Upstate New York radio host Bob Lonsberry is opening up about his personal mental health.
Lonsberry, who hosts talk shows on WHAM-AM (1180) in Rochester and NewsRadio 570 WSYR in Syracuse, penned a blog post on his website about a call from his doctor Wednesday morning. He described how his mother spent the first two years of his life in the Rochester Psychiatric Center, and how he avoided treatment himself after seeing her struggles.
“Mental illness and addiction and pure evil choices,” Lonsberry wrote. “I avoided my mother’s alcoholism and dependency on headshrinkers, but I chose a far more damaging fate. And so it is that a couple of mornings ago, I wrote a longhand letter to my family doctor, walked down the street to his office, and handed it to the nurse in the waiting room. I told him my situation, asked for his help, and wondered who to talk to.”
Lonsberry said his mother was institutionalized often for breakdowns, suicide attempts and alcoholism, but he lived with her when he was 12 years old and tried to kill himself. He also said he was molested in elementary school by a step-father’s brother and in middle school by an unnamed businessman.
He added that his mother’s father was discharged from the Navy in World War II “for being mentally unstable,” but personally never sought counseling or other help because he saw it as a “weakness.”
But now at 62, Lonsberry said he’s changed his tune.
“You have to admit to yourself that you’re not right, that you’re insane, that there’s not enough willpower or praying to fix this all the way, and you’ve got to get help,” he wrote. “All my life, I’ve hated the doctors and counselors who couldn’t save my mother. Now, I’m turning to them to save me. They are my last and best hope.”
Lonsberry, who lives in the rural Livingston County village of Mount Morris, has been working in radio for decades, including hosting afternoons on WSYR since 2012 when he replaced previous Syracuse radio host Jim Reith. Lonsberry’s career has included a number of controversies, including going viral in 2019 for comparing getting called “boomer” to the N-word, drawing criticism for railing against transgender health care benefits in Rochester, and previously getting fired from WHAM in 2003 after criticizing Black teens as “raised like animals, groomed as predators” and referring to Rochester Mayor William Johnson Jr. as a “monkey.”
Lonsberry declined to comment further on his blog post when contacted by syracuse.com | The Post-Standard for an interview. His full column can be read at lonsberry.com.