There’s something vaguely unsettling about seeing a well-groomed, middle-aged man carrying a life-sized model of the human brain tucked under his arm like a football.

But there’s also something out of whack about a local TV show featuring nothing more than a psychiatrist with a brain model answering questions about mental illness every week lasting for a dozen years.

And Fort Wayne’s Dr. Jay Fawver, the aforementioned psychiatrist and proud brain custodian, knows it.

“It was a 13-week pilot when they signed me up in 1997. I wasn’t supposed to be here. I’m as surprised as anyone,” Fawver says as he takes the short walk from the makeup room to the studio at Fort Wayne’s Kachmann Teleplex, home of PBS affiliate WFWA-TV Channel 39.

As host of Channel 39’s “Matters of the Mind,” a live call-in show that airs at 7:30 p.m. Mondays, Fawver is one of a handful of area doctors who regularly dispense their expertise on local television.

Besides his program, WFWA hosts “Healthline,” a weekly show that has guest physicians speaking on rotating medical topics such as cancer and heart disease, and “Senior Spotlight,” which focuses on both medical and financial issues that concern older adults and their families.

WPTA-TV Channel 21 has “Docs on Call,” a two-year-old show that lately has featured doctors talking about robot-assisted hysterectomy, new methods of rehabilitation for stroke patients and therapeutic and cosmetic nose surgery. The program airs at 7:30 p.m. on Tuesdays and Wednesdays.

WANE-TV Channel 15 doesn’t have a stand-alone medical show but instead integrates local coverage of medicine and health into local daily news coverage with its “Wellbeing” segments, says Ted Linn, news director. The station also joined with other local news outlets last fall to broadcast an hour-long special “H1N1: Community on Alert” about swine flu.

Todd Grimes, production manager for WFWA’s medical programs, says viewers of the shows skew a little to the older side of the PBS viewership, which for the most part comprises 30- or 40-plus college-educated adults. The shows are most popular with those 50 and older, he says.

And though the shows rarely get much more than one-half to 1 percent of viewers, they tend to be loyal. Ratings have changed little over time, he says.

“Our charge is a little different than a commercial station. A commercial station would have dropped “Matters of the Mind” a long time ago. Our mission is to educate and inform and enlighten people. And we know they’re helped by Jay and the others; that’s why we keep doing the show,” Grimes says.

Jerry Giesler, president and general manager of Indiana’s NewsCenter, says doctors don’t diagnose in front of the camera during “Docs on Call.”

But, he says, viewers get an overview of a topic and can judge the doctor’s expertise, personality and bedside manner by watching.

Doctors pay to be a guest on the show, which is expanding to twice weekly. The show airs during time set aside for public-service broadcasts.

“I think we’re a gateway,” Giesler says. “I think we’re there to open up the lines of communication for people to take the next step and call the doctor.”

Still, for doctors involved, being a guest on live TV can be nerve-wracking.

“It’s terrifying,” says Fawver, recalling his first experiences as part of a show on parenting.

But now, Fawver makes it look easy as he sits in a comfy armchair on the set with a vase of orange silk bird-of-paradise flowers at his right. Viewers don’t see that he’s taken off his shoes and has his stocking feet propped up on a wooden crate, or know that he sips an energy drink with plenty of reputedly brain-boosting taurine before air time.

“I love taurine – a marvelous invention!” he says when caught in his habit by a crew member.

Fawver says he overcame his jitters with the advice to imagine the camera was a single person and not a mass audience of thousands.

The only anxiety he feels now is making sure the show closes on time. “In the office, you can take the extra couple minutes to answer a question, but here you’ve got to be done,” he says. “There’s no running over on television.”

He says he never begs off a question. “Really doing the program is no different from what I do in the office every day,” he explains. “It’s rare in the show that I hear a question that I haven’t heard before.”

Fawver says his approach is to “medicalize psychiatry,” and demystify the invisible world of emotions – and that’s why he keeps his handy brain around.

One minute he might be showing off where a seizure might originate, and the next minute he might be explaining the different stages of sleep, complete with terms like “neurotransmitters” or “acetylcholine receptors” that some might assume would be above the heads of his viewers.

“I explain complex concepts, but I try to do it in words Andy Griffith would use,” he says, crediting viewers with much of the success of the show. Grimes says it is being considered as an offering to Indiana’s new coalition of public television stations.

“I think the reason we get the viewers we do, is that these are real people with real problems trying to articulate their problems, and I think that’s interesting to people,” Fawver says.

“I don’t think we would still be here if it was just me talking about a single topic.”

rsalter@jg.net