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A while back, Dr. Phil put a 9 year old child and the kids Mom on his show and stated that the child possessed 9 out of the 14 traits typically seen in serial killers. That is one of the most criminally negligent things I have ever seen a professional do.
As a psychologist he violated just about every possible professional ethic there is.For the record the childs' mother is a complete idiot for letting this ever happen and has no business raising any children. IMO. This childs identity was not protected in any way, shape or form and this kid is going to go school and have to walk around with this stigma on him for the rest of his childhood. He is just a little kid and he is not a serial killer (yet). He would have had more protection under the law if he was a serial killer. Ain't that ironic?
The poor kid may grow up to be a serial killer now because someone has already prophesized it for him. Imagine being 9 years old and being told you were born evil?
This angers me beyond imagination, the child abused, Dr. Phil unpunished.(I guess if he was really licenced that could revoke it)
So, is he a quack? I say yes.
Of course dr. Phil is stupid. It's a television show!
The real persons to blame are the son, the mother for exposing themselves and anyone seeing and believing the show.
He has gone mad with power, get your torches its time for a good ol fasioned witch burnin'
Dr. Phil is a shock jockey, playing off the base instincts of television viewers to get ratings. I'm sure that at one point, he might have had some morals of ethics, but he lost those quickly enough when the money started rolling in.
His "tough love" tactics are brutish and ineffective, relying on scaring rather than addressing real problems. Scaring someone into change does nothing to help the underlying problems in their psyche, it only teaches them to stuff it down into their stomach and never let anyone see it for fear of retribution.
They should have gone to oprah =p
It's a daytime television show, just like The Maury Show, it's got actors. 80% of the people on there are just to be paid for entertaining us like a sit-com or any other television show.
| mediadar wrote: | | So, is he a quack? I say yes. |
So do I, but the truth is that it's not such a black and white issue.
The plain fact is that no one has ever done any real study - to my knowledge at least - into the effectiveness of the kind of therapy Dr. McGraw uses. McGraw's system is behavioural modification, whereas traditional therapy is generally more about determining the source of the problem behaviours. Or to put it in a humorous example: a patient walks in holding his arm and says "Doctor, it hurts when I move it like this." Traditional therapy would investigate the arm and find out why it hurts before trying to cure it. Dr. McGraw would just say, "Well then don't move it like that!" Technically, both make the arm stop hurting. But are both equally effective?
Although it's kind of stupidly obvious in that example that Dr. McGraw's method is not really curing anything, in reality the truth is not so clear. Say for example, that person X is a compulsive shopper, and spends thousands of dollars a month shopping. This causes financial problems which strain the relationship, making the person even more depressed which makes them shop more. While it would certainly be nice to determine what the root cause of the shopping compulsion is, it may not be necessary. If you can simply modify the person's behaviour so that they don't shop so much, you break the cycle of shop-crisis-depression-shop. There's no more financial crisis, and no more depression from it, so the need to shop goes away automatically. Thus the patient is effectively cured, although the doctor never really knew why they were doing what they were doing to begin with. And if it so happens that there is another cause contributing to the shopping compulsion, then although you haven't solved the problem, you have at least brought it under control, and you can then continue to search for that other cause - in essence, you didn't cure them on the first try, but you haven't done any harm, and by relieving the symptoms you have done a little bit of good.
If a medical doctor worked in the same way, then if you walked into the doctor with symptom X, the doctor would treat that symptom directy, without even attempting to diagnose the cause of the symptom. If that did not cure the disease, then the doctor is free to try another treatment, but was any harm done in treating the one symptom? It's medicine - and psychiatry - by trial and error. Not really very scientific, and certainly not elegant. But it just might work.
Of course, many of his methods really don't stand up logically, and McGraw himself has a long track record of questionable ethics. Still, those people on his show certainly know what they're getting into. If they didn't want the information about the child broadcast, they would have been free to stop it. In the case you mentioned, I would say the parents are the real monsters, not the kid, or McGraw.
| Indi wrote: | | ....In the case you mentioned, I would say the parents are the real monsters, not the kid, or McGraw. |
Yeah, I think the kid can't be faulted, but I think Phil and his entire show qualify as "monsters", also. Forget his methods, I think the real issue is the stigma attached to the kid by not hiding his identity. That's assuming, of course, that the bit was real and not created using actors.
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