After Roberts and his colleagues played clips from Curb Your Enthusiasm to their schizophrenic patients, the researchers led a group discussion in which the patients analyzed where Larry went wrong and how he could have behaved more appropriately. Eventually, Roberts and his adviser David Penn began to develop this method into a formalized set of practices called Social Cognition and Interaction Training, or SCIT for short.
However, the researchers hit a snag in their quest to basically make it possible for a doctor to prescribe episodes of Curb to treat mental illness – they couldn’t get the rights to the show. Despite numerous appeals, they never received approval from HBO to use the award-winning semi-improvised sitcom in a clinical setting. This forced Roberts and Penn to take matters into their own hands – by producing and filming original scenes written to imitate the blowups and social miscues that Larry David would make.
This means that a major educational institution funded the creation of a knock-off Curb Your Enthusiasm in order to treat schizophrenia and skirt copyright laws. Sometimes life is the real sitcom.
SCIT was a success, and in the years since the writing of the original New Yorker piece, its methodology has been published into textbooks, translated into seven different languages, and implemented in ten different countries across the world. David L. Roberts went on to get his Doctorate from UNC Chapel Hill, and he currently teaches at the University of Texas Health Science Center.
There’s something beautiful and poetic in the reality that Larry David’s numerous neuroses allowed him to create a TV show so amazing that it would not only exonerate an innocent man on death row, but also that it would be used to treat some of the most difficult and tragic conditions known to humanity.
Said Larry when he learned of his show’s role in the success of SCIT, “A lot of the time, it’s just me expressing myself freely. I knew that my own mental health was problematic, but should I be worried? I mean, I blow up, too! Is this something undiagnosed? Do I need to see a clinical psychologist?”
Honestly, Larry? Probably.
Top Image: HBO Entertainment
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