THIS CLINICAL CASE IS DESCRIBED FOR US BY DR. MARSHA LINEHAN, Professor of Psychology at the University of Washington. Dr. Linehan, an internationally known clinical psychologist, created a form of psychotherapy that you will learn about in this chapter.

Consider now a second case. This one also is described by a prominent scholar: Dr. Elyn Saks, Professor of Law, Psychology, and Psychiatry at the University of Southern California and winner of an academic prize so prestigious it’s nicknamed the “genius award.”

One night, when studying with friends at a library, a student blurted out, “Have you ever killed anyone?” When her friends asked what she was talking about, she said, “Heaven, and hell. Who’s what, who’s who.” She then coaxed her friends out onto the library roof, where she waved her arms above her head while shouting, “Come to the Florida lemon tree! Come to the Florida sunshine bush! Where they make lemons. Where there are demons” (Saks, 2007). Her friends were scared. Teachers who saw her behavior knew something was deeply wrong. Within a day, authorities had taken her to a mental hospital.

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In both cases, the young women suffered from severe psychological disorders. Their normal personalities were profoundly disturbed. Their thoughts were detached from the world of reality. In this chapter, you’ll learn about these disorders, their causes, and the therapies available to treat them.

But first, take a guess about the following. Where do you think these two troubled girls are today? Confined to a mental hospital? On the streets, homeless?

The cases turned out better than you might expect. Drs. Linehan and Saks were describing themselves. They battled their disorders and, today, help others to do the same. Their lives testify to both the burden of mental illness and the possibility of overcoming it.

WHAT ARE SOME things you believe—basic beliefs about the world and yourself? You surely believe that you are a human being, composed of the same biological matter as other humans. You probably believe that government officials are no more interested in you than in hundreds of millions of other citizens. Whatever your religious beliefs, you probably believe that your relationship to the spiritual world does not differ fundamentally from that of billions of other people.

But now consider the following beliefs expressed by individuals in a public discussion forum on the Internet:

The writers expressing these beliefs have a mental illness known as schizophrenia. In this chapter, we’ll examine schizophrenia in depth. We’ll then look at other forms of mental disorder, including the persistent styles of behavior known as personality disorders and the disruptions to normal conscious experience that are the dissociative disorders.

In covering these disorders, we will maintain a strategy employed in Chapter 15. After reviewing a given disorder, we review therapies developed to treat that particular disorder. In today’s clinical psychological science, researchers rarely ask whether therapy approaches work “in general.” Instead, “the overwhelming majority of randomized clinical trials in psychotherapy”—that is, studies evaluating the effectiveness of therapy—“compare the efficacy of specific treatments for specific disorders” (Norcross & Wampold, 2011, p. 127). Our linking of disorders and therapies thus reflects the state of psychological science. Just as you did in Chapter 15, in this chapter you will see how contemporary psychologists devise and evaluate therapies that target specific disorders of the mind and brain.