Yes, it's easy enough to take the producers' supposed good intentions with a grain of salt, and sure, those of us who happen to get a kick out of "scream-and-shout television" are probably guilty of some serious rubbernecking. But plenty of shows make me feel dirty: Watching the squeamish babe feast on a roasted donkey penis on "Fear Factor"; seeing another bachelor agonize over which girl he barely knows should become his fiancée; witnessing those final moments on "The Swan," when the once chubby girl with low self-esteem gazes into her brand-new, generic, plasticized face and cries, "Oh my god! I'm so beautiful!" On "Intervention," the subjects are aware that they have a major problem, and agreeing to document it is, arguably, part of their cry for help.

"I'm suffering from severe depression, agoraphobia, severe panic disorder, bipolar, obsessive-compulsive disorder, and post-traumatic stress disorder," Vanessa, who played a nurse on the show "E.R." for three years, tells us. Vanessa blew her earnings on clothes and accessories and shoes that fill a large storage space, and now she has trouble leaving her apartment at all. "Some days I'm able to drive a couple of blocks and I feel OK and I'm able to go to the store and do my stuff. And then, for whatever reason, for the next six weeks, I won't be able to drive at all." Weak and self-pitying as Vanessa sometimes seems, mostly we feel extremely sad for her and find ourselves hoping that someone can shake some sense into her and help her overcome her afflictions.

Tamela, a cutter, or self-mutilator, is even harder to understand at first: She seems remarkably well-adjusted and happy when she's not crying and clutching a razor blade. "When the razor's going in, I'm just thinking about the blood and how good I'm gonna feel afterwards," she tells us. Later, she reveals to a friend that she was molested when she was younger. According to the show, more than 50 percent of self-mutilators are victims of sexual abuse. When Tamela goes home to stay with her parents, her father fidgets and stands several feet away from her, and her mother tells her that sin must be at the root of her problem, since sin is "the cause of all of our problems." Seeing Tamela in an environment that clearly erodes her sense of self is almost too much to bear.

Gabe, on the other hand, is a little less easy to love. "It is my personal feeling that when you decide to have kids, you're responsible for them for their entire lives," he tells us in the whiny voice of a 10-year-old. Gabe reportedly had a genius-level IQ when he was younger. Now he's addicted to gambling, and his debts have cost his parents their house. Every step of the way, Gabe blames others for his problems. When he can't pay his bills and his parents won't step in yet again (one gets the sense that they've stepped in way too many times already and have exacerbated his problem by not insisting on healthy adult boundaries), he whines to the cameras, "Now I'm going to have to gamble, because nobody's giving me the money that I need!"

When you see such rationalization in slow-motion, at close range, it's impossible not to feel that you're being enlightened. The mistakes the addicts make, the mistakes their codependent parents make, the mistakes their conflict-averse friends make, all add up to a big, ugly mess that's as instructive as it is fascinating. Many of us might not enjoy the mess (ahem, many of us do enjoy it), but there's a lot to learn there, mostly about ourselves and our own susceptibility to weakness, self-pity, blame, destructiveness and passivity.

After all, what bothers us the most about addicts is that they're doing what we're all tempted to do, either once in our lifetime, once every few years, once every few months, or once a week: Give up. We hate the addict because we want to tell him or her, "Suck it up! Do you think I like going to my tedious job every day? Do you think I enjoy reading credit card bills I can't begin to tackle? Sure, I'd love to stay in bed and eat chocolate and smoke crack for the rest of my life, but I don't do that, because I know better!"

But the addicts have something important to tell us, too. When they falter and flail and whine and manipulate and blame, they're showing us how a normal person can turn into a paralyzed, confused demon. And the message is this: You are not immune.

Whether "Intervention" was born of a pure heart or a crass desire to capitalize on the lowest moments of others hardly matters to me. What matters is that, in this time of excess and overindulgence and the deification of partying celebrities, this show has the potential to scare the hell out of millions of viewers. And that doesn't seem so bad, since as far as I can tell, our culture is crying out for an intervention.

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