On Tue, Jun 11, 2013 at 7:30 AM, Bob in Jersey <bob.in.jer...@juno.com>wrote:
> Inside a piece about his multi-show life in the NY > Times<http://www.nytimes.com/2013/06/09/fashion/dr-drew-pinsky-physician-and-media-star.html?pagewanted=all&_r=1&;>: > When former clients e.g. Mindy McCready died, Laura Holson writes, > "...people hold him accountable long after his on-air doctoring is done. > 'They think I’m a millionaire and they think I am, like, rampaging or > exploiting people to maintain that,' he said. 'And that could not be > farther from the truth.' He has a partial point here. It is not fair to hold a mental health professional for the outcomes of a patient long after the treatment is over. And when you work with high risk patients, you will almost inevitably have more eventual bad outcomes. In my practice I work almost exclusively with depressed patients. I have been lucky not to have (yet) had a patient under my care kill themselves, but a lot of that is just luck. And I am not famous, and my patients are not famous, so I really have no idea if any of them have killed themselves years after terminating treatment with me. The chances of someone I have treated killing themselves is much higher than the chances that the average person would know somebody who has killed themselves, just because I see people who, by definition, want to kill themselves. The same is true for the kind of people Pinsky sees. But that misses the main point, which is that what he calls his "on-air doctoring" is not really "doctoring" at all (if by that he really means psychotherapy or treatment of their substance abuse problems). The only real justification for what he does is not treatment benefit for the person on his show (who might better be termed a cast-member than a patient) but education of the public with possible preventative health value. But even if there is real public health benefit for his show (something I am not convinced of) that would have to be weighed against the potential harm done to the person being exposed on air. So, the real question is not whether Pinsky is responsible for what happens to "patients" long after he terminates treatment with them. The real question is whether appearing on his show harms the "patient" - either directly (the powerful reinforcing attention of the public for their drug behavior) or indirectly (e.g. being on a TV show about drug treatment instead of actually being in real drug treatment). -- -- TV or Not TV .... The Smartest (TV) People! You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "TV or Not TV" group. To post to this group, send email to tvornottv@googlegroups.com To unsubscribe from this group, send email to tvornottv-unsubscr...@googlegroups.com For more options, visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/tvornottv?hl=en --- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "TVorNotTV" group. To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an email to tvornottv+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com. For more options, visit https://groups.google.com/groups/opt_out.
