Oh Dr. Drew

I first became interested in Dr. Drew via unconventional means: his appearance on Dawson's Creek, a dominant influence on teenage Alice. He was on the show in one of the last and weaker seasons, when the gang is living in Boston. Jen is working for a sex and relationships hotline and invites Dr. Drew and his annoying sidekick to headline a fundraising event. Following the episode, I did not follow Dr. Drew, but his profile has recently blown up and forced me to pay attention to him again.

This article in the NYT Magazine chronicles what's wonderful -- and horrifying -- about sexy Dr. Drew Pinsky, celebrity rehabilitator.

And despite this not exactly being a shining endorsement of my recent (somewhat) forced interest in reality television, I enjoyed Real World last night too much not to indulge.

...Capitalizing on what many saw as his genius for explaining America’s psyche to itself, Pinsky began to focus on what he considered a bigger opponent, the disease that lay beneath them all: a toxic new form of narcissism, stoked by the media. In his latest book, “The Mirror Effect: How Celebrity Narcissism Is Seducing America,” he diagnoses today’s obsession with fame as a potential public health issue.
The book incorporates a 2006 study conducted by Pinsky and his co-author, S. Mark Young, in which they subjected 200 celebrities to a standard psychological test, the Narcissism Personality Inventory, and found that celebrities were 17 percent more narcissistic than the average person, reality-TV stars being worst of all. Narcissistic celebrities aren’t exactly news, but this newer variety, according to Pinsky, is. It has been bred for years by casting directors screening for what are known as “Cluster B” personalities, those prone to histrionics, aggression, hypersexuality, drug abuse — and auditioning for reality-TV shows. This emerging strain of supernarcissism, Pinsky says, turns especially virulent in the world of social media, where young people, who are chasing an increasingly accessible kind of fame, begin to mirror the increasingly pathological behavior of their idols. According to Pinsky, our fascination with these newer narcissistic role models may seem a mere guilty pleasure, but, he argues, it is a reflection of the deep, primal chord they strike within us, the desire to emulate and then destroy our icons. It’s a kind of envious compulsion that tabloids have fed for decades and that new media now intensify with fast, cheap dopamine-blasting hits at the click of a remote.