By: anonpatient

anonpatient — Mon, 17 Feb 2020 00:51:17 +0000

I am one of Dr. Kelleher’s patients with Borderline Personality Disorder. I got to work with him for three and a half years and it’s hard for me to believe the change our work made in me, after 15 years of unsuccessful attempts at therapy with many others. I always wondered (and often asked, though he wouldn’t say) why on earth he had chosen to work with borderlines, who are fairly universally reviled by mental health practitioners and not for no reason — we are difficult, angry, needy, paranoid, at times irrational; the disease is intractable, interminable, our defenses are “primitive” in that the damage was done to us when we were preverbal and our emotions can be as uncontrollable and agonizing as a mindless infant’s. The suicide risk alone rules us out for many who are rightly concerned about liability should we die under their care. Although he never told me why he was so willing to take all this on, by the end I came to an answer that I found satisfying. I believe he wanted to be, wanted to help, where the greatest pain was. “Gratitude” does not begin to encompass the feelings I have for him.

Comments on: John C. Kelleher III, M.D.

By: anonpatient