Dr. Phil Is Being Accused Of ‘Traumatising’ His Employees In Toxic Workplace Environment

TV psychologist Dr. Phil has been hit with accusations of Ellen-like behaviour by about a dozen former and current employees, bringing the doctor’s reputation under serious fire for the first time in 20 years on air.

One ex-employee told Buzzfeed:

Everyone was just pretty miserable. You would walk into the building and there was just a palpable dread and anxiety. ’Dr. Phil’ — the show about mental health where everybody who works on it has terrible mental health because our work conditions were really bad.

Another anonymous accuser added:

I would have nightmares. Even when I quit, I had to go to therapy for it, which is crazy because you’re working for a therapist.

The most shocking tidbit among these accusations though is that 71-year-old Dr. Phil is NOT licensed to practice as a psychotherapist. What the hell? That’s like finding out Santa Claus isn’t real.

Here’s the super lame bit – none of the accusers directly implicate Dr. Phil in their anecdotes. They simply suggest he must’ve been privy to the bad behavior of executive producer Carla Pennington. The Emmy-winning producer is being accused of, among other things, outbursts at lower-level employees — allegedly calling them “idiots,” “stupid” and “retards.” Very mean indeed!

One worker described the Dr. Phil set as a ‘war zone’, and others added:

It was traumatizing. There was full-blown yelling, calling people idiots and slamming doors, and it would not be acceptable in any other job in any other business. Then, after, everybody’s upset and everybody’s crying.

I’ve worked jobs where people get angry, but this is a whole other level of just strange, neurotic behavior, and it’s just unceasing, it’s just constant. There is no relief.

Reporting bad behaviour was pointless, apparently:

If you complain to HR, you might as well expect to be fired. They will do anything and everything they can to keep anything under wraps.

The worst of the alleged abuse is that guests were apparently encouraged to drink or take drugs before their appearances on the show, and one ex-staffer even claims to have been told to ensure a guest didn’t take their medication:

We were specifically instructed, ‘Make sure that she doesn’t take her medication before she goes onstage,’ because they wanted her to look unstable and quote-unquote, ‘crazy,’ for lack of a better term.

She did take the medication because no one got there in time and I remember thinking, ‘My God, I don’t want to be the one to tell them or dissuade them from that.’ And that’s all for the sake of TV. Obviously this girl should be on her medication and that’s what we’re trying to get her help for, but for the sake of TV they wanted her to look off the rails.

Wow. Could that be true? And if so, would it have been a directive from Dr. Phil himself? Who knows. I like Dr. Phil though (despite discovering he’s not a ‘real’ doctor) so I’m going to give him the benefit of the doubt. Not to mention that none of these anecdotes even involve him, they’re just trying to make him guilty by association. Some people say it’s interesting timing given the ‘transphobic’ pile-on he received a few weeks back after having Matt Walsh on the show. Could this be an underhanded Dr. Phil cancellation attempt? We’ll have to see how it pans out.