class on thursday was on linehan's dialectical behavioral therapy. i remember cp being particularly enamored of this several years ago because it's the closest empirically-supported treatment we have that even remotely resembles his idea of therapy, which is a swift kick in the pants (to be precise, practitioners are supposed to be somewhat irreverent towards patients, e.g. P: I really just want to kill myself; T: Well, why don't you then?) 5 years on, and there's still very little evidence that it works for anything other than borderline personality disorder*, so sorry cp, no dice. i will freely admit, however, that it often takes a fair amount of restraint to not say irreverent things in the therapy i do, particularly as there are many patients who more or less deserve to be clouted over the head with the dsm, twice.

*to be fair, it's just about the only thing that works for borderline personality disorder.