Jamie Huysman offers mental health care for some who tell-all on tabloid TV.
It was 7 o’clock on a Friday, and Huysman was getting ready to leave his office when he got a phone call from a frantic producer at “The Geraldo Rivera Show” in New York.
Laura Jansen, 21, and her father, Jim, had told their story of rape and incest on the show a week earlier. Although both wore disguises, Jim was recognized by people back home in Kansas and had been fired from his job.
Now Jim was holding a gun to Laura’s head and threatening to kill her. Could Huysman help?
Huysman, a clinical social worker and therapist working as a hospital administrator in Washington, previously had been a guest panelist on Rivera’s show.
He spent the next three hours on the telephone, alternately talking to the show’s producers, to Laura and Jim–who had called the studio–and a private Florida psychiatric hospital that agreed to admit Laura and Jim that night. (Rivera flew them from Kansas to Florida.)
In exchange, Huysman told the hospital director he would try to get the hospital recognition on Rivera’s popular daytime show.
It may have been unconventional, but it worked.
Six years later, from his office on Las Olas Boulevard in Ft. Lauderdale, Huysman describes how “the frailty of the human condition” collided that evening with the bizarre world of tabloid television.
“She was begging for help with a gun to her head,” says Huysman, who persuaded Rivera to hire him to get help for the show’s guests. “Necessity had to become the mother of invention.”
And so began Huysman’s baptism by fire as the dean of mental health on daytime talk television. Geraldo Rivera. Les Brown. Leeza Gibbons.
“There was very much a ripple effect, especially after Jenny Jones,” says Huysman, referring to the case of the homophobic guest who shot and killed a would-be male suitor who surprised him on the Jones show.
During the past six years, Huysman has found treatment for about 200 talk show guests whose afflictions include morbid obesity, stalking, eating disorders and sexual addiction.
Assembling a network of hospitals and treatment centers eager to fill an empty bed in exchange for a plug on Geraldo or Leeza, Huysman estimates he has secured $4 million in donated health care for guests “left bleeding on the stage” by a ratings-driven industry.
“I actually believe he saved Laura’s life,” says Dan Weaver, a former senior producer on “The Geraldo Rivera Show.”
Rivera quit his daytime show this year to return to network television news. In June, he devoted a final show to Huysman’s work and thanked him for “helping people in a way that has brought honor to my program and to me.”
“It was a win-win-win situation,” says Huysman, who appeared more than 80 times on the Rivera show, where he was given the star treatment, picked up at the airport by limousines and paid a monthly fee.
Huysman describes himself as the guest advocate, building a bridge between talk TV and the health care industry.
“I felt I could bridge the chasm, the canyon, between the mental health industry and this powerful medium and do some good.
“I’m walking a tightrope between the two worlds.”
He walks that line by combining his health-care expertise with marketing savvy, enthusiasm and a natural schmooze.
“He is incredibly humble,” a virtue viewed as a rarity in television, Weaver says. “He has a way about him that is very calming and soothing.”
When Geraldo came knocking, he says he saw an opportunity to use the power of television to erase the stigma surrounding mental health care.
“It made no sense for them to exploit guests for ratings and not give them something back. . . . These talk shows are the perfect vehicle to show the public that these issues have real solutions in the
day-to-day world.”
But his role on Rivera raised eyebrows among his peers.
“Colleagues asked me, `Why are you doing this? Why would you go to work for Geraldo Rivera?’ It was an ethical dilemma. Some traditional people in my field probably think I sold out.
“I felt if I turned away, if I didn’t do it, what would happen? I didn’t know. What I did know was that talk shows would continue. I couldn’t get rid of them. All I could hope to do was utilize them for some good.
“It’s like in therapy. I saw a window. This was TV’s treatable moment. I wanted to take full advantage of it.”
