Licensed mental health professionals are steamed up over a Maine entrepreneur who charges angry people $1.99 a minute to listen to them rant and rave over the telephone.
Philip Doyen receives between 10 and 20 phone calls a week to “Vent-Line,” a service he launched in February that allows callers to blow off steam -- at a price.
But some professional counseling services aren’t happy about Doyen’s business and are urging prosecutors to investigate whether he is breaking any state laws, the Portland Press Herald newspaper reported Tuesday.
“For some people, venting is going to upset them more,” Leslie Brancato of the Community Counseling Center in Portland, Maine, told the paper. “That he’s charging $1.99 a minute is, in my opinion, totally exploitative.”
Doyen, who works as a computer repairman when not operating Vent-Line, says he has dozens of customers along the East Coast.
“I’m in it for the money, like everybody else,” the Press Herald quoted him as saying. “If it helps people, great.”