Mental Health Worker in Peer Support Workshops
Mental Health Professional

Dr. Ian Shulman is a clinical psychologist who has been practicing, mostly in the Halton region, for much of the past twenty years. He is the Clinic Director of Shift Cognitive Therapy, a multi-person psychology practice, staffed by psychologists, registered psychotherapists and social workers, serving the community at large.

Starting out in the Anxiety Disorders Clinic at The Clarke Institute of Psychiatry, before it merged with the Centre for Addiction and Mental Health (CAMH) in the early 1990s, Dr. Shulman learned to understand the common features sitting at the core of many anxiety-related conditions, and co-lead group treatment programs for panic disorder, social phobia and obsessive-compulsive disorder.

He achieved his PhD in clinical psychology from the University of Calgary in 1999 and returned to Ontario, where he completed a Postdoctoral Fellowship in the Anxiety Clinic at Toronto’s Hospital for Sick Children.

Recruited to the University of Waterloo’s Department of Psychology after that, he co-leads the Psychology Treatment Clinic with a faculty partner, supervising the work of graduate-level students as they treated members of the Kitchener-Waterloo community, under the supervision of licensed, clinical supervisors. Returning to Toronto in 2002, he split his time between working in a private practice in Oakville and working for North York General Hospital. In that latter capacity, he provided treatment to children, teens and their families in the Child & Adolescent Outpatient Mental Health Clinic, and worked with the Unexplained Medical Issues Team, a small team focusing on exploring and resolving issues where patients presented with physical problems that had very real symptoms, but no medical conditions to explain them.

He gave up his hospital practice in 2003, preferring to focus on private practice work. In 2005, he opened his own practice, expanding over time to become the nine-person, group practice it is today. Dr. Shulman’s clinical work focuses largely on treating individual and couples’ issues, in addition to working with first responders and other public safety personnel and their families. He has been a regular volunteer with Badge of Life Canada since 2018, attending and participating in a number of their 3- and 6-day, residential programs. He joined the organization’s Board of Directors in January 2023.