Meet television's Hippocratic Oafs, the media shrinks who are messing with your minds
Vienna, between the wars, and Sigmund Freud opines: "However much the analyst may become tempted to become a teacher, model and ideal for other people and to create men in his own image, he should not forget that that is not his task in the analytic relationship, and indeed he will be disloyal to his task if he allows himself to be led on by his inclinations."
Spool forward to ITV2, the present day, as television psychologist Geoffrey Beattie brings his noble discipline to bear on the eponymous heroine of Ghosthunting with Katie Price. His expert diagnosis? "She is somewhat egocentric."
Or perhaps you prefer the psychotherapeutic stylings of Derek Draper, who remains a high-profile practising mental health professional despite having described attempts by former Gordon Brown aide Damian McBride to falsely smear George Osborne's wife as "absolutely totally brilliant".
Or how about Graham Stanier, the psychiatric nurse who has been elevated to "director of aftercare" on The Jeremy Kyle Show. To get a flavour of the man, do YouTube the clip of him analysing a 13-year-old father on Sky News, in which the presenter's mere mention of The Jeremy Kyle Show causes him to rip out his microphone and terminate the interview. "I'm not prepared to continue this discussion," fumes Graham. "I'm not going to talk about The Jeremy Kyle Show, that's not why I'm here."
Well, quite. It must be horrific to be under the impression that you are on Sky News in your capacity as honorary fellow of the Royal Society, then discover that your caption reads "That Prat Off The Jeremy Kyle Show".
We mustn't do Jeremy down, of course ? after all, his valuable work has been praised by none other than Dolly Draper himself, who claims that Kyle "projects himself as a strong father figure, setting boundaries and trying to teach responsibility and restraint". Which was my first thought when ITV released that indignant statement saying they only gave alcohol to guests to counteract their delirium tremens.
This week, we celebrate media shrinks ? a rapidly proliferating breed for whom an entirely new circle of hell is currently under construction, after the rest of the damned simply refused to spend eternity bunked up with them. Consider them Hippocratic Oafs, whose willingness to brave charges of intellectual prostitution in the course of explaining that Jordan is faintly self-centred or that Nick Clegg's body language suggests he is on the defensive has improved humankind's understanding of psychology and mental health immeasurably.
No doubt Geoffrey Beattie would not desire to be lumped together with Dolly Draper, or indeed with Graham Stanier. But we must ask ourselves how much store we can really set by the conscious desires of a man who takes money to wait in a taxi outside a "haunted" venue, and offer psychological support to whichever fleeing members of Girls Aloud/McFly/the Saturdays are pretending they've seen a ghost to promote their single. I'm not a professional ? as if that matters these days ? but I can't help feeling that somewhere deep in his subconscious, Geoffrey wants us to call him a phallus.
He is not such a phallus as Dolly, of course, who graduated from the University of Somewhere Quite Near Berkeley ? nor indeed as twin-headed a phallus as the Speakmans, the husband-and-wife psychotherapist team to whom you have been so amusingly introduced by Alexis Petridis. That the Speakmans should regard a battered DeLorean as a clinical tool underscores their position as the age's foremost heirs to the Viennese tradition.
Then you've got the likes of Dr Linda Papadopoulos who, to my knowledge, is the only mental health professional to have sublimated her learning into a competitively priced cosmetic range. Skin Therapy (geddit?) is based on something called psychodermatology ? so now for what is traditionally referred to as "the science bit". "Listen to your skin," instructs Linda. "Its condition and your psyche are closely linked, so your skin will be telling you something if you have acne or dark circles." So there you have it: acne is less of a skin disease, more the physical manifestation of some message from your psyche. (Encouragingly, Linda was commissioned by the Home Office to write a government report last year, which she somehow managed to juggle with her reality TV commitments.)
Anyway, the list goes on. Only this week, Lost in Showbiz received an email from the tireless publicist for mental health author Robert Ashton, headlined "Celebrity bipolar epidemic could be due to 'energy and creativity'". Is it helpful or accurate to refer to mental illness as a "celebrity epidemic"? If only we had a mental health professional on hand to advise. Perhaps we could call upon psychotherapist Jules McClean, whose publicist recently got in touch to tout his services under the subject header "Katie Melua breakdown". There followed what appears to be a remote diagnosis of the singer, which I will paraphrase as "Blah blah quick fame blah blah price tag blah blah goldfish bowl blah blah feelings of failure blah blah cycle of destruction" (though that flatters it considerably).
The father figure of them all, of course, is telly psychiatrist Raj Persaud, who once gave an interview to the British Medical Journal explaining that criticism of him by other doctors was "largely motivated by jealousy". "The point is, why does everyone go back and ask Raj Persaud?" he wondered rhetorically. "Is it not because, by and large, what I tend to say makes sense to the public?" I think it's because your answerphone message says "I'll do it" ? or rather, of course, it was. The GMC found Raj guilty of plagiarism and bringing his profession into disrepute, but most of the above practitioners have nothing to fear. The only body even nominally regulating psychotherapy is the British Association for Counselling and Psychotherapy, which ruled that Dolly Draper deeming a plan to smear someone "absolutely totally brilliant" was in no way a bar to his continuing to practise.
So the good news is, we're stuck with the likes of Graham Stanier ? whose official website, I note, celebrates "his councilling role". Do let's consider that a Freudian sic.
Krista Allen Hayden Panettiere Jules Asner Whitney Able Kelly Clarkson
No comments:
Post a Comment