Dr. Keith Ablow on Charlie Sheen's Recent Outbursts, and Imus's Daily Ones

As any good shrink would, the first thing Dr. Keith Ablow picked up on this morning was the irritation in Imus’s voice. “I’m here for you,” Ablow insisted.
 
But Ablow was not appearing via satellite from Boston today to delve into Imus’s psyche, no doubt a scary place to visit. Instead, the two discussed Charlie Sheen’s recent—and very public—meltdown, which Ablow insisted was not a lame subject.
 
“This is like a public health laboratory,” he said. “There are few things in medicine where you say, ‘If you understand this, you can understand all of medicine.’ Maybe if you understand Charlie Sheen, you can understand all of psychiatry.”
 
Ablow was not comfortable diagnosing Sheen from afar, but thinks it’s important to put everything the actor has been saying in perspective. “If somebody goes on network TV, or the cable stations, or tweets about using seven-gram rocks of cocaine because that’s how he ‘rolls,’ and he’s convinced his heart’s not going to explode because he says he has ‘tiger blood’—then yeah, you’ve got to respond to that,” he said. “Because, you know, I-Man, there are vulnerable people out there in the world, and they’re listening.”
 
Like countless others, Imus and his crew find this episode and all of Sheen’s intoxicating interviews nothing if not hilarious. “People who are throwing their lives away, in many ways, can still be tremendously galvanizing,” Ablow said. “Until everything crashes.”
 
And everything is crashing: Sheen’s CBS sitcom “Two and a Half Men” has been suspended for the remainder of the season, and his twin boys were taken away from him and given back to his allegedly drug-addicted soon-to-be ex-wife, whose head he supposedly threatened to cut off and send to her mother in a box.
 
To Imus, who would certainly know, Sheen looks totally wired, and Ablow agreed. “I’m not saying he’s manic, because that would be a diagnosis,” he said. “But people who are manic—what do they have? Pressured speech. Flight of ideas, meaning jumping from one thing to another. Dis-inhibited behavior. Often, they’re hyper-sexual.”
 
Ablow also pointed out some glaring similarities between what has happened to Sheen and what happens to most drug addicts: they lose their jobs, their marriages go bust, and they lose their kids.
 
But Sheen’s responsiveness and seeming coherence in interviews forgives the media from taking advantage of him. “He shows up in a suit, or otherwise well-attired, he sits down for the interview, he’s not grabbing at the camera,” Ablow said.
 
Having completed his analysis of Sheen, Ablow turned serious as he bid Imus goodbye. “You can call me other times, too,” he told the grumpy old cowboy. “It doesn’t have to be on the air.”
 
Noted.
 
-Julie Kanfer