Lily Scherlis Lily Scherlis is a writer whose work has appeared in The Baffler, The Guardian, Parapraxis, and Cabinet. She is a PhD candidate at the University of Chicago.

Skill Issues | Dialectical Behavior Therapy and Its Discontents

Lily Scherlis

When Marsha Linehan was seventeen, she developed terrible headaches. The family doctor didn’t seem to know what was causing them, so Linehan saw a psychiatrist, who recommended a two-week inpatient “diagnostic evaluation” at the Institute of Living, a private mental hospital in Hartford, Connecticut. A few days later she was cutting herself with the smashed lenses of her glasses. The staff psychiatrists moved her to a ward for “the most...