mind over matter

Alright, I could only put off talking about cra’y-cra’y Brit-Brit and Dr. Phil for so long. Unless you’ve been living under a rock, you’ve probably heard about this celebrity showdown, but just to bring you up to speed: After Britney was restrained and rushed to a hospital, her fam called on Dr. Phil and asked him to pay them a visit. Not long afterward, Dr. Phil was talking to the paparazzi about her condition, suggesting that she suffers from Multiple Personality Disorder and hinting that in return for his help, she would appear on his TV show.

“In return for his help,” hmm? Britney’s family let out a war whoop and allegedly filed a complaint against Dr. Phil a few days later, saying that he’d breached a patient’s trust by disclosing personal information, and that he’d practiced therapy in California without a license. (Apologies for linking to a TMZ document; the State Board of Psychology will neither confirm nor deny the existence of the complaint, as this article explains.)  This is the part of the complaint I find most interesting:

“Phillip McGraw of the ‘Dr. Phil’ show does not have a license to practice psychology in the State of California. By giving advice he is practicing without a license. He is violating HIPPA.”

One of my best friends is in a PhD program for clinical psychology; though she’s only in her first year, she already gets her fair share of “Whoa, I keep having this dream, can you tell me what it means?” from people she meets in bars. Is a licensed therapist banned from giving advice to those who seek it, outside his office? What distinguishes “practicing psychology” from advising friends? Is payment the difference, and if so, was Britney’s (now-canceled) future appearance on Dr. Phil’s show a form of payment?

(Before signing off, I’d like to apologize for breaking a cardinal rule of journalism and including a pun in the headline. Once I wrote a business profile of a gyro manufacturer and threw on the headline “Devanco Foods doesn’t just ‘meat’ expectations,” sure such silliness wouldn’t make it past my editors. How wrong I was.)