Romania

Several significant developments since the mid-2010s supported the introduction and scaling of DBT in Romania. An introductory training was held by Andrada Neacsiu in Timisoara and Wies van den Bosch participated at a conference in Bucharest. These events were the very early steps of studying DBT, with one consultation and self-study team functioning in that period.

The more structured effort to implement DBT in Romania started in 2016, when the first DBT skill training for patients were delivered at HOPE Clinic in Bucharest by Gabriella Bondoc (psychiatrist, psychotherapist) and Oana Munteanu (psychotherapist). Gabriella Bondoc took trainings with Behavioural Tech, and both started the first translations of training materials to teach skills to patients. The first group members were adult diagnosed with BPD and receiving therapy in Clinica Hope Bucharest 

An early consultation team was formed the same year (Gabriella Bondoc, Oana Munteanu, Anca Răducan, Roxana Drăghici). The Romanian Association for Dialectical Behavior Therapy (ART-DC) was founded in 2017 to bring DBT to Romania at international standards and was recognized as a professional training provider by the Romanian College of Psychologists in 2018 (provider code RF-II-B/200). The official website was constructed at www.dbtromania.ro with Dr Gabriella Bondoc as President of ARTDC

In 2019, ART-DC ran Romania’s first Intensive DBT Training in collaboration with Dialexis (with BTECH support), delivered in the classic two 5-day modules (Mar 31–Apr 4 and Dec 1–5) with 6 months implementations in between. The training was with personal presence with 54 people joining the first module, in Bucharest and led by Wies van den Bosch and Leen Dobbelaere.

At the end of 2019, we had our first 35 DBT trained specialists. We consider Wies van den Bosch the official Fairy God Mother of the DBT program in Romania and we thank her for all her support and encouragement.

In 2017, the first BPD patient appeared in Romanian prime time news and openly talked about DBT as a life changing therapy. Multiple TV appearances promoted DBT in different tv talk-shows.

We are actively promoting DBT with constant presence in Romanian psychiatric and psychology Conferences (6 presentations so far, about adult and adolescents implementation, suicide prevention using DBT, skills implementation in psychiatric routine care etc).