We’ve written about KSTP morning chief meteorologist Ken Barlow‘s struggle with mental illness before.
He’s made no secret of his diagnosis of bipolar disorder. Because it’s sweeps, he’s spreading the word again to help others. This time he told told Chris Egert he was angry when he got the diagnosis.
“When you are told you have this, the first thing you think about is what you know, and all I knew was ‘One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest,'” Barlow told Egert.
It wasn’t easy, but now Ken has turned that anger into motivation to help the thousands of people in Minnesota and western Wisconsin who are also suffering.
Barlow says he experiences euphoric good moods; desperate, crushing bad moods and noises he can’t escape.
“You constantly hear things going on. It’s not necessarily anything that makes sense but just noise, like white noise or background noise that is constantly going,” Barlow said.
He’s one of five adults in the U.S. who experiences mental illness in a given year. Adults living with serious mental illness die on average 25 years earlier than others. And Barlow could have easily been one of those statistics after going undiagnosed for 25 years.