Should You Watch Dr. Phil? Dr. Phallacy..

Well, Dom is 22. I just turned 23, so I imagine I am in his peer group. Like his accusation states, I write Dr. Phil off as a worthless hack. Actually, I go farther. I feel Dr. Phil has built a reputation on bad pop psychology that exploits of the problems of the extreme cases in our society and does nothing to actually help a darned person in his target audience. However, unlike his accusation against peers who write off Dr. Phil, I have seen a few episodes.

On one particular episode, I recall how Dr. Phil told a group of eager listeners that everyone had five or six "defining moments" in their life that helped build their character, definite points they could remember and recall as being significant.

This is complete and utter baloney for a variety of reasons. First, not one soul that has ever walked the Earth - not me, not the reader, and not even Dr. Phil - has complete awareness about their life. While one may know more about the past than the future, the level of clarity is significantly below 100%. Character is molded slowly through personal growth and evolution (not to mention biology); this garbage about "defining moments" has no basis in science, social realty, or any other nonfiction realm.

Honestly, when someone starts saying that there are "5 or 6" moments in your life that define a person, the skepticism meter should be flying off the charts. Exposing such dishonest ways of looking at things was a primary concern of Leo Tolstoy's, and constantly his novels seem more realistic to the reader because there are no "defining moments." Characters develop gradually and sometimes regress. People have no self-awareness of when their happiest moments or saddest moments occur. The only thing such simple paradigms do is give someone a thought exercise that gives them the impression of knowing themselves better, when really they're just as clueless as before.

On another episode, I saw him address a married couple where the husband was a total scumbag. The man slept around with another woman, demanded unrealistic things from his wife, became violent towards her, and ran the family into debt despite his claims that he loved her. What, oh what, was Dr. Phil's sage wisdom in this situation? She needs to stand up for herself and not be a doormat. If he cannot live with her as a partner, then she needs to leave.

That was it. The episode was 25 minutes of tear-driven explanations of everything that's wrong with this couple - exploitation by another name - followed by five minutes of the most simple, banal advice. Question: who wouldn't tell the woman the stand up for herself and grow some muscle or leave? What true friend wouldn't give her the exact same advice? What person who earnestly thought about it would tell her otherwise?

I don't know of any. But yet, week after week, Dr. Phil has a teeming mass tune in to his show because he brings in the most extreme cases, exploits them for twenty minutes, and tells them frankly what half the audience is thinking anyway. For this, the audience is reassured that they are intelligent, and their lives go on unchanged.

Does he help real people? He might. I don't know, but it seems to me his advice rarely strays from what a true, honest friend would say. Getting that usually doesn't require an hour-long exploitive television program. I give him credit for some things, like his stance on marriage as a life-long commitment - which is a much-needed view in the media - but far too often he fails to give people genuine insight into who they are.

And his peers in the sociological and psychological communities agree. Dom Coccaro writes that "watching Dr. Phil is like reading a passage from a sociology textbook," but such statements are erroneous. Numerous actual, working psychologists and sociologists regularly scoff at Dr. Phil and denounce what he does. Despite his doctorate, there is nothing academic about him. He is also currently the defendant in multiple class-action lawsuits.

And let's not forget how Dr. Phil got his start - through the moneymaking machine that is Oprah. The man has his fame due to one thing: he helped Oprah when she was in court against the cattle industry. For that, she spawned him into the all-out commercially driven marketing fest that he is.

He comes up with cutesy terms and mnemonic devices to create his own language for the viewer to think in, but most of them are rubbish gimmicks made up to sell his products. "Guy-Q" is one I heard recently on a commercial. Apparently, women just need "Guy-Q" and Prince Charming will ride in on a gorgeous stallion with his immaculately-white shirt half-unbuttoned and his flowing blonde locks waving in the light wind. Right.

If the man hawks products at all junctures, gives hackneyed advice (and worse advice than a true friend could give, for far too often he writes off the unique characteristics of people in order to generalize and sell books), and is roundly denounced by his psychiatric or psychological peers, is there really any reason to give him credibility?

I'm not saying people should not watch him. If it's entertaining, fine, but frankly, Dr. Phil - either via the airwaves or in book form - isn't going to teach you anything about yourself you don't already know or can't figure out with an hour of honest contemplation about your life.