Excerpt of SHAM by Steve Salerno
(Page 7 of 8)
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Far too often, the SHAM leaders delivering these pompous philosophies of
life and living have no rightful standing to be doing any such thing.
"There's a tendency on the reader's part to think these people are
unimpeachable authorities speaking gospel truth," says Steven Wolin, a
professor of psychiatry at George Washington University. "That's hardly
the case." In truth, writes Wendy Kaminer in I'm Dysfunctional,
You're Dysfunctional, the only difference between a self-help reader
and a self-help writer may be "that the writer can write well enough to
get a book deal." In Kaminer's view, the end result is that consumers
make sweeping changes in their lives based on "something their aunt or auto
mechanic could have told them."
By the time the most powerful woman in American media plucked him from
obscurity and conferred the Oprah Touch, Phil McGraw had given up on
clinical psychology, in part because, he later said, he was "the worst
marital therapist in the history of the world." But McGraw, at least,
holds a degree to practice what he now preaches. As we'll see, others of
similar SHAM stature hail from far less convincing backgrounds; they
proclaim themselves "relationship therapists" or "dating coaches,"
made-up specialties that require no particular licensing yet sound
credible, thus duping unsuspecting patrons by the millions. At meetings
of Alcoholics Anonymous and other support groups, the leader's sole
credential may consist of his being in recovery from whatever the
specific addiction is. Society, again, seems to think this makes good
sense. I would ask two questions: Isn't it possible that fellow
sufferers are a bit too close to the problem to lead effectively and
impartially? And if your problem was, say, that the electrical fixtures
in your house were acting funky, would you really want a workshop taught
by some other homeowner who couldn't get his lights to work right (and
who, by his own admission, still had the problem)? Or would you want a
trained electrician?
In today's SHAM marketplace, individuals who stumbled into celebrity
sans talent, or who managed to "conquer adversity" entirely by accident,
now collect hefty fees for talking up their experiences as if they'd
planned the whole thing out as an inspirational crucible. Get stuck on a
mountain for a while, lose some body parts, and presto!–instant
motivational icon. I refer to Beck Weathers, the Texas pathologist who
lost his nose, his right hand and part of his left hand, and nearly his
life in the notorious May 1996 Mount Everest disaster that was
chronicled in Jon Krakauer's Into Thin Air. Weathers, now in his
late fifties, travels the lecture circuit, expounding on the theme of
"surviving against all odds." You wonder, though: How many people live
in situations that are truly analogous to what Beck faced up on the
mountain? For that matter, what role did any of Weathers's own actions
play in his survival? According to Krakauer, Weathers was like a hapless
pinball bounced around the mountaintop for sixteen hours, and he almost
surely would have died if others hadn't helped him down the treacherous
slopes at significant risk to themselves, and if his wife had not
arranged for a dangerous helicopter rescue. (To be blunt about it,
Weathers probably had no business being up on that mountain in the first
place, as Krakauer himself strongly implies.) So what do we learn from a
Beck Weathers? Tellingly, he informs his admiring audiences that
"Everest, in many ways, was one of the best things to happen to me." At
$15,000 per speech, he's not kidding. Even pathologists don't make that
kind of money.
Excerpted
from Sham by Steve Salerno Copyright © 2005 by Steve Salerno.
Excerpted by permission of Crown, a division of Random House, Inc. All
rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or
reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
