Dr. Comtois’ career goal is to give suicidal clients and their clinicians their best chance to succeed.  She has been working in the area of health services, treatment development, and clinical trials research to prevent suicide for over 20 years. Her graduate training was in community/clinical psychology and focused on achieving clinical ends through prevention and other system interventions in socio-culturally diverse populations. She has developed and adapted interventions to improve care and clinician willingness to work with suicidal patients including DBT, Collaborative Assessment and Management of Suicidality (CAMS), caring contacts via text message, and Preventing Addiction Related Suicide (PARS).  She has developed DBT-ACES, a program to assist psychiatrically disabled individuals with BPD find and maintain living wage employment and self-sufficiency.  Dr. Comtois’ research has been funded by the National Institute of Mental Health, American Foundation for Suicide Prevention, the State of Washington, and the Department of Defense.

Marsha Linehan is a Professor of Psychology and adjunct Professor of Psychiatry and Behavioral Sciences at the University of Washington and is Director of the Behavioral Research and Therapy Clinics, a consortium of research projects developing new treatments and evaluating their efficacy for severely disordered and multi-diagnostic and suicidal populations. Her primary research is in the application of behavioral models to suicidal behaviors, drug abuse, and borderline personality disorder. She is also working to develop effective models for transferring science-based treatments to the clinical community.

She has received several awards recognizing her clinical and research contributions to the study and treatment of suicidal behaviors, including the Louis I. Dublin Award for Lifetime Achievement in the Field of Suicide, the Distinguished Research in Suicide Award (American Foundation of Suicide Prevention), and the creation of the Marsha Linehan Award for Outstanding Research in the Treatment of Suicidal Behavior established by the American Association of Suicidology. She has also been recognized for her clinical research including the Distinguished Scientist Award from the Society for a Science of Clinical Psychology, the award for Distinguished Scientific Contributions to Clinical Psychology (Society of Clinical Psychology,) and awards for Distinguished Contributions to the Practice of Psychology (American Association of Applied and Preventive Psychology) and for Distinguished Contributions for Clinical Activities, (Association for the Advancement of Behavior Therapy).

She is the past-president of both the Association for the Advancement of Behavior Therapy and of the Society of Clinical Psychology, Division 12, American Psychological Association. She is a fellow of the American Psychological Association and the American Psychopathological Association and is a diplomat of the American Board of Behavioral Psychology.

She is the developer of Dialectical Behavior Therapy (DBT) a treatment originally developed for the treatment of suicidal behaviors and since expanded to treatment of borderline personality disorder and other severe and complex mental disorders, particularly those that involve serious emotion dysregulation. In comparison to all other clinical interventions for suicidal behaviors, DBT is the only treatment that has been shown effective in multiple trials across several independent research sites. It has been shown both effective in reducing suicidal behavior and cost-effective in comparison to both standard treatment and community treatments delivered by expert therapists. It is currently the gold-standard treatment for borderline personality disorder, a disorder with a 8-10 suicide rate that afflicts between 4-6% of the population.

Linehan is the founder and the convener of both the Suicide Strategic Planning Group and the DBT Strategic Planning Group. Both groups meet annually or bi-annually at the University of Washington. The goal of the suicide group is to jump start the building of a field of suicide treatment research. The further goal of both groups is to bring together both expert, new and potential treatment researchers to collaboratively evaluate the state of current research in the respective areas, chart necessary studies to advance the development of more effective treatments and build a rigorous and cohesive next generation of young clinical-scientists.

She has written four books, including two treatment manuals: Cognitive-Behavioral Treatment for Borderline Personality Disorder and Skills Training Manual for Treating Borderline Personality Disorder. She serves on a number of editorial boards and has published extensively in scientific journals.

Linehan is founder of Behavioral Tech LLC, a behavioral technology transfer group. She is also founder of Behavioral Tech Research, Inc., a company that develops innovative on-line and mobile technologies to disseminate science-based behavioral treatments for mental disorders. Learn more about the organizations founded by Dr. Linehan.

Linehan was trained in spiritual directions under Gerald May and Tilden Edwards and is an associate Zen teacher in both the Sanbo-Kyodan-School under Willigis Jaeger Roshi (Germany) as well as in the Diamond Sangha (USA). She teaches mindfulness via workshops and retreats for health care providers.

Richard Ries is Professor of Psychiatry at the University of Washington Medical School in Seattle, Washington. Dr. Ries serves as Associate Director of the University of Washington Addiction Psychiatry Residency Program. He is board certified in Psychiatry and certified in Addiction Medicine by the American Society for Addiction Medicine, and in Addiction Psychiatry (1993) by the American Board of Psychiatry and Neurology. Dr. Ries is Director of Outpatient Psychiatry, Dual Disorder Programs, and the Chemical Dependency Project at Harborview Medical Center. He is director of substance abuse education at the University of Washington Medical School and director of the Division of Addictions for the Department of Psychiatry. He has obtained NIDA sponsored clinical research grants in 1989 and 1997 to evaluate treatment outcome in dual disorders and also helped develop and participate in a NIDA sponsored training videotape (1996) on dual disorders. Dr. Ries was chosen to chair the first official Treatment Improvement Protocol (TIP#9-1994) on dual disorders by the Center for Substance Abuse Treatment and is currently co-chair of the TIP#9 update. In 1999 he became co-editor of the key reference text Principles of Addiction Medicine, published by the American Society of Addiction Medicine.

Linda Dimeff, Ph.D., is clinical faculty in the Department of Psychology at the University of Washington, and the Institute Director at Portland DBT Institute, Inc. She received her doctoral degree in clinical psychology from the University of Washington, where she specialized in prevention and treatment of addictive behaviors under the mentoring of G. Alan Marlatt, Ph.D., and in Dialectical Behavior Therapy (DBT), with Marsha M. Linehan, Ph.D. She is also the Chief Scientific Officer at Evidence-Based Practice Institute where she develops and evaluates emerging technologies that have the potential to transform training and delivery of evidence-based therapies (EBTs). Previously, she served as Chief Scientific Officer and Vice President at BTECH Research, Inc., an organization she co-founded with Dr. Linehan to facilitate the training and dissemination of DBT and other EBTs. She has received over 20 federal grants to facilitate the dissemination of EBTs and has published over 50 peer-reviewed publications. In addition, she is a Linehan Board of Certification Certified DBT Clinician.

Dr. Ursula Whiteside is a licensed clinical psychologist, CEO of NowMattersNow.org and Clinical Faculty at the University of Washington. As a researcher, she has been awarded grants from the National Institute of Mental Health (NIMH) and the American Foundation for Suicide Prevention. Dr. Whiteside is co-principal investigator on a study involving 18,000 high-risk suicidal patients in three major health systems. This study includes a guided version of NowMattersNow.org, a program she developed that includes skills for managing suicidal thoughts based on Dialectical Behavior Therapy (DBT) and paired with Lived Experience stories.

Clinically, she began her training with Dr. Marsha Linehan in 1999 and later served as a DBT-adherent research therapist on a NIMH-funded clinical trial led by Dr. Linehan. Dr. Whiteside is a group and individual certified DBT clinician. Now, she treats high-risk suicidal clients in her small private practice in Seattle using DBT and caring contacts.

Dr. Whiteside is national faculty for the Zero Suicide initiative, a practical approach to suicide prevention in health care and behavioral healthcare systems. This program was recently described by NPR on a segment titled “What Happens If You Try to Prevent Every Single Suicide?” Dr. Whiteside serves on the faculty of the National Action Alliance Zero Suicide Academy. She is also a founding board member of United Suicide Survivors International and a member of the National Suicide Prevention Lifeline Standards Trainings and Practices Committee.

As a person with Lived Experience, she strives to decrease the gap between “us and them” and to ensure that the voices of those who have been there are included in all relevant conversations: nothing about us without us.

Vibh Forsythe Cox, PhD, is the Director of the Marsha M. Linehan Dialectical Behavior Therapy (DBT) Clinic at the University of Washington. Dr. Forsythe Cox sees clients in the clinic and teaches and supervises psychology graduate students learning the foundations of DBT. Dr. Forsythe Cox is a Trainer and Consultant for Behavioral Tech, LLC (BTECH) the training company founded by Dr. Linehan to disseminate DBT and provides consultation and training to DBT teams internationally specializing in supporting newly forming DBT teams. She is also the Training and Development Specialist at BTECH, working as part of the team that creates content for BTECH’s training offerings. Additionally, Dr. Forsythe Cox supervises for the Post-Doctoral Fellowship program at Cadence Child and Adolescent Therapy, a DBT-Linehan Board of certification certified DBT program in Kirkland, Washington. Dr. Forsythe Cox is a licensed Psychologist in Washington state and a DBT-Linehan Board of Certification certified clinician.