Prof. Joaquim Soler Ribaudi

Dr. Joaquim Soler is Senior Researcher of the Mental Health Research Group of the Sant Pau Research Institute. With a degree in Psychology and a PhD in Psychiatry from the Autonomous University of Barcelona, he has been working at the Hospital de la Santa Creu i Sant Pau as a Clinical Psychologist in the Borderline Personality Disorder Treatment Unit since 2005.

He is a DBT and MBCT therapist and has participated in several research projects, as principal investigator and collaborator, financed with public funds from competitive calls on Borderline Personality Disorders (BPD), focusing on assessment, genetics and psychological and pharmacological treatments.

He has more than 135 indexed articles related to Depression, Eating Disorders, BPD and mindfulness, a total of 4,798 citations and an H-index of 41 (SCOPUS; March 2025).

He has been an organizer and member of scientific committees of multiple national and international congresses and was local chair of the fifth international congress on borderline personality disorder in 2018 organized by the European Society for the Study of Personality Disorders (ESSPD). In the field of mindfulness, he is the tenth most prolific research author worldwide and third in collaborations with other researchers in the field. In the area of BPD, his research network (authors and co-authors) emerges as the eighth research group in the last 20 years of scientific publications in BPD in the world. His line of research has focused on evaluating the benefit of these practices in populations with high impulsivity and emotional dysregulation.

He is an associate professor in the Department of Psychiatry and Legal Medicine at the Autonomous University of Barcelona (UAB). He participates in the Interuniversity Master in Initiation to Research in Mental Health of CIBERSAM. He has directed a significant number of doctoral theses.

He has been a researcher attached to the CIBERSAM group CB/07/09/0010 since its creation in 2007 and has also been a researcher of the PROMOSAM network of excellence. He has been a consultant and board member of the ESSPD and also board member of the Spanish Society for the Study of Personality Disorders (SEETP) for 10 years. He currently collaborates with working groups on personality disorders, both national and international, such as the working group of the World Federation of Societies of Biological Psychiatry (WFSBP) and is a member of the European and research committees of the World Dialectical Behavior Therapy Association (WDBTA and EDBTA), founded and chaired the Spanish Society of Dialectical Behavior Therapy (SP-DBT).

All major clinical guidelines support psychotherapy as the treatment of choice for BPD, and even some of them specifically recommend avoiding the use of psychotropic drugs to treat BPD. In this sense, no drug has been specifically approved for the treatment of this disorder, but despite this, more than 80% of patients with BPD in our health context receive psychotropic drugs, and more than 50% of them receive more than one psychotropic drug. In addition, access to evidence-based psychological therapies, such as Dialectical Behavioral Therapy (DBT), is still very limited. Group formats of DBT oriented to skills training can be useful as a cost-effective alternative for this disorder and help reduce (or “deprescribe”) drug treatments to a minimally useful treatment.

In recent years, we have also explored potential pharmacological candidates that could provide some benefit to the treatment of subjects with high emotional dysregulation (ED). In this sense, substances such as ayahuasca have shown positive effects in different related disorders where ED plays a relevant role, such as affective disorders and substance use. In particular, we have explored the effects of ayahuasca to increase the level of mindfulness, promote acceptance, increase cognitive defusion and emotional regulation. It would seem to act in a similar way to the effects observed with the practice of meditation when trained in this population. These psychological processes have a health-promoting value and are of a transdiagnostic nature, but they are particularly useful in the improvement of people with BPD. Finally, also oxytocin, described as a "social hormone" and underlying biological substrate of the bond, could have a role to increase kindness and promote affection towards oneself. In this territory, data on the effectiveness of treatments, both pharmacological and psychological, are still scarce. The levels of self-criticism are, again, a transdiagnostic variable and are high in multiple clinical populations, but in the case of BPD the level of self-judgment is extreme. In this last part, we consider whether oxytocin combined with psychological treatments, such as compassion training, could reduce levels of self-criticism and increase positive affect in BPD patients.

• Domínguez-Clavé E, Soler J et al. (2019). Ayahuasca improves emotion dysregulation in a community sample and in individuals with borderline-like traits. Psychopharmacology, 236, 573-580.
• Soler J, Casellas‐Pujol E, Fernández‐Felipe I, Martín‐Blanco A, Almenta D, & Pascual JC (2022). "Skills for pills": The dialectical‐behavioural therapy skills training reduces polypharmacy in borderline personality disorder. Acta Psychiatrica Scandinavica, 145(4), 332-342.
• Casellas-Pujol E, Soler J, Schmidt C, Soria-Madrid A, Elices M, & Pascual, JC (2024). Contextual-compassion training for borderline personality disorder with long lasting symptoms: A randomized clinical trial. Journal of Contextual Behavioral Science, 34, 100846.