Replies

Thanks!

http://www.dallasobserver.com/Issues/2000-04-13/news/feature_print.html

By 1989, he felt he had a decision to make. Continue in the gossipy small town that he had outgrown and the psychology practice that he did not love, or move to Dallas and pursue his passion as a jury-selection expert.

McGraw says that decision was in no way influenced by a ruling of the Texas State Board of Examiners of Psychologists, which slapped him on the wrist on January 27, 1989, for engaging in unprofessional conduct. The board found that McGraw had maintained an "inappropriate dual relationship" with a young woman because they had "an ongoing therapeutic relationship followed too closely by a business relationship in the form of part-time temporary employment."

McGraw says he won't discuss details of the case because of "doctor-patient confidentiality," but considers it little more than "a misdemeanor," an employment error that he has put behind him. The woman, who now lives in Dallas and wishes to remain anonymous, says she has not been able to do the same.

In 1984, she was a college student returning home after her sophomore year depressed, lonely, and suicidal. "I was emotionally abused as a child," she says, "and suffered from low self-esteem." When McGraw began treating her, she says, he became fully involved in her life, demanding to know with whom she spoke, when she went to bed at night, what she did that day. "If I was depressed or anxious, his first question was 'Why didn't you call me?' Every time I felt bad, he insisted only he could fix me." When she wanted to spend the following summer working for a professor at the Houston university she was attending, he persuaded her to work in his biofeedback lab in Wichita Falls. "He kept me totally dependent on him," she says.

Twelve months after she filed a formal complaint against him, McGraw and the psychology board reached a settlement in the case: He would be publicly reprimanded, and his practice would be supervised for a year. Before the year was out, McGraw had put his office up for sale and would shortly move to Dallas and begin CSI.