Wills: My mental torment
William shares pain to support mental health care in workplace
THE Duke of Cambridge has told of how seeing children injured and killed in accidents sent him “over the edge” while he was working as an air ambulance pilot.
Prince William, speaking at a conference on improving mental health care at work, said his experiences of going to emergencies hit home once he had his own family and left him feeling down.
He said: “I worked several times on traumatic jobs involving children and after I had my own I think the relation between the job and my personal life is what really took me over the edge.
“I started feeling things 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.”
William, 36, said he was lucky to have worked for the RAF as a search and rescue helicopter pilot, and then East Anglian Air Ambulance, as both had good mental health practices. Speaking
yesterday at the This Can Happen conference at the O2 in London, he told how his employers encouraged crews to talk about what they’d seen and offered professional help.
It was unclear if the particular child William referred to survived. But it was not unusual for him to attend such incidents in his two years with the air ambulance, from July 2015 until July 2017.
William said: “I was lucky enough that I identified something was going on and I spoke to a lot of people about it.
“I was seeing a lot of death and a lot of injury, and families being destroyed every single day I was at work.
“And you start to think, without realising it, 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.”
About 120 employers from different sectors were represented at the event, where William added: “We spend a vast amount of our time at work. There should be a more open, supportive and compassionate working environment to deal with those sorts of problems.”
Workplace mental health issues cost the economy almost £35billion a year. Experts want the Government to make it obligatory for employers to have mental health first-aiders in workplaces.