nick thorsen adventures

Dear Dr. Phil

I grew up in a house that could’ve been a Dr. Phil multi-part series—except it was my life. At sixteen I watched him on Oprah and decided I’d escape. Thirteen years later I was in his office, producing the show that once felt like salvation. For five seasons I mined “Dear Dr. Phil” letters while hiding the truth of my own unraveling—using competence as a costume, booking interventions on Monday and white-knuckling my cravings by Friday.

When my contract wasn’t renewed, the life I’d built collapsed fast: meth, sex work, first-class flights paid with last-ditch schemes, and a free-fall through thirteen countries that ended in a New York homeless shelter, watching my former boss on a busted TV and wondering how I’d become one of our stories.

Dear Dr. Phil is an inside-out addiction narrative and a cultural x-ray of “help” as brand. How TV promises transformation in soundbites, how I outsourced my survival to gurus, and how recovery finally began when I chose accountability over spectacle. It’s raw, darkly funny, and brutally unsentimental—about family, fame-adjacent delusion, and the long road to a sober, useful life.

I have spent three years on this book and I am now editing the full manuscript. Part Three will take shape while I trek from Mexico to Rio de Janeiro over four months.