Advice columns, helpful resource or complete BS?

Many times I have been perusing msn.com and come across some advice column. How do I tell my deadbeat boyfriend to beat it? How do I tell my neighbor their dog drives me insane, etc. More often than not I am appalled at the advice given in these columns.

You can’t possibly understand the scope of a person’s personality or problems in a 5 sentence How do I? So often the “advice giver” tells someone to leave their spouse, quit their job, etc, with little or no understanding of what is really going on. I often wonder about the people who wrote in. Did they really leave their husband because some stranger told them they deserved better?

Oftentimes these advice people are some sort of unexplained doctor of sorts. They may claim to be relationship experts or psychologists, and maybe they are. But how can you judge someone you have never met who is only telling you one tiny side of what is most likely a long and complicated story?

Ok so these columns are less about helping people and giving advice then providing fodder for the readers, I get it. But it seems dangerous to be spewing out advice willy nilly. I hope for most people that writing in to one of these columns is a last resort. That they have already pursued talking to a real professional, family, a priest, whatever.

I have been tempted to write a fake story into one of these columns just to see what the response is.

Have you ever written in to one of these columns? What did you think of the advice?

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