and talk about it, and get better, usually in less than a year. But these people may not be atypical; mild to moderate depression is one area where short-term psychotherapies have had remarkably good results. Apart from his insistence that SSRIs should not be dispensed without psychotherapy, Glenmullen believes that they should be given to far fewer patients. Doctors are now prescribing them for weight problems, premature ejaculation, back pain, PMS, failed romances, nail biting. Increasingly, SSRIs are also being given to children, whereas, to quote a 1996 review article in the Journal of Nervous and Mental Disease, "The evidence is unanimous that antidepressants are no more effective than placebos in children with symptoms of depression." In Glenmullen's view, seventy-five per cent of people on SSRIs can either go off the drug or dramatically reduce their dose. In any case, they should read this book.
    For many people of my generation, especially women, psychotherapy is not so much an issue as a history, a language in which they learned to speak of themselves, and of life. This fact has been widely deplored. Psychotherapy, people say, has taught women to think of themselves as victims. It has made them narcissistic, turned them in on their own minds rather than out into the world, where the men seem to be living. True enough, of some therapies. In others, women—and men—have learned to stop being victims, and to act in the world. That was the case with Emily Fox Gordon, the author of "Mockingbird Years: A Life In and Out of Therapy" (Basic; $24). The title is a little scary; this is not just another "woman's memoir" but a memoir of the couch, the tears. Yet "Mockingbird Years" is a beautiful book, and very tough-minded.
    Gordon was born in the late forties to a father who was an economist—he became the Director of the Budget in the Kennedy and Johnson administrations—and a mother who, in Gordon's view, was even more gifted: artistic, imaginative, subtle. She was also, Gordon felt, embarrassed by her chubby, emotional, underachieving daughter. By the age of eleven, Gordon had begun her voyage through psychotherapy, a long story (six therapists) that is a sort of capsule history of psychodynamic treatment in the postwar period. First she was sent to orthodox psychoanalysts who, faithful to the Freudian rule, put her on the couch and remained silent for most of the hour, as did Gordon. (Fifty minutes of silence. For a pre-adolescent. The parents paid for this.) Then she began a sit-up therapy, which, however, came to an abrupt end when Gordon was dumped by a boyfriend and responded, as she unsentimentally recounts, by scratching at her wrists with a pair of nail scissors. That was it—she was judged suicidal, and sent to Austen Riggs, a famous institution in Stockbridge, Massachusetts, where, diagnosed as having "schizoid personality disorder with borderline trends," she spent three years. She is very funny on the subject of Riggs. Now and then, she says, something interesting would happen. Once, for example, a man inserted a number of hard-boiled eggs into his rectum and then laid them, publicly, in the hall. But mostly the place was just boring: elderly outpatients "shuffled up and down Main Street, stopping for the lunch special at the drug store, ducking into the library for a nap."
    At Riggs, however, Gordon was eventually assigned to a man who became the lodestar of her youth, the existential therapist Leslie Farber. Existential therapy, almost forgotten today—it was echt sixties—focussed on patients' responsibility for their lives, and on the "authenticity" of the patient-therapist relationship. Farber, Gordon says, treated her like a moral agent—a revelation to her. He also, in keeping with the non-Freudian rules of "authenticity," kept loose boundaries. He told her about his childhood, his marriages. He offered not a cure but a friendship, and when, after a few years, he left Riggs and moved to New York, she went with him, and got gummed up in his life, hanging out in his kitchen, becoming friends with his wife, looking after his children. Like many of the experimental treatments of the sixties, this ended badly. Though Farber had permitted her intrusions, he finally lost patience with them and bawled her out. In considerable disrepair, she left him soon afterward. She married and went back to school. Eventually she returned to therapy—with "Dr. B.," whom she describes as an "ordinary" man, not like the deep-browed Farber—and stayed for seven years. Dr. B. had no truck with existentialism. This was the eighties, and the rule of therapy was empathy. Dr. B. wound her in love and compassion; she, resisting him all the way, unwound herself, and emerged as a writer.  Gordon has a low opinion of psychotherapy. She says what the others say: victimization, narcissism. Therapy, she writes, taught her to view herself as "saucer-eyed and frail," as opposed to the "blunt and caustic person" she knew she was. It corrupted her morally: "I wasn't interested in being happier, but in growing more poignantly, becomingly, meaningfully unhappy."
    She says all this, yet she is a walking refutation of it—above all, of the moral indictment. Good writing is itself a moral virtue. Wit, complexity, and detail are its outward signs, and "Mockingbird Years" shines with them. One could search the whole of confessional literature and be hard put to find a less self-serving portrait of a writer's childhood than the one Gordon gives us. Her father, she says, was a "disastrous parent," and, she immediately adds, "worse than he deserved to be." Mostly, it seems, he was just busy with his work, and emotionally blind, as men were supposed to be in those days. As for the artistic mother, this is a deeper matter. The mother is the book's great character. Gordon writes:

When she bathed my brother and me, she floated birthday candles anchored in halved walnut shells in the bathtub. She turned off the lights, lit the candles, and stood smoking a cigarette in a shadowy corner of the bathroom as we sat in the midst of a small shining armada.

Even as the shadows engulf her, the mother is always haloed in light. On a vacation in Puerto Rico, the family goes for a boat ride:

The water was full of tiny phosphorescent creatures; a hand or foot dipped into it came out glowing and glittering. My mother found this fascinating; again and again, as my father sat at the rudder, she lowered her hand into the water, held it up loosely in front of her eyes, and gazed at it.... She would often do something similar at the dinner table in Washington, holding up her graceful, aging hand so that it was framed by the nimbus of the candle flame, turning it this way and that and marvelling as if it had been transformed into the head of a swan.

By then Gordon recognized the gesture as a sign not just of her mother's poetic nature but of the fact that she was an alcoholic. The portrait is almost Southern.
    In 1961, Gordon recalls, her family went to a reception at the White House. She wore "a black-and-white checked shirtwaist with oversized pink rosette buttons" which her mother had ordered from the "chubbette" section of the Sears catalogue. When, in the receiving line, she got to L.B.J., he leaned down from his great height, "took my hands in his large ones," and said, "How do you do, my little cotton-tailed bunny rabbit?" This is funny—the big, kind, corny Texan romancing the fat little girl—but it is also stabbing, for that is what she needed: to be someone's bunny rabbit. (Alas, it's what we all need.) She didn't get it; instead she got therapy, whose attempts to compensate she now regards as false and demoralizing. But if therapy gave her the strength to write that scene plainly, factually, with no tears—or just ours—then it taught her something. Gordon is not a great thinker on psychotherapy. She's still hung up on Farber (the one who was mean to her, natch), and her condescension to Dr. B., the one who cleaned up after Farber, the one whose love and pity she pushed away—thereby, I believe, conquering self-love, self-pity—is painful to witness. But she is a thrilling writer. Dr. B. should be proud. Good for you, Dr. B.! The heck with Farber!
    What do we think about psychotherapy? I don't mean for inpatients. (They clearly need it; their lives are wrecked.) I mean for outpatients, the walking wounded—us. For some it's damaging. Even when it's good, it's very expensive, but compared with the church and family of yesteryear, whose loss it is trying to make up for, it's a bargain. (In the church you tithed, gave ten per cent of your income. As for the family, it kept women at home. What was the cost of that?) And when it is good, it is something hard to find in life, a moral dialogue. Gordon says Farber taught her that talk could be "treated not as a means to a therapeutic end, but as the central source of moral meaning itself." That's very existential of her, but the truth is that a talk about moral meaning cannot not be therapeutic, if by therapy we mean not just symptom relief but a chance for a serious life. The matters that people discuss in psychotherapy—whether they are really answerable for their lives, whether they should place their own welfare over another's—are the things that people in the Bible were trying to decide. They are the big questions, right? For patients in serious distress, pills are useful, but they cannot provide, don't aim to provide, what psychodynamic therapy has at its core. Luhrmann summarizes it: "a sense of human complexity, of depth, an exigent demand to struggle against one's own refusals, and a respect for the difficulty of human life."