Prince Harry has opened up about his brother William encouraging him to seek counselling after two years of “total chaos” as he struggled with Princess Diana’s death.
The prince is a huge supporter of changing the stigma about mental health and is actively promoting Heads Together campaign, which he started with Prince William and Kate Middleton, but he never talks about how the topic affected him personally until now.
Harry joined Bryony Gordon’s Mad World where he revealed his own emotional and mental health struggles, which he says he’s been dealing with since his mother’s death 20 years ago. However, he only realized lately that he was hiding from all those struggles for most of those years.
“If you look back to the fact that I lost my mom at the age of 12 on the public platform of which it was, and then everything else that happens with being in the spotlight in this sort of role and the pressures that come with it,” Harry shared. “And then going to Afghanistan, and then working in the personal recovering unit with all of the soldiers as well and taking on a lot of their issues. Anybody would like at that and go, ‘OK, there must be something wrong with you. You can’t be totally normal.'”
He said he would always deny his emotions, adding, “My way of dealing with it was sticking my head in the sand and refusing to ever think about my mom because why would that help. It’s only going to make you sad. It’s never going to bring her back.”
He spent most of his life (into his late twenties) pretending everything was fine. “I was a typical 20, 25, 28-year-old running around going, ‘Life is great’, or ‘Life is fine.'”
Today, he recognized the negative effects of running away from his emotions has had on him.
“I can safely say that losing my mom at the age of 12 and therefore shutting down all of my emotions for the last 20 years has had a quite serious effect on not only my personal life but also my work as well,” he explained. “It was only three years ago that, from the support around and my brother and other people around who started to say, ‘You need to deal with this. It’s not normal to think that nothing’s affecting you.'”
He added, “I started to have a few conversations and actually all of a sudden all of this grief that I have never processed started to come to the forefront and I was like, ‘There is actually a lot of stuff here that I need to deal with.'”
He said he began dealing his own emotional and mental health when he was 28, and by the time he turned 30, he felt at last like he had a handle on himself and now he could talk to others who also suffered through grief.
“It’s a fascinating process,” he shared. “It’s all part of a conversation, being able to talk to a parent or stranger or sibling or colleague.”
This is the reason why he firmly believes in therapy and seeking professional help for mental health awareness. “[Sometimes] I don’t actually need your advice I just need you to listen to me,” he confessed.
Other than therapy, Harry also took up running and boxing to help him unleash some of his emotions. “Exercise really is the key,” he shared. “Exercise is a simple solution. Instead of giving up, giving up, giving up. How about taking up?”
But more importantly, Harry surpassed his own struggles by helping others and assisting in “normalizing the conversation” about mental health and fitness. His biggest objective was to remind everybody that “we’re not robots,” and mental fitness is something that unites us all.
“What my mother believed in is if the fact that you are in a position of privilege or a position of responsibility and if you can put your name to something that you genuinely believe in…then you can smash any stigma you want.”