Robert Marino, PhD., co-founder of Bay Area Psychotherapy Institute (BAPTI) in Lafayette retired early in the summer of 2017, leaving behind a legacy of helping individuals and families, as well as training high-quality psychotherapists. 

BAPTI is a 501(c)(3) non-profit founded almost 25 years ago to provide high quality, affordable therapy to the central Contra Costa community as well as training the next generation of psychotherapists.  BAPTI offers positions to qualified applicants who possess a master's degree or doctorate in Clinical Psychology and are in the final stages of achieving licensure.  BAPTI utilizes a private practice model that provides training and support for interns and guides them in developing, marketing and managing their own practices. 

Dr. Marino has been a longtime fixture in the East Bay as a professional known for his work with addictions and with couples and families coping with the effects of codependency and chemical dependency. 

Dr. Marino was raised in Long Beach, California and earned a Master’s Degree in 1973. He then worked for 2 years as a high school counselor for at-risk students in San Francisco.  After earning a Master’s Degree in Religion from the Graduate Theological Union in Berkeley, he worked as the Director of the Jesuit Volunteer Corps for the southwest region, overseeing volunteers, the majority of whom served the Navajo Nation as counselors, nurses, and addiction experts. In 1981 he began a Ph.D. program at the Pacific Graduate School of Psychology.  In 1984, Dr. Marino completed his Ph.D. while a pre-doctoral intern at Kaiser Vallejo. The following year he worked as a post-doctoral fellow in addictions at Kaiser Walnut Creek and then as the Director of Training for post-doctoral interns in Psychology. During those years, working with colleagues from psychology and psychiatry, he helped to create the Alcohol and Drug Abuse Program (ADAP), which has since been adopted (and adapted) as the Northern California Kaiser Hospitals treatment model, now called CRT. 

From 1985-2000 Dr. Marino worked as a faculty member at John F Kennedy University and at St Mary’s College in the East Bay where he taught a variety of courses particularly focused on educating his students in the assessment and treatment of addiction. His courses often focused on work with family members. He believed each person must be understood and approached in an existential, psychological, and spiritual context.

Dr. Marino left Kaiser in 1990 for private practice and in 1993 co-founded the Bay Area Psychotherapy Institute (BAPTI) in Lafayette, CA. The program focuses on training Doctoral and Master’s level therapists in a variety of modalities.  Dr. Marino has personally trained, or coordinated the training of, more than 150 therapists, who through the agency, have provided more than 35,000 hours of low cost treatment to a varied clinical population. The program, continues to serve clients today, provides affordable therapy to clients throughout the East Bay. In addition, he has coordinated a cadre of licensed therapists who themselves have provided nearly two million dollars of donated teaching and supervision services. This donation of time and expertise has enabled Bay Area Psychotherapy Institute to continue to offer services to a population that could otherwise not afford quality care. 

From 1993 to his recent retirement in June of 2017, in addition to his leadership of BAPTI, Dr. Marino has worked full time in private practice with a particular focus on addicts and their family members, and has regularly consulted with therapists throughout the East Bay on issues of addiction. He has chosen to speak on the issue with numerous attorney, teacher, and parent groups, because of his belief in the critical importance of these groups possessing an adequate understanding of the process of addiction and how it affects their clients, their students, and their families. 

Dr. Marino has left behind a legacy of clients and their families whose recovery from addiction has been reinforced, and of hundreds of Bay Area therapists who are better trained and more experienced in the practice of psychotherapy thanks to his lengthy and important contribution.