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“Celebrity Rehab with Dr. Drew” Season 3 begins Thursday, Jan. 7

By April MacIntyre Jan 4, 2010, 18:51 GMT

Dr. Drew Pinsky - © Chris Hatcher / PR Photos

Dr. Drew has his recovery hands full with a cast of characters.

The VH1 series boasts a season three lineup that includes Mackenzie Phillips, who recently revealed she slept with her dad in a drug-hazed decade, ex madame to the stars (and UK Celebrity Big Brother contestant) Heidi Fleiss, Fleiss's abusive ex, actor and jailbird Tom Sizemore, perennial trainwreck Dennis Rodman, country crooner Mindy McCready AMTM Lisa D’Amato, rocker Mike Starr and Real World Hollywood's Joey Kovar.

VH1 has once again partnered with Dr. Drew Pinsky for a third season of eight one-hour episodes, where the infamous try and give up the goofballs and booze.

Similar to the first two cycles, the third season of “Celebrity Rehab with Dr. Drew” will follow the real-life experiences of celebrity patients undergoing detoxification and treatment at a center in the Los Angeles area. 

The series takes us on a 21-day program with these assembled personalities for both group and one-on-one therapy and non-traditional therapies like art and music.  Returning to the show to help Dr. Drew are drug counselor Bob Forrest and resident technician Shelly Sprague who have each spent years on both sides of the rehab fence.  Dr. Drew is also bringing in some additional prominent physicians to help him give the patients supplementary one-on-one care.

Dr. Drew is a medical doctor on staff at Huntington Hospital, a board certified addictionologist and service director of the Chemical Dependency Program/Residential Treatment Center, where he has been treating addicts for over 20 years. 

Although he is an associate professor of clinical psychiatry at the KECK USC School of Medicine, he is not a psychologist or psychiatrist. 

His book, Cracked: Putting Broken Lives Together Again (Harper-Collins) is all about what treating addicts is like from a caretaker’s perspective.

Dr. Drew co-authored the first academic study on celebrities and narcissism.  The study was published in the Journal of Research in Personality (Elsevier) in September 2006, and is the first systematic, empirical scholarly study of celebrity personality.