PsiAN Speaks: Rich Shulman, PhD

Editor’s note: The Forum will periodically post video interviews of authors, researchers, academics, and policymakers under the heading PsiAN Speaks. The views expressed do not necessarily reflect PsiAN’s official positions.

For over 20 years, Volunteers in Psychotherapy’s innovative approach has allowed community members to access free or low-cost psychotherapy outside of medical institutions and managed health care.  In this interview, Richard Shulman tackles the medicalization of human suffering, the way in which the institutions in which we practice can get in the way of providing good therapy, the value of a truly private psychotherapy, and the potential for the VIP model to expand access to therapies of depth, insight, and relationship. 

Richard Shulman, Ph.D., was one of the founders, and is the ongoing director, of Volunteers In Psychotherapy, a nonprofit organization in greater Hartford, CT, that allows anyone to earn strictly private psychotherapy in exchange for volunteer work they provide, independently and privately, to the charity or government agency of their choice. Rich is a licensed Clinical Psychologist who previously worked at Hartford Hospital – Institute of Living, where he provided psychotherapy and had supervised and trained psychologists and other therapists at the outpatient clinic. That clinic primarily served Hartford’s poor or uninsured population. He also served for 20 years on the Institutional Review Board of those hospitals. 

Bevin Campbell PsyD is a psychologist in private practice in Brooklyn, New York.