Marsha M. Linehan

Marsha Linehan was born in Tulsa, Oklahoma, on 5 May 1943, the third of six children. Her father was an oil company executive and her mother was active in church and volunteer work. She attended Catholic schools and as a child was drawn to the lives of the saints.

On 30 April 1961, weeks before her high school graduation, she was admitted to the Institute of Living in Hartford, Connecticut. She stayed for twenty six months, was diagnosed with schizophrenia and treated with high doses of medication, electroconvulsive therapy and long periods of seclusion. She began cutting herself in hospital. She later said she believed her real condition had been borderline personality disorder, which was not then recognised in its modern form. In the hospital, she said, she made a vow to God to get herself out of hell and then to go back and get others out, a vow she described as guiding most of her life.

She returned to Tulsa at 20, attempted suicide twice while living at a YWCA, and studied at night at the University of Tulsa before moving to Chicago to be near her brother Earl.

Linehan studied at Loyola University Chicago, graduating cum laude in psychology in 1968, and earned her MA in 1970 and PhD in 1971 there. She completed an internship at the Suicide Prevention and Crisis Service in Buffalo, a postdoctoral fellowship in behaviour modification at Stony Brook, and taught at Loyola and at the Catholic University of America before joining the University of Washington in Seattle in 1977.

With a National Institutes of Health grant she studied highly suicidal patients, which required a formal diagnosis and led her to focus on borderline personality disorder. Drawing on behaviour therapy and on Zen training at Shasta Abbey and with Willigis Jager, she developed dialectical behavior therapy, which balances acceptance and change through skills in mindfulness, distress tolerance, emotion regulation and interpersonal effectiveness. After several rejections, her randomised trial was published in 1991, showing that DBT patients self harmed less and stayed in treatment longer. Her manuals Cognitive-Behavioral Treatment of Borderline Personality Disorder and the Skills Training Manual became standard texts.

She directed the Behavioral Research and Therapy Clinics at Washington until retiring in 2019, founded Behavioral Tech to train clinicians, and co-founded the DBT-Linehan Board of Certification.

Linehan's Catholic faith shaped her early adult life; at Loyola she took a personal vow of poverty and volunteered with the Little Brothers of the Poor. She later stepped away from the institutional church but kept a deep spiritual practice, training in Zen and becoming an associate Zen teacher in the Sanbo Kyodan school and the Diamond Sangha. In 2011 she told The New York Times about her own hospitalisation and self harm, saying she had kept it secret for decades. Her memoir, Building a Life Worth Living, was published in 2020. She had a daughter, Geri.

Marsha Linehan died in Seattle on 10 November 2026, aged 83. A message shared among colleagues in the DBT community said she had been admitted to UW Medical Center with pneumonia on 31 October, was later moved to comfort care, and died peacefully with her daughter Geri at her side. Her death was reported by the Italian psychology journal State of Mind and noted by clinicians and mental health organisations around the world.

DBT is now practised worldwide and has been adapted for eating disorders, substance use, adolescents and other groups. Linehan received the Louis Israel Dublin Award for lifetime achievement in suicide research and the American Foundation for Suicide Prevention's Distinguished Research in Suicide Award, and the American Association of Suicidology named an award for research on suicidal behaviour after her. Allen Frances described her and Aaron Beck as the two most influential clinical innovators in mental health.