https://opinionator.blogs.nytimes.com/author/will-lippincott/

In January 2012, two weeks after my discharge from a psychiatric hospital in Connecticut, I made a plan to die. My week in an acute care unit that had me on a suicide watch had not diminished my pain.

Back in New York, I stormed out of my therapist’s office and declared I wouldn’t return to the treatment I’d dutifully followed for three decades. Nothing was working, so what was the point?

D.B.T. is a therapy that was developed in the 1980s by the psychologist Marsha M. Linehan as she worked with suicidal patients suffering from borderline personality disorder. In spite of my 30 years as an avid, often desperate medical consumer, I’d never heard of it.

Drawing on her own experiences and further study of both psychology and Zen practices, she began to create a form of C.B.T. that spoke to the particular vulnerabilities of her patients.

Dr. Linehan also recognized that people who struggled with the urge to commit suicide were often people who might be biologically vulnerable to being emotionally overwhelmed.