At age 14, she’s addicted to you, Dr. Phil. Please advise
My family’s close brush with TV’s self- help guru
Is it a greater indignity to be a guest on a taping of The Dr. Phil Show that doesn’t make it to air or to end up on the program, your problems splayed out for all the world to see? That has been the debate in my family since one of my brothers turned down the opportunity to fly to Los Angeles for a taping of Dr. Phil with his family.
The excitement began in July. My 14-year-old niece, who, like many of her friends, is intrigued by Dr. Phil and the human wreckage surrounding him, was on the show’s Web site, which encourages viewers to air their dysfunctions on upcoming programs. She looked for one she could apply to. The list is long: “Sacrificing it all for your child to be the next Britney?” “ Are you a cheating wife?” “ Tricked into having a child?” “Do you suffer from a fetish?”
Then she came across “ Are you a kid addicted to the Internet?” Hey, she thought, that could be me.
With her mother’s amused nothing- can- possibly- come- ofthis consent, my niece fired off an e-mail, laying it on. “The Internet is my life,” she wrote.
A few weeks later, a Dr. Phil producer e-mailed her mother. He wanted 10 examples of my niece’s “addiction” and a family photo. Her mother was shocked but didn’t want to throw cold water on the project. So she and her daughter created a list, which included the benign facts that my niece “socializes” on the net and gets frustrated when the family computer is occupied.
But is she an “addict” in the true sense of the term, before it was appropriated by daytime TV? Hardly. Like most teenagers, she surfs sites that interest her and e-mails friends. Her parents monitor her activities. She went to camp for several weeks this summer without suffering withdrawal. And when she returned, she didn’t rush to log online.
A week later, on a Friday night in late August, the producer called. My brother answered. It became apparent the show was seeking angles to exploit. The producer asked whether my niece was overweight. Clearly he was seeking a visual. (Dr. Phil likes to hector fat people.) Then the producer asked if my niece watched a lot of television. My brother said no, except for Dr. Phil. The producer then asked if my niece had discussed her “problem” with her parents. “Maybe writing to you was her way of reaching out,” my brother said, parodying the language of self- help.
The producer loved that. He asked if the family could fly out to Los Angeles within the next few days to tape a show. (Obviously people drop everything for the chance to bask in Dr. Phil’s glory.) He cautioned there was no guarantee the program would go to air.
By now it was a no-go for my brother, who admits that for a fleeting second appearing on Dr. Phil had a perverse appeal. “I don’t want my 14-year-old daughter out there for every ‘Internet addiction’ society to use as its poster girl,” he explains. He also wasn’t about to disrupt her education. School was starting that week.
But you can be sure many other parents will love the idea of being on Dr. Phil with their “Internetchild. These would be “parents who can’t say no,” another recurring Dr. Phil theme, people without whom he would have no show.
No one wins going on Dr. Phil except Dr. Phil. Phillip McGraw, a psychologist, came to national attention in 1998 as a regular guest on Oprah. His folksy “get real” approach proved a refreshing change from the usual psychobabble drone. By 2002, he had his own syndicated show, a landscape filled with feuding in-laws, stage parents, “super-parenters,” moochers, adulterers and people with mental illnesses. His five books have all perched atop bestseller lists. He’s now embedded culturally, America’s preacher of self- accountability, a font of advice during national traumas. One of his books features prominently in the current thriller Red Eye.
The popularity of Dr. Phil and similar shows is symptomatic of a breakdown of the extended family, once there to provide commonsense advice and support. Certainly, these shows exploit this lack, ramping up alarm and creating new “syndromes” and “addictions” to bolster ratings.
But easy as it is to mock, the self-help industry is the rational, if sometimes misguided, response to a shifting social and economic landscape, as Micki McGee concludes in Self- Help Inc.: Makeover Culture in American Life. A sociologist and cultural critic at New York University, McGee writes that because we can no longer count on employment or marriage to last a lifetime, perpetual reimprovement becomes “the only reliable insurance against economic insecurity.”
He observes that the self-help industry fosters two antithetical goals — material success (physical and financial) — and inner transcendence. These objectives are not a product of contemporary narcissism as many assume. The creation of “time management” used in material-success books, for instance, is traceable to Benjamin Franklin, just as the notion of transcendence dominates the writings of Ralph Waldo Emerson.
The entry of women and minorities into the workplace, McGee notes, also bolstered the need for self-help from others by exposing the fallacy of the “selfmade man.” So now we have Dr. Phil-made men. And women. And children, whose numbers thankfully do not include my clever niece, whose only challenge now is to work on her Dr. Phil “addiction.”