WHY HARRY SOUGHT HELP
On the brink of breakdown
GRIEF HIT THE PRINCE AFTER HIS MOTHER’S DEATH HARDER THAN THE WORLD KNEW
To the watching world, it seemed as if he was having the time of his life.
It was 2012 and 28-year-old Prince Harry was cementing his role as the playful prince. From posing for selfies with British athletes during the London Olympics, through to hamming it up with Usain Bolt and showing off his groovy dance moves with locals on an official visit to the Caribbean, he was having a ball.
And then there were those photos of him romping naked in a Las Vegas hotel after a game of strip billiards. Here was a young man making the most of his position of privilege and apparently without a care in the world.
But the happy-go-lucky image Harry was portraying was fake. In fact, at that time, his life was “total chaos” and he was on the verge of a breakdown.
In a groundbreaking interview, the prince has revealed he had serious mental health problems brought on by the death of his mother, Diana, Princess of Wales, which came to a head when he was in his late twenties. He has also admitted that not talking about his struggles made things worse.
“I can safely say that losing my mum at the age of 12, and therefore shutting down all of my emotions for the last 20 years, has had quite a serious effect on not only my personal life, but my work as well,” he told Bryony Gordon from Britain’s Daily Telegraph.
“I have probably been very close to a complete breakdown on numerous occasions when all sorts of grief and lies, and misconceptions and everything are coming at you from every angle.”
Harry coped with his grief by trying to bury it – a huge mistake, he says now.
“My way of dealing with it was sticking my head in the sand, refusing to ever think about my mum, because why would that help? I thought,
‘It’s only going to make you sad, it’s not going to bring her back.’
“So I was a typical 20, 25, 28-year-old running around going, ‘Life is great.’”
But it wasn’t. He was struggling with aggression, so took up boxing to let out his anger. “That really saved me because I was on the verge of punching someone,” he says.
He also experienced anxiety while carrying out official duties and battled a “flight or fight” response without properly understanding why he was feeling so tense.
After two years of what Harry describes as “total chaos”, he realised he needed to start talking about what was happening to him.
“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.”
Harry reveals that his older brother, Prince William, encouraged him to seek help.
“My brother, bless him, was a huge support to me. He kept saying, ‘This is not right, this is not normal. You need to talk to someone about stuff. It’s okay.’”
Harry says he has had counselling, which was “great” and he’s now in a “good place”. He decided to speak out – although doing the interview made him “a little nervous, a little tight in the chest” – to help get the message across that mental health problems are nothing to be ashamed of.
With William and sister-inlaw Catherine, Duchess of Cambridge, Harry last year launched Heads Together, a campaign aimed at changing the way people think and talk about mental health. They have supported many charities, including those that help troubled youth and war veterans. William has spoken out about his concerns for his children, Prince George (3) and Princess Charlotte (1), and
‘ This is not right, this is not normal. You need to talk to someone about stuff’
his hopes they will be able to talk openly about their feelings when they grow up.
“For too long there has been a taboo about talking about some important issues,” William says. “If you were anxious, it’s because you were weak. If you couldn’t cope with whatever life threw at you, it’s because you were failing. Successful, strong people don’t suffer like that, do they? But, of course, we all do. It’s just that few of us speak about it. There may be a time and a place for the stiff upper lip, but not at the expense of your health.”
This is a lesson his brother Harry has clearly learned the hard way and he says that once he started to speak out, he realised he was not alone in having to deal with overwhelming emotions.
“The experience I have had is that once you start talking about it, you realise that actually you’re part of quite a big club.
“I know there is huge merit in talking about your issues and the only thing about keeping it quiet is that it’s only ever going to make it worse. Not just for you, but everybody else around you as well because you become a problem. I, through a lot of my twenties, was a problem and I didn’t know how to deal with it.”
Harry now says that having counselling and working through his issues means that he’s able to take his work and his private life seriously and to put “blood, sweat and tears into the things that I think will make a difference to everybody else”.
Bryony Gordon, who interviewed Harry, says by speaking out, Harry, “just redefined strength and dignity for a new generation.
“He has shown the world that talking about your problems is nothing to be ashamed of – it is something to be positively encouraged. And I can think of no more fitting tribute to his mother than that.”
‘He has shown the world that talking about your problems is nothing to be ashamed of’