On March 9, 1961, at age 17, she was admitted to the Institute of Living in Hartford Connecticut and found herself assigned to the seclusion room on the unit known as Thompson Two, reserved for the most severely ill patients. .

             While there, doctors gave her a diagnosis of schizophrenia. She was also treated for "extreme social withdrawal" and suffered from what would later become known as borderline personality disorder. They dosed her with Thorazine, Librium and other drugs, as well as hours of Freudian analysis. She was strapped down for electroshock treatments, 14 shocks the first course and 16 the second. Nothing seemed to help her, and she was re-assigned to Thompson Two. A discharge summary, some two plus years later, stated that "during 26 months of hospitalization, Miss Linehan was, for a considerable part of this time, one of the most disturbed patients in the hospital. " No one knew what was happening to her, and as a result medical care only made it worse. Any real treatment would have to be based not on some theory, she later concluded, but on facts: which particular emotion led to which thought led to the latest gruesome act. It would have to break that cycle and teach a new behavior. "I was in hell,"" Linehan said. "And I made a vow: when I get out, I'm going to come back and get others out of here. ".

             In 1967, several years after she left the institute there was at least one suicide attempt in Tulsa, when she first arrived home; and another after she moved to a Y.M.C.A. in Chicago to start over. She was hospitalized again and emerged confused, isolated and more committed than ever to her Catholic faith. She moved into another Y, was hired as a clerk in an insurance company and started taking night classes at Loyola University. She prayed, often, at a chapel in the Cenacle Retreat Center.

             "One night I was kneeling in there, looking up at the cross, and the whole place became gold - and suddenly I felt something coming toward me," she said.