Dial Dr. Toni for Therapy

Pop psych and soap-opera counseling stir the air waves

The first caller of the day is not as disturbed as most. Bob, 41, is worried about "overtalking" and not listening to what others say. Psychologist Toni Grant answers soothingly: You are a lonely man trying to force intimacy from friends. Wouldn't it be better to stop buttonholing people and try to be more relaxed and playful? Says Bob: "You've just pulled up a shade for me."

For Psychologist Grant, this is another easy start for the Dr. Toni Grant Program, her daily talk show at KABC, Los Angeles. Over the next four hours, she will give on-the-spot advice to a stream of troubled callers--child abusers, rapists, baffled homosexuals, wife beaters and "pre-orgasmic" women. "It's a soap opera that educates," says Grant, 38, who studied at Vassar and Harvard and got a Ph.D. from Syracuse. It is also a vast financial success that has made Grant a well-paid star ("a median five-figure" salary) and draws an audience of 115,000 --enough to make KABC top-rated in her time slot among more than 70 stations in the Los Angeles area.

Grant's counseling is couched in the familiar jargon of pop psych: "I try to help people get in touch with their own resources and use them wisely ... This is the process of self-actualization." She is also prone to fortune-cookie formulations: "Life is not a dress rehearsal. Make use of every day."

Her actual advice, however, can be refreshingly blunt. Bill, 34, tells her that he has just quit a good job on impulse. Eager for disapproval, he asks Grant: "When will I grow up?" "Well," chuckles the psychologist, "that's a good question for all of us." She calls the hapless Bill immature and masochistic for quitting before lining up another job. "Never throw out the dirty water until you have clean water," she says. Grant is just as tough on Donna, 26, who complains that her husband goes to topless bars. Grant explains that men derive natural pleasure from visual excitement; a sensible wife should not interfere. After Donna hangs up, Grant tells the audience that the caller's attitudes are insecure and childlike.

Pat, 39, wants to know how to discourage his son, 16, from seeing a 20-year-old woman who is estranged from her husband. Grant, who notes that she once read a book titled In Praise of Older Women, indicates that she is pleased that 16-year-olds are taking up with older women, then wisecracks: "I don't want my 14-year-old involved with your 16-year-old. I want him very far away from her." Pat explains that he is not worried about age discrepancy, only that the husband might stab his son. "Let this one go," replies Grant. "You've described her as a pleasant young woman. Let your son go on experimenting with life."

It is no accident that Grant's show runs opposite the afternoon TV soaps. Says Bruce Marr, who was KABC program director when Grant arrived in 1975: "People are tuning away from soap opera to listen to the radio shrinks because they can tune into the bedrooms of real people rather than just listen to actors." In fact, Grant's kaffeeklatsch counseling has been such a smash that stations around the country, particularly on the West Coast, are rushing to clone her. Marr, now at Seattle's KVI, has hired Jennifer James, a cultural anthropologist. Station KXRX in San Jose has taken on Psychologist Thomas Tutko, while San Francisco's KSFO signed Psychologist Bonnie Ring. Bay Area Rival KGO hopes to top that by finding a male and a female psychologist to do a show together. Says a KGO spokeswoman: "Everyone in the industry saw what Toni Grant did to the ratings, and now everybody wants to copy her. She grows on you." Grant's own station has hired U.C.L.A. Psychologist Manuel Smith, who wrote the 1975 bestseller When I Say No, I Feel Guilty, to hold forth on weekends at a part-time salary of $18,000 a year.

Why the demand for show-biz therapy? "The extended family of 30 or 40 years ago used to deal with these things," says Smith. "The housewife of several years ago had 30 relatives or friends she could turn to. Now she's got the radio shrink." Grant thinks that Southern Californians need a lot of help. "There is a profound sense of alienation and loneliness here, and few traditional guidelines for behavior. I don't have any grand solutions, just my own idiosyncratic ones."

Grant believes that most of her listeners can cope with life's problems; they just need some feedback and confidence. Seriously disturbed callers are screened out or referred on the air to psychotherapists. "My program is an extension of the consulting room, but it's not psychotherapy," says Grant. Her critics are not so sure. "My gut feeling is against any psychologist who shoots from the hip," says Joseph R. Sanders of the American Psychological Association's (A.P.A.) ethics committee. The spread of radio shrinks, in fact, is producing grumblings among professionals who consider instant airborne advice a kind of quackery that invites malpractice suits.

The chairwoman of the A.P.A.'s ethics committee, Patricia Keith-Spiegel, acknowledges that radio psychologists are technically in violation of the association's code, but she argues that the code should be bent to accommodate the new trend. Says she: "My hunch is that they will double or triple in number within the next year or two. We don't want them to say, 'Either I'm going to be a star or a member of the A.P.A.' " In any case, as long as radio shrinks give only chatty-type advice rather than formal diagnoses over the air waves, the association will probably not act against them. After all, why cut down a group of emerging celebrities who are beginning to give the profession more clout with the public? Says Lee Salk, resident psychologist on ABC's Good Morning, America: "There's a tremendous demand for responsible professionals to use the media. If they don't, other people will."

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