10 "Dr. Phil" Mistakes That We Can Learn From

welcome to my scientifically informed insider look at mental health topics if you find this video to be interesting or helpful please like it and subscribe to my channel hello this is dr. grande today I have a few questions the first one is what can counselors and non counselors learn from phil mcgraw the TV show host so answer this question by looking at ten mistakes that phil mcgraw makes and what counselors can learn from them the next question is what is his therapeutic modality so one of the questions I hear around this is did phil mcgraw steal the work of dr. Glasser so is his modality similar to reality therapy so just important to note here as I get started phil mcgraw of course is real person so i'm not diagnosing anybody here in this video only speculating about what could be happening in a situation like this and another note here I've never been a fan of phil mcgraw so when i talk about him like in situations like this i'm attempting to be fair but i just want to put that out there that I'm not a fan so I want to start with some background and key points about phil mcgraw that I think will help frame the rest of this video phil mcgraw has a successful TV show and youtube channel featuring what i guess could be called consultations with people who have mental disorders and/or behavior that deviates from social norms ostensibly he is not conducting therapy in the course of a show although he does offer advice during many of his shows he references treatment modalities he identifies problems and he discusses psychopathology he also says things like I'm here to help you that sure seems like therapy but the story I guess here is that he's not delivering therapy he says that he's teaching so these are teaching moments on the show so people can learn from what he's doing so of course that's a possibility and I'll be talking about what he teaches today but also I think he does raise awareness about some of the mental disorders that are highlighted on the show phil mcgraw typically refers guests on the show to licensed mental health professionals so even though they're on that show and not really too much good as happening they are in my opinion he is referring them to people who can't help them we see that he is a real doctor this is the question I get sometimes he does have a PhD in psychology and that qualifies him as a doctor at one time he was licensed and then he had a dual relationship with a former client and this led to a letter of reprimand he did not lose his license he gave it up in 2006 he's also clearly intelligent and he appears to have superficial charm and I think both of these attributes help him to succeed in terms of learning value I see a lot of learning value from the point of view of clinicians and training and others trying to learn about therapy from phil mcgraw they can learn what not to do right and this has become kind of a popular thing that we see in training programs we see people looking at a show and picking out all of the ethical problems and sometimes it takes a while to get through them all unfortunately learning works in both directions people can learn good things and bad things from the show and I've encountered situations where counsellors and training have looked at this show and they believe the Phil McGraw in a certain situation was doing something helpful so they thought they should behave like he behaves now sometimes he was doing something helpful but sometimes he wasn't he's not a consistent example in terms of being helpful or harmful it really depends on which episode somebody's looking at when they make that determination so now looking at my list of 10 mistakes if Phil McGraw was conducting therapy if that is what he is doing what are the 10 mistakes that he makes and what conditions and others interested in therapy learn from those mistakes so getting started here with item number one this is not being careful in front of an audience now this may not seem like a valid point most counselors would not have a studio audience because they're not on a show but it's important remember that in group counseling or in family counseling there is this sense that there could be an audience a clinician has to be careful about what they say about a client or what they ask from a client when other people are watching the second mistake having a fascination with who is telling the truth so finding out the truth when working as a counselor is certainly helpful but counselors don't always have the ability to do that we see phil mcgraw tends to use polygraph information he says he's very familiar with them and there's a lot of science behind them well yes there is the science indicates that polygraphs don't work very well right so it makes me wonder if he's actually reading the scientific literature about polygraphs but either way finding out the truth again is helpful but you really can't have a fascination with it because sometimes you can never get to the truth you still have to be able to help people even if you can't find out for sure what's going on or what happened in the past mistake number three not being able to separate your skills and interests from your work as a counselor so part of Phil McGraw's career was spent as a consultant for legal related matters many times on his show he kind of appears like a judge or a lawyer and he discusses how much experience he has in all of these areas I mentioned his fascination would find the truth but also his style has this cross-examination feel to it like he's trying to get people to admit something against interest it's not always a counselors job to get clients to incriminate themselves right and I don't really see that as part of their job at all we see that phil mcgraw does that quite a bit mistake number four using canned witty statements we see phil mcgraw tends to use the same canned statements over and over inside of a particular episode and sometimes across episodes like you need to be your own best friend again we see really little depth no reading of scientific literature which I guess makes sense from his point of view but it's disappointing because it seems like he can't adapt to a situation that's changing the lack of depth of knowledge we see on a particular subject is not apparent in the short time frame of an episode he seems well prepared for the short burst type style that a show has right so he's talking to somebody for five minutes he can do okay then but again we see kind of a lack of depth the inability to really go into deep water he can't handle being challenged by guests he can't handle twists and turns that may come up like unexpected directions in the conversation we see that when something surprise thing happens he kind of sits there and doesn't always have something definitive to say he seems to be taken off-guard another challenge I have here is it looks like he wants to say something during those moments when he's caught off guard it never seems to occur to him that he could just keep listening right so a show really isn't about listening it's about him talking another point here with the same item it's important to resist the desire to try to fix someone else's problem immediately there may come a time for direct advice in counseling but that's usually not within the first 30 minutes of talking to a new client mistake number five always being and playing the expert someone called him an expert in a recent episode and he said that's exactly right I am now it's good to be an expert however if you really are an expert you don't have to brag about it constantly in a session or even brag about it at all I'm not exactly sure phil mcgraw is an expert in many of the areas he covers on the show we see this one episode where Phil McGraw was talking with a 45 year old man who lived at home the man had been an aircraft mechanic this led to Phil McGraw talking about how he had all this experience flying these different types of aircrafts he really understood aviation so well these experiences really had no value in this particular context it's like he couldn't resist talking about himself in that moment even though it didn't help his guest at all mistake number six using terms in mental health as if they don't have meaning or using the wrong terms for example we see this episode where there was a woman who appeared to be delusional she appeared to have what's called an idea of reference she saw an Instagram photo featuring Phil McGraw wearing a hat and she believed his wearing of that hat indicated that the Mafia knew about her upcoming appearance on his show Phil McGraw initially referred to her behavior as emotional confusion that's not even close to what was going on then he used this term flight of ideas now that's actually closer and she did have a little bit of that going on but again these words from mental health counseling research actually had precise meanings there's definitions for these terms mental health clinicians just don't throw them around randomly they try to select the correct term now it's interesting in that same episode when talking to that woman who appeared to have the delusions he told her that she wasn't that important he said you're just not that important and you need to stop talking so could Phil McGraw have been projecting by using these two statements something that occurred to me right because you look at those two statements you think that was apply to more than just that guest I actually think that they really didn't apply that guest at all right I mean telling her she wasn't important that's not helpful and being rude and telling her to stop talking I can understand there might be a desire to have her stop talking it as a show so there has to be some sort of structure but there's no reason to be impolite in another video dealing with a 21 year old female who sent hundreds of texts to a woman she met online the guest describes what clearly appears to be ideas of reference and in that episode as well phil mcgraw completely misses it now moving to mistake number seven this is taking pride in spotting delusional behavior many of the episodes we see with dr. Phil here involved this particular theme we see reactions from the audience trying to figure out what a person was thinking when they make certain statements he kind of highlights the oddity of delusional thinking phil mcgraw seems fascinated that anyone could have a delusion it's like each time he sees someone who's delusional it's the first time he's ever seen someone like that it's like he wants a reward for seeing something's clearly delusional and pointing it out right it's just kind of an odd behavior also trying to point out the logic of why somebody's delusion is in fact delusional has limited value if simply pointing out irrational behavior eradicated the behavior the people would already be better right so I don't really see the value in this what he's doing here unless he's just trying to humiliate and embarrass that guest I don't know I don't really see any other purpose for it moving to mistake number eight failing to understand the complexity of relationships and how those relationships evolve over time so in this one episode we see this discussion between a husband and a wife where the husband has a secret phil mcgraw says i'm not going to tell your secrets but you've told us things backstage that you have not told your wife then he says come clean about everything with your wife or decide to go your own way trying to hold the guest accountable he threatens to end the discussion right so phil mcgraw is threatening to just end that segment if the guy doesn't share the secrets sort of like terminating a session or terminating treatment it's almost like phil mcgraw is saying i'm going to threaten you until i get a result that i want there's nothing therapeutic about that mistake number nine taking sides so we see this frequently in the dr. Phil show it's easy to fall into this and of course it's not helpful I get the sense that Phil McGraw decides in advance who he is going to side with and who he's going to highlight as the one having the problem that probably helps him to prepare and what limited research he does before the show so he has this image in his mind of how things are gonna play out and I talked about this before it's like he's not good at adapting on his feet he's not good at reacting when that situation tends to change sometimes the people that he's kind of committed to agreeing with say awful things right the narrative seems to shift and he kind of sticks with the original story again I think he must plan out in advance of course I don't know that for sure it's just a sense I get from watching many episodes of that show so mistake number ten the last fall cover here is manipulating clients were in the case of Phil McGraw manipulating guests outside of the obvious ethical problems it's not effective and really this manipulation piece kind of ties to a lot of the other mistakes I've talked about here so now moving on to the other question of course keeping in mind that Phil McGraw says that what he does is not therapy what therapeutic modality does he seem to be using what's the closest modality to what he's actually doing some have suggested that Phil McGraw took the ideas of a theorist named William Glasser the individual who developed reality therapy so let's take a look at that I think this idea that he took reality therapy that Phil McGraw took it and made it his own comes from his phrase get real that's actually pretty much the extent of his usage of that modality reality therapy essentially says that there are no mental disorders William Glasser said the DSM was the worst book ever created instead with reality therapy we see that all dysfunction is simply a result of the human condition having unmet needs and not being able to control the effort to meet those needs control is actually a major theme of reality therapy and this will come up again a little bit later in this video the role of the therapist and reality therapy is to be non-judgmental and non-coercive different than what we see from phil mcgraw there is no blame or criticism again different symptoms are typically not discussed that's quite different and there's a focus on the present we really don't see history being taken the past isn't talked about so that's also different a lot of these elements are actually quite different from what phil mcgraw does now I'm not a big fan of reality therapy it certainly has some good points but the failure to look at somebody's history really misses a lot right so just as a side note I'm not a fan of that particular therapy either so kind of seems to be a theme of this video so if phil mcgraw is not using reality therapy what counseling modality would be the most similar to what he's doing his strategy really doesn't line up with any modality but I have a theory a made-up modality that I think his behavior does align with and before I get into that let's look at the strategies that he does seem to use as part of this made-up modality we see humiliating guests right so embarrassing them over talking them dominating guests wowing them with star power and his incredible levels of knowledge about almost everything intimidation and using canned witty remarks there's actually many other things I could talk about here but this is enough I think to demonstrate my point what's the theme of all this behavior well in a sense it goes back to that one part of reality therapy I talked about before control rather than simply trying to have control over meeting one's needs phil mcgraw as control theory seems to be Phil McGraw is having control right so that's his version of a control theory I talked before about how sometimes he only seems to have an impression of constructs that we see in mental health counseling right like the ideas of reference like he talks about it without using the correct term and really doesn't seem to understand what's going on perhaps he heard the word control from reality therapy and just thought that means I'm taking control I don't know it's impossible to know what his motives are or what he's thinking but kind of looking at what he does I think that some sort of control theory makes the most sense now again what he's doing really isn't therapy in the sense that it's not helpful like if it's intended to be therapeutic it's certainly not control theory is not a valid theory because trying to control clients isn't helpful now that doesn't mean that clinicians don't do this sometimes and again this is one of the things I worry about when especially counsellors and training are looking at film agirl and thinking I need to emulate this behavior that's certainly not the way I think about it I think we can really look at film a girl instead and say I'm kind of learning what not to do as I talked about before I think that's really one of the greatest lessons that Phil McGraw can teach us now I know whenever I talk about topics like celebrity personalities there will be a variety of opinions please put any opinions and thoughts in the comments section they always generate an interesting dialogue as always I hope you found my analysis of this topic to be interesting thanks for watching

Channel: Dr. Todd Grande

Views: 263,631

Rating: 4.8850355 out of 5

Keywords: Phil McGraw, Dr. Phil, narcissistic personality disorder, sociopathy, grandiose narcissism, vulnerable narcissism, covert narcissism, shame, anger, aggression, hypersensitivity, anxious, depressed, socially awkward, neurotic, shy, manipulative, blame-shifting, gaslighting, self-esteem, manipulation, arrogance, self-centeredness, jealousy, special, unique, fantasy, entitlement, grandiosity, requires admiration, lack of empathy

Id: zLZqMgu4zMo

Length: 16min 59sec (1019 seconds)

Published: Thu Mar 05 2020