M.D, M.Sc., P.hD. Ricardo J.M. Lucena is a Brazilian psychiatrist and a DBT (Dialectical Behavior Therapy) psychotherapist. He recently completed a 26-year academic career and was a full professor in the Department of Internal Medicine at Universidade Federal da Paraiba (UFPB) and now lives in Canada.

Since 2011 he has focused his practice on substance use and personality disorders. He was the state coordinator of the largest national research project on crack-cocaine users ever conducted in Brazil. He was also the coordinator of the Study Group on Alcohol and Other Drugs at UFPB. He was a visiting scholar in the area of substance use disorders at the Lady Davis Institute at the Jewish General Hospital (a McGill University affiliated hospital in Montreal, Canada). In 2016, he finished the training program in Dialectical Behavior Therapy Comprehensive Training for Independent Practitioners™, offered by the Linehan Institute/Behavioral Tech DBT in Seattle, USA. He was the coordinator of the Outpatient Clinic on Mental Health and Addiction at CRAS/UFPB and of the mindfulness project for students in medicine and psychology.

In 2016 he designed two elective courses on stress management: one for medical students and the other for students in psychology. The main goal of the courses was to help university students to manage academic stress using DBT skills and formal mindfulness practices of the MBSR program (such as meditation with focus on the breath, body scan and mindful walk). In the same year, with the overall goal of enhancing mental resilience, he conducted a DBT skills training group for UFPB executive staff, including the rector and vice-rector.

In 2019 he designed a DBT Skills program for a group of UFPB medical residents in anesthesiology to assist them in coping with burnout. The curriculum included five modules: dialectics, mindfulness, emotion regulation, interpersonal effectiveness, and distress tolerance. He also delivered a similar program to a group of students in philosophy to assist in the management of academic stress.

For the past two years he has been training student mental health counselors at McGill University (Canada) in a DBT Skills program he designed. In 2019 this included four onsite sessions followed by eight online group sessions. In 2020 the program was conducted completely online from July to December.

After earning his M.D. degree from UFPB in 1992, Dr. Lucena completed his medical residency in psychiatry in 1995. Fluent in Portuguese, English and French, with working knowledge in Spanish, he received his Master of Science degree in Biomedical Sciences (Department of Psychiatry) from the Université de Montréal (Canada) in 1998. In the same year and at the same university, he joined the doctoral program in Biomedical Sciences (Department of Psychiatry) and earned his Ph.D. degree in 2002. His dissertation was entitled “Strategies of Collaboration between General Practitioners and Psychiatrists: An Exploratory Research Project in Montreal.”

Dr. Lucena has presented at international and national meetings in psychiatry. He has been a consulting psychiatrist for primary care doctors in his community and has always promoted the development of mental health services to individuals with prevalent mental disorders (affective and anxiety disorders). He has taught students in medicine and psychology disciplines in the area of mental health (including mindfulness) and addiction, primary care psychiatry, and medical psychology (doctor-patient relationship). At the beginning of his academic career, he was a professor in the Department of Biology at Universidade Federal de Roraima (UFRR), where he assisted in the creation of a medical school in Roraima in the Amazon region of Brazil.