by Kara Machowski
On Thursday “Dr." Phil, or Phil McGraw, appeared on Laura Ingram’s Fox News segment and compared the coronavirus to car accidents and pool drownings by stating that we would never close down the country to stop those deaths from happening. Yeah, that was an oopsie moment, similar to the one Dr. Oz experienced while promoting schools to reopen stating it would only cause 2-3% deaths from coronavirus while misquoting an article by the Lancer. The Lancer article actually stated that if the UK, not America, UK did not close down schools they would have experienced 2-3% more deaths from coronavirus. But right now Phil McGraw is being called out by the media, Twitter and even fellow physicians. McGraw even gave grossly false facts by stating that 360,000 people die in pool related drowning accidents a year, which in reality, there are only about 3,500 pool swimming deaths a year. As someone who is a recovered addict, I feel like I can speak for a majority of ex-addicts when I say, we are not a fan of Dr. Phil. We’ve all sat through his disingenuous but provocative therapy segments, therapy segments, he’s actually not licensed to conduct. He doesn’t help others, he’s simply a profiteer and no longer holds a license to practice psychology, essentially eliminating his “Dr.” title, minus the fact that he earned his doctorate. The downfall of McGraw’s psychology career mainly stems back to a relationship that Phil McGraw had with a patient back in 1988, where the Texas State Board of Examiners of Psychologists found him guilty of improperly hiring a patient without “proper separation between termination of therapy and the initiation of employment.” There was a complaint of inappropriate physical contact with that client, however, that was dropped from the official case as it wasn’t mentioned in the "Findings of Fact”, final case document. For me, this kind of struck true to home. I had a therapist growing up who was very cynical to my intelligence and even me as a person, and tried to talk my parents into sending me to a trade school since “high school wasn’t for me". Mind you I was sexually harassed by two people in my school in separate instances. I eventually, after years of convincing and hard, hard work, talked my parents into helping me with college and graduated magna cum laude with a degree in journalism and a degree in creative writing, after moving back to my birth city, Chicago and attending my dream college. Anyway, kinda got off track, that therapist was not only strange and disingenuous, he also had an odd relationship with a former young male patient which made me question how appropriate it was. Again, McGraw was brought up on ethics charges in Texas for having an inappropriate non-physical relationship with a patient in January 1989. In 2006 he, for unknown reasons, “voluntarily” gave up his license in Texas. In 2008 McGraw was charged in California for practicing without a license and violated doctor-patient confidentiality in an incident with Britney Spears in the same year. After this psychologists in California and around the country began to question if his show violated the law by offering his services as a “psychologist”, however Mr. Phil had clients, err, contestants sign a long agreement saying they understood that he was simply “offering advice”. It was later stated that McGraw visited Britney Spears in the hospital in hopes of recruiting her and her family to essentially have an "intervention" on his television show So, while Phil McGraw may appear as a television celebrity psychologist, he’s nothing close to that. This is simply another lesson to be careful who you listen to, always keep an open mind, and always do your research, you never know what you might dig up!
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