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This is the face of erectile dysfunction.*

Dr. Phil, who has officially become a regular here on the Basement, stooped to further levels of unprofessionalism (and potentially over the stalker line) by surprising Britney Spears at Cedars-Siani hospital, where she was being treated for a mental health disorder. It seems they fear she might be a tad unstable. Nevermind, a slight case of bipolar personality disorder is a piece of pecan pie to the world’s most overrated psychobabble profligate. Dr. Phil says he threw the surprise party at the request of Brit’s family. Brit’s family wish Dr. Phil would take a long walk off a short pier. Either way, someone is definitely getting smugged for this.

* Caption unrelated to photo, as far as we can prove.

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You know it’s going to be a good Dr. Phil day when your site goes offline and you lose your internet connection both at once. The combine of two such events is pretty much always Fate’s way of saying “Something about to happen will cause in you a desperate need to vent your frustration in the most public and immediate way possible.” She has a really irritating sense of humor that way. So when this perfect storm happens over the third episode of Dr. Phil’s trilogy on “how to tell your wife you might be a serial rapist and murderer,” you just know a big messy storm is about to break.

Wait, let me start again. I occasionally watch Dr. Phil (pause for laughter). I know, I know, and I agree with you. I’ll explain later. For now, just bear with me.

Sure enough, the good Dr. has managed to take yet another delicate and complicated situation and turn it into a complete and total SNAFU on every single level. The case notes might read something like this:

“Husband is a combat veteran with a history of Post Traumatic Stress Disorder. Wife is a suburban mother, who has recently come to suspect husband of multiple lies. Wife asked husband to take a polygraph to determine whether husband had carried on an affair. Husband denied the affair, but failed the polygraph. When husband continued to deny affair despite polygraph results, wife, made stupid by desperation, called the Dr. Phil show for help. Show conducted a second polygraph, which husband again failed. Dr. Phil taped show deriding husband for being a liar and wife for not seeing the “red flags” sooner and went along his merry way. Two weeks after husband and wife returned home from show, husband became agitated and described in detail a series of serial rapes and murders, which he claimed to have committed, to his wife. Wife flipped the fuck out and (astoundingly) called Dr. Phil show for help again. Dr. Phil and show’s pet FBI agent colluded to send wife back to husband, offer to help move the bodies, and start initiating autoerotic asphyxiation role-plays with potential serial-murderer husband just to see what would happen.

Meanwhile, third party psychiatrist gets a clue and diagnoses husband with a thought disorder, specifying that husband cannot distinguish thoughts from reality. Dr. Phil ignores diagnosis and puts husband and wife back on stage together to draw two more episodes out of husband’s gory recollections of said crimes. Pet FBI agent ignores his own statement that no evidence of any crime has been found at any crime scene divulged by husband and continues to encourage wife to prod husband for further details. When husband becomes agitated with FBI moron for telling his wife and kids to stay in the house despite believing her husband to be a serial killer, Dr. Phil sanctimoniously accuses husband of “flash anger” and moves on to teen fashion episode.

The level of incompetence magnified by an avaricious pursuit of self-promotion in this situation is astonishing, even for Dr. Phil. For a talk show host who likes to boast about how well he does his homework, he dropped a pretty big ball on this one. For starters, anyone with a PhD. in psychology should be perfectly aware that a polygraph isn’t truly a lie-detector test, it’s a test of arousal. When most people intentionally lie, their sympathetic nervous system has an automatic reaction which usually can be measured by a polygraph. However, the same reaction can occur for other reasons, including uncertainty over the correct answer. Because a polygraph is not a very sensitive test, when being used to determine truthfulness examiners stick to closed questions, which can only be answered by saying “yes” or “no.” A person who doesn’t know the correct answer might show any reaction, the results don’t necessarily mean anything. Even though it has become a staple in the talk-show genre, the polygraph cannot be interpreted with the same accuracy as, say, a DNA test. There’s no comparison between effectiveness; DNA tests are objective and concrete, the level of accuracy is known before the test is taken. Polygraphs, however, are subjective - different form person to person, and require a great deal of interpretation by the examiner. The relationship between the examiner and the test-taker itself can muddle the response. Law enforcement uses polygraphs mostly for threat value, and for the benefit of learning what suspects will be willing to confess to when they’re trying to avoid lying. Unlike more objective tests, like DNA, they are not admissible as evidence in court due to the high error rate.

Of equal importance is the matter of what the wife was doing back on stage with the husband in the first place? Once domestic violence is established in a case (she disclosed that he had choked her three different times during the FBI inspired auto-asphyxiation “role-plays”), no further counseling should occur with both partners at the same time. Studies have repeatedly shown that the perpetrator of domestic violence may otherwise control the session and punish the victim afterward for anything “bad” said during the session.

But since Dr. Phil didn’t bother to assess for indications of the expected pattern of controlling and violent behavior typical in domestic abuse, he didn’t learn that the husband’s behavior did not seem to follow any predictable patterns at all, a pretty good indication of the bizarre thought process common among people with certain types of mental illness. Instead, he referred back to the lie-detector test in an effort to get the husband to, and I quote, “start talking or start walking.” The problem being that the husband doesn’t know what the truth is, which he makes as clear as humanly possible throughout the process, he didn’t know how to respond to Dr. Phil’s demands and became agitated. Dr. Phil, who might just be the laziest psychologist in the entire world, then wrote off the husband’s agitation as obfuscation, despite being informed by the FBI that there is so far no evidence of any of the crimes the husband described. There are no bodies where he said he left them. There is no missing person’s report that fits with his description of any of the victims or locations he disclosed. In fact, the husband even stated that he had raped his ex-wife, but nothing further was mentioned about this, which means either the ex-wife is dead, or no one bothered to ask her about it.

If she’s dead, certainly they would want to look into that, no? If not, she might be able to answer the question that tortures every single member of this family; is this man a serial rapist and murderer, or does he in fact have a thought disorder which renders him unable to distinguish between fantasy and reality, as diagnosed by someone who actually practices psychiatry out in the real world (i.e. not Dr. Phil)? As far-fetched as it sounds, there are disorders common to trauma survivors like combat veterans which could explain the whole matter. If this is the case with the husband, the fact that he recalls different versions of the same event without ability to distinguish which version is true and which is imaginary makes sense. It would also explain why the polygraph results indicated arousal - he’s afraid because he truly doesn’t know the correct answer. The idea that a combat veteran with a history of PTSD could develop such a disorder is far more plausible than the suggestion that this husband and father has randomly raped and murdered several women leaving no trace other than a string of confessions which magically occurred after taping a Dr. Phil show. The experience of being put under a microscope and then condemned by a narcissistic megalomaniac on national television just might have thrown the guy a little further off balance, doncha’ think?

Which is why it would seem necessary to discuss the situation with the ex-wife. Wouldn’t you like to know whether she can corroborate his memory of raping her? Well, so would we, but Dr. Phil doesn’t seem to feel it’s integral to the story he’s trying to tell. Unfortunately the story he’s trying to tell unnecessarily destroys the lives of an entire family at minimum. Neither of those “guests” will fully recover from the way in which the situation was massively mismanaged, and both of them should probably sue the show until they own every brick in that building. Which leaves us feeling that maybe it’s not so shocking that Donda West’s doctor wasn’t all he was cracked up to be, despite Oprah’s endorsements. Maybe the lesson here is simply that we should all just stop relying on Oprah’s taste in medicine men.

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