Please Kate, don’t turn George into a therapy junkie
YES, I know what I’m supposed to say. Well done, Kate! What a wonderful person you are! Thank you for speaking out about mental health problems in children. And I do feel that. Really I do. There’s just something that made my heart sink when I read the Duchess of Cambridge’s comment this week that she ‘ would not hesitate’ to send her children to therapy if she thought they needed it.
Kate was guest- editing a website as it launched a campaign to end the stigma around child mental health. She was heaped with praise for choosing what everyone claimed was an unfashionable subject. Actually, the really unfashionable subject is
adult mental health. We all feel sorry for troubled children. It’s mentally ill adults who generate fear and prejudice.
Speak up for adults with schizophrenia and people imagine you’re defending axe-wielding maniacs. Not a good public relations move.
Of course, even if Kate chose a slightly safer cause to champion, it’s still a worthy one. And I don’t want to be churlish.
But I couldn’t help but cringe, just a little, when she said she wanted ‘ to encourage George and Charlotte to speak about their feelings, and to give them the tools and sensitivity to be supportive peers’.
It sounded as though it was lifted straight out of some PR handbook. Slightly inauthentic, in other words — and when you’re talking about mental illness, being sincere and authentic are quite important.
Clearly, Kate is a great advocate for talking problems through. She seems to think this is a panacea. I’m not so sure.
You might be surprised to read this from me, but sometimes it’s better to bottle things up. Sometimes, talking endlessly about your feelings isn’t the answer.
Sometimes, in fact, you just need to accept the past and move on. No amount of chatting is going to change what’s happened. Instead, the best advice doesn’t come from Freud, or Jung, but from a far more child-friendly source: Disney.
I’m thinking of that maddening song from Frozen: Let It Go. After all, isn’t that all that psychotherapy is about, really? It’s meant to help us let go of something in the past and move on.
The trouble is that people get hooked on it. They keep turning over their problems like a treasured possession they can’t look at too often.
Instead of letting go, they use psychotherapy to hold on. Yet all the time they convince themselves they’re being terribly brave and sensitive.
That’s not to say I’m not a great fan of psychotherapy when it’s rigorous. I absolutely think that the unexamined life is not worth living. I’ve had psychotherapy and I’ve trained in it.
But I also think there can be too much navel- gazing. And that’s not a good habit to get into — least of all right from childhood. How old do you have to be before you stop blaming your parents for all the mistakes you’ve made in your life?
Of course, I’m not saying a stiff upper lip is always the answer. That can cause a multitude of problems as emotions fester.
But it’s sometimes best to let wounds heal. Constantly reopening and examining them only makes the process take longer and scars more likely to form.
I look at the younger generation who have embraced the idea that we must constantly examine every feeling we have.
Are they happier? Have they grown noticeably wiser and more psychologically rounded? No. If anything, I think people have simply got a little more selfobsessed and narcissistic.
I think about my gran and the hardships she endured. One of 14 born into crushing poverty, she watched as her brothers were killed one by one in World War II, was bombed out of her home, left school at 13 despite having won a place at a grammar, and fell for a man who turned out to be a violent alcoholic who beat her.
NOT only did you never hear her complain, I didn’t even know about half of the stuff she’d gone through until after she died.
She didn’t speak about it because she knew she couldn’t change what had happened and just had to get on with living.
If Kate wants role models for her children, who are the modern royals we most admire? Who comes across as the most psychologically robust?
It’s certainly not Princess Diana, who, much as I loved her, was hardly what you’d call psychologically stable. Despite hours upon hours of psychotherapy, she was still dogged by problems.
More than any other royal, she spoke about her feelings and yet it did her no good whatsoever. If anything, she seemed all the more tormented by her psychological issues precisely because she spent so much time examining them.
No, the royals whom people look up to are the Queen and Princess Anne, both of whom are paragons of emotional restraint.
I’ve no doubt both have their issues, as everyone does, but they just get on with life, don’t they? They don’t wallow in self-pity or spend all day self-analysing.
Yes, good for Kate that she’s speaking up about mental health. She genuinely seems a warm, caring mother. But turning little George and Charlotte into therapy junkies won’t do them any favours.