Wills: Seeing dead children when I was an air ambulance pilot took me over the edge
He sought professional help – but shielded his family from trauma
PRINCE William spoke from the heart yesterday about how seeing children killed and injured while working as an air ambulance pilot took him ‘over the edge’.
In a deeply personal moment, the future king admitted for the first time that he had sought professional help for the trauma from the road traffic accidents he had seen.
William, 36, revealed that being a father to Prince George and Princess Charlotte brought home the horror of the life-anddeath situations he was dealing with while working for East Anglian Air Ambulance.
Although he was supported by his wife, the Duchess of Cambridge, he said he didn’t want to bring his work home with him as it wasn’t fair on his family.
Speaking at a workplace mental health conference, he praised his former employers for helping him and his team cope and urged more workplaces to improve mental health procedures for their staff.
He said: ‘I worked several times on very traumatic jobs involving children. After I had my own children, the relation between the job and my personal life is what really took me over the edge.
‘I started feeling things that I’ve never felt before and I got very sad and very down about this particular family.
‘And I think you start to take away bits of the job and you take them home and you keep them in, and of course you don’t want to share them with your loved ones as you don’t want to bring that sort of stuff home.
‘So the only place you can talk about it is at work and if you don’t necessarily have the right tools or the right environment at work, you can see why things can snowball and get quite bad.’
It is not known whether the child William was referring to survived.
The prince flew as an East Anglian Air Ambulance co-pilot from July 2015 to July last year, when he became a full-time working royal.
He and his crew helped each other by talking about the incidents they saw, William said, and were offered professional help.
‘I was lucky enough that I identified that something was going on and I spoke to a lot of people about it,’ he told the This Can Happen conference in London. ‘I knew also that my colleagues were all also feeling, from this particular job, very troubled.
‘It allowed the crew the time to go through a debrief process. We regularly used to talk about it. It helped me to come to terms with the enormous sadness I’d witnessed.’
Asked how he dealt with the trauma, William said he had to ‘disconnect’ from his job.
‘I started to realise that I had to self-analyse a bit,’ he said. ‘I was seeing a lot of death and a lot of injury, a lot of traumatic injury and families being destroyed every single day I was at work.
‘And you start to think, without realising it, that life is like that the whole time. The negativity creeps up on you so much that you have to distance yourself from the job a little bit, and go, “OK this happens in the job environment but the whole world isn’t this gloomy and really sad”.’ It is understood that William had been somewhat nervous speaking so personally as he did not want to shine an unwanted spotlight on the families affected, some of whom he is still in contact with.
His brother, Prince Harry, opened up for the first time last year about his own mental health issues con- nected with the loss of their mother, Diana, Princess of Wales, when he was just 12, and said he had also sought professional help.
William was on a panel with GP Dr Ellie Cannon, Cisco sales manager Justin Woolen and retired police officer Edward Simpson, hosted by BBC journalist Tina Daheley. The conference was organised by Zoe Sinclair, Neil Laybourn and Jonny Benjamin, who have helped William, Kate and Harry with their Heads Together mental health campaign.
Mr Laybourn and Mr Benjamin have worked together since 2014 but first met in extraordinary circumstances a decade ago.
Mr Laybourn was walking past Waterloo Bridge in London one evening when he spotted Mr Benjamin sitting by the bridge, contemplating taking his own life.
Mr Laybourn stopped to talk to him and persuaded him to take a step back. The pair went their separate ways and six years later, Mr Benjamin found the stranger who saved his life and they have since worked to eradicate the stigma of mental ill health.
Mr Laybourn said yesterday: ‘What the duke said today took everyone by surprise. Being a guy and being socially conditioned, whether you’re in the Royal Family or not, to keep in your feelings and then beat that to speak about them is great. It’s quite something for him in his position to say, “you’re not infallible”.’
‘Negativity creeps up on you’