Dr Phil's misery gold mine

Dear Dr Phil,

         What’s it like making money out of other people’s misery?

         Since your TV show started 10 years ago on the back of Oprah Winfrey you have made a fortune by exposing people’s most intimate shortcomings to the world.

            You have bastardised your training as a psychiatrist by practising this with the door wide open to the world when it should be dealt with in the utmost privacy.



You said it Doc

         As a result your guests, as you like to call them, are often put through a vicious and humiliating third degree for all to see, just to make money.

Their dirty deeds and most embarrassing moments are highlighted ostensibly to improve their lives, but in reality it’s so that you and Winfrey’s Harpo Studios, the producers of your show and King World Productions that distributes it can make as much money as possible.

You do your best to surround yourself with a good deed aura. But that’s rubbish.

You and your team’s main objective is clearly to find the most sensational misfits of society so that you can have the pleasure of dissecting them purely in the interests of higher and higher viewer ratings among the ghouls of this world.

As you well know nothing beats having grown women and even men in tears in front of you, not to mention children, while you piously pretend that you are only doing this for their own good.  

The philosopher

Then you have your show’s hangers on who are also there for the money. They pick up the shattered lives that you pass on to these institutions that specialise in treating drug addicts and the rest of society’s dead beats.

If your viewers read what Wikipedia has to say about Phil McGraw, which is your real name, they will realise that the squeaky-clean image that you like to promote on TV is just a charade.

Do you remember your Shape Up weight loss products that you promoted on your show? They were supposed to contain "scientifically researched ingredients that could help people change their behaviour to control their weight." The research was so scientific that when the Federal Trade Commission started investigating these wonderful claims you took the product off the market.

Did you only get real, as you always tell everybody else, when you were pushed?

And what about the time you, as the kind hearted Dr Phil, visited singer Britney Spears in hospital after she was admitted because, like a lot of stars, life in the limelight had got too much for her? You were slammed by her family for betraying her trust by making public statements about her condition.

Family First was one of your best selling books. I haven’t read it but I would be interested to know, Did you 'get real' in that? Does it mention anything about your first wife, who you divorced?

We see the points Jay

As you know a biography written about you by two journalists accused you of being abusive to her and your staff.

Is it right that you have always been an outspoken critic of pornography? If so you didn’t get real when you were the best man at the wedding of your eldest son Jay when he got hitched to Erica Dahm, one of Playboy’s famous triplets.

You don’t get into Playboy magazine without stripping down to nothing for all to see in much the same way that you strip so many of your guests of every bit of dignity.

Get real Dr Phil your show is similar to pornography in that it is designed to shock and titillate by exposing other people’s dubious morals.

Porno? No just the Dahm sister's

But who cares as long as you are making money.

I see that in one year you reached number 22 in the Forbes Celebrity 100 list with an income of $45-million.

Not a bad return from other people’s misery. But how real is that?

Regards,

Jon, a hypochondriac, who has been married five times; has had four failed businesses and who could easily become a drug addict, but who still believes he is qualified to give psychiatric advice to anyone who cares to listen.
P.S. One of your favourite sayings is: "I'm not here to put you under the bus." Then you do just that.