No Therapy for Victims of Oprahphilia

A scandal is growing in the therapeutic community, a little town just outside the self-delusional universe. The scandal has to do with an outbreak of Oprahphilia among therapists.

Oprahphilia: a perverse desire to get on the Oprah Winfrey show and promote yourself or your therapy book before millions of therapy consumers. Oprahphiliacs are prone to self-serving rationalizations, deals with devils and blame-shifting to the Oprah object.

Oh, you can fool yourself into thinking: I’m not just promoting my book, I’m really helping people. Or: Even if this is entertainment, it’s also educational. Or: If I didn’t do it, someone sleazier would.

Several therapists have publicly admitted to these feelings. They “share” their stories in several engagingly written pieces in a recent issue of Networker, a journal for family therapists. Their confessions are just the tip of the shocker I like to call “Oprahgate.”

Jill Harkaway, director of a therapy center in New Hampshire, describes how she was misled by her own megalomania and a sharp-talking producer into taking part in a media circus in which troubled people were used as entertainment. Although she had resisted the producer’s entreaties to bring along her own clients (an offer other therapists on the show have not refused) she did get her professional-ethical arm twisted into providing therapy right there on the air.

She was presented as an expert on weight problems and placed alongside married couples who fought over the wife’s obesity. One couple began a game of out-publicly-humiliating each other, egged on by Oprah, as the powerless therapist sat by. Her dreams of being discovered by Hollywood and becoming a therapist-to-the-stars, and ultimately a star herself, lay in tatters in Ms. Winfrey’s neighborhood.

A worse blow was suffered by the husband of the overweight woman. He went into hiding in the green-room bathroom after the show and refused to leave.

Immediately following her appearance, Harkaway went into Post-Oprah Stress Syndrome and even wrote to the show’s producer decrying the lack of “support” for the guests. She suggested “they provide a professional counselor and . . . follow-up.” The producer wrote back and said she thought it was a great idea to do another show “on successful outcomes due to appearances” on the Oprah Winfrey show.

Let’s face it, Oprah did not become the richest woman on television by providing a public service. But Harkaway worries about Oprah’s power as “one of the major sources of psychological information and education in the country today.” She wonders what will come of “this curious 1980s form of media transference.”

Another therapist, Frank Pittman of Atlanta, also thought he’d hit the publicity jackpot when he got a chance to plug his book “Private Lies: Infidelity and the Betrayal of Intimacy” on the Oprah Winfrey show. Instead, he describes his Christian-in-the-lion’s-den appearance in which he was introduced as the only monogamist to an audience of 150 proud male adulterers.

Discussing his Post-Oprah Stress Syndrome, Pittman writes: “The show did achieve a certain notoriety, in that USA Today listed it as one of the low points in the history of trash TV.”

Post-Oprah Stress Syndrome: The sudden realization that you have sold your soul and not your book.

And will I ever get my chance?

Twice I’ve gotten the call. Twice I’ve blown it.

The first time the producer asked, “Can you, your daughter and your mother be in Chicago tomorrow? We’re doing a show on how three generations of women communicate.”

Well, there was good news and there was bad. My mother was in Chicago. But she happened to be dead.

“Too bad,” said the producer.

Several months later, another producer called. They had probably gotten my name during an old book-promotion tour and filed it away under: “Exhibitionists, psyche.”

“Listen, I don’t know if you have a husband,” this producer began, proceeding more cautiously than the last. “But if you do, we’d like the two of you to come on the show and talk about his midlife crisis . . . if he’s having one.”

She was the soul of discretion. Once again I had to give her the bitter with the sweet.

“Well, the good news is: I do have a husband! And he is having a midlife crisis! But unfortunately, the last thing on Earth he would ever do is talk about it on television in front of millions of people.”

Of course, if he really cared about me and my career. . . .