Ireland
About Us
Several significant developments took place in Ireland in the early 2000s which supported clinicians to consider the value of introducing DBT in their services. This included advancements in recording epidemiological information on suicide and self-harm through the National Suicide Research Foundation, the formation of the Department of Health Expert Group for Mental Health Policy, and the subsequent publication of its policy document A Vision for Change in 2006, which recommended the provision of DBT as an evidence-based psychotherapeutic intervention within the Health Service Executive‘s (HSE) public mental health services. Around this time, a few DBT training events were organised by interested clinicians in Ireland, and this resulted in a small number of DBT teams being set up.
Subsequently, in 2010, led by Daniel Flynn, a group of six clinicians travelled to the UK to attend DBT Intensive Training and subsequently set up a DBT team in Cork city. The team gathered client outcome and health service utilisation data, both of which demonstrated the effectiveness of DBT in a real-world clinical outpatient setting. In 2012, this project expanded to include four teams across Cork city and county. There continued to be a growing interest in providing DBT in Ireland around this time, but funding and implementation challenges persisted.
In 2013, Daniel Flynn was successful in an application to the HSE National Office for Suicide Prevention for funding to coordinate and evaluate the implementation of 16 DBT teams across Ireland over a two-year period. The National DBT Project Ireland was established with support from key local, national and international stakeholders and experts, including Prof. Michaela Swales. In 2025, there are now 32 DBT teams operating across Ireland representing 51% coverage. Our goal is to have DBT available in both adult and child and adolescent mental health services in all regions across Ireland.
Local therapy programmes
1. DBT teams operate in many HSE and HSE-funded adult mental health services in Ireland. One such team is the HSE’s North Kerry DBT team, which has been running since 2015, when the first team members were trained through the National DBT Project. This team covers a rural catchment area in County Kerry in the HSE South West. The North Kerry team works with service users aged 18 and over with severe emotion dysregulation, offering comprehensive DBT, DBT-PE, and DBT skills-only groups, as well as the Family Connections programme for family members.
2. St John of God Community Mental Health Lucena Child and Adolescent Mental Health Services (CAMHS) are publicly funded to provide services to young people under 18 with moderate to severe mental health difficulties living in catchment areas in counties Dublin and Wicklow on the east coast of Ireland. Lucena CAMHS celebrated ten years of DBT in their services in 2024 and have developed an emotion regulation pathway using DBT as a model of care in the service, with two DBT teams providing both comprehensive DBT and three skills-only groups for clients with lower severity across Lucena’s six locations. This pathway aims to improve emotion regulation in families and offers three levels of DBT input: comprehensive DBT-A, a multi-family skills-only group intervention for young people with less severe difficulties, and Family Connections groups for parents and carers. DBT staff have also been trained in Alan Fruzzetti’s model for DBT with families and are using this framework to address emotion dysregulation within families.
Members
We are currently in the process of setting up the Irish DBT Association.
Before this, the National DBT Project Ireland was established in 2013 as part of the coordinated implementation of DBT in the public mental health services (HSE) in Ireland. In 2021, the National HSE DBT Training Team was established. Our team includes both DBT clinicians and experts with lived experience who train clinicians across publicly funded services in Ireland. As well as training staff in mental health services to deliver DBT, and providing education on DBT and severe emotion dysregulation to other publicly funded agencies, the National HSE DBT training team also supports new and existing teams with sustainability through the provision of expert supervision and consultation, including adherence feedback, continued training opportunities, and support with coordination and ongoing implementation.