end of royal taboo:
As Prince Harry reveals he has consulted a ‘shrink’, we look at how the Royal Family has embraced a practice that was once taboo
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IT HAS become increasingly clear that Prince Harry is one of the Royal Family’s greatest assets. Displaying a natural charm that harks back to his mother Princess Diana, Harry has turned from a tearaway to a national treasure. And yet as he has just revealed, for many years he blocked out memories of his mother.
It is only now, in an astonishingly candid interview given the reserve of the Royal Family, that he has opened up about the impact Diana’s death had on his mental health.
“I can safely say that losing my mum at the age of 12 and therefore shutting down all of my emotions for 20 years has had a quite serious effect on not only my personal life but my work as well,” he said, before revealing he had sought help from a “shrink”.
The Afghanistan veteran has in the past spoken up about the way that service in the Armed Forces can be damaging psychologically and the need to look after soldiers emotionally as well as physically, but this is the first time he has opened up about his own mental problems.
Harry and the Duke and Duchess of Cambridge have sought to bring the issue of mental health to centre stage by setting up a royal foundation that supports mental health programmes, which received a £50,000 donation from Express Newspapers owner Richard Desmond earlier this year. It is behind a mental health campaign called Heads Together.
All in all it is a long way from the more traditional stiff upper lip approach the Royal Family has adopted in the past.
There is a famous story about the Queen that took place at the height of the crisis years involving Diana: to calm down she took her dogs out for a walk. On returning home she took off her coat, put it back on again and took the dogs out for a second time.
That is the way the Windsors have traditionally behaved, not by saying, as Harry just has done, “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.”
It is a sentiment more in keeping with his American actress girlfriend Meghan Markle – although it should be pointed out that Harry decided to seek help two and a half years ago, some time before they first met.
But it is also in keeping with Harry’s own parents, who both sought help for mental health issues. Even while she was still alive, it was known that Princess Diana saw a good many mental health professionals but what was less well known is that Prince Charles did, too.
In a recent biography Sally Bedell Smith revealed that as early as their honeymoon Diana was having extended crying fits leading the prince to invite his mentor, philosopher Laurens van der Post, to visit her. Van der Post recommended that Diana should see psychiatrist Dr Alan McGlashan, which she did but only briefly. Rather, it was Charles who continued to do so.
Indeed, both Charles in his 1994 admission of adultery during a television interview with Jonathan Dimbleby, and Diana with her Panorama interview, during which she also admitted adultery and cast doubt on Charles’s mental fitness to be king, have let it all hang out in a way that would have been unthinkable to earlier generations, royal or otherwise.
ANDREW MORTON’S biography of Diana, written with the princess’s co-operation, revealed an emotional distress that the public couldn’t have dreamt of at the time: bulimia, suicide attempts and self-mutilation all made an appearance. But even she didn’t go as far as Harry.
But then in the past few years Harry has given a strong impression that he was carrying on his mother’s good work. Last year he took an HIV test live on Facebook, something one could not imagine, say, the Queen Mother having done. It was Diana, of course, who first championed Aids as a cause at a time it was still met with fear. HIV charities were delighted. Dr Michael Brady of the Terrence Higgins Trust called Harry’s move “fantastic” and in the wake of it home tests went through the roof.
It was not so long ago that Harry was falling out of nightclubs and taking a swing at photographers. Now he is the prince who founded the Invictus Games for wounded service personnel before breaking this final taboo and addressing his own health.
His grandparents might well not understand his motivation but they should respect him enormously for the bravery he has shown. Once again, Harry has done his country proud. For more information visit headstogether.org.uk