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Biography

Born in Chicago in 1944, grew up on the South side, attending the University of Chicago as an undergraduate and for medical school. He completed his residency in Psychiatry at Yale from 1970 to 1973, and served in the U.S. Army Medical Corps, from 1973 to 1975. Dr. Shuchter joined the full-time faculty at UCSD in 1975, and is currently the Director/ Medical Director of Outpatient Psychiatry.

Besides family and clinical/scholarly pursuits, he has been a serious athlete throughout his life: playing basketball in high school, college, and Senior Olympics. Since 1985, he has also been a professional musician; as Dr. Elvis (of Dr. Elvis and the Immortals), he has sung rock and roll and have impersonated Buddy Holly, Jerry Lee Lewis, Elvis, Mick Jagger, Roy Orbison, Chuck Berry, Little Richard, Fats Domino, Ray Charles, and Luciano Pavarotti.

Research Interests

Since the beginning of the San Diego Widowhood Project in 1976 through UCSD’s current Survivors of Violent Loss Program, he has studied the phenomenology of grief, its relationship to depression, and integrated treatments of complicated grief reactions.

During the past two decades, his scholarly work has been focused on the integration of psychotherapy and psychopharmacology in the treatment of affective and anxiety disorders. His current project is a review of the evaluation and treatment of medical professionals (300 medical students, house staff and faculty-level physicians) with whom he has worked.

Clinical Focus

As the Director of Outpatient Psychiatry, Dr. Shuchter’s clinical work and supervision of Psychiatry residents, medical students, family medicine and neurology residents, psychology staff and trainees, and social work staff and trainees has been, of necessity, of a broad and varied nature. The outpatient service treats 1200-1500 patients through their contract with San Diego County Mental Health Services, seeing chronically and severely ill population. Through their private service, they also see another 1200-1300 patients whose health care plan is with UCSD: these tend to be people who are working and present with milder forms of mental illness. In his private practice, he sees people with affective and anxiety disorders. In recent years, more and more of his practice has been with medical trainees and professionals.