Duke: stars scared to show support for mental health

Mood around royal charity only changed when ‘we put our necks on the line’, says Prince William at Davos

CELEBRITIES shied away from supporting the Heads Together charity because they were afraid of the stigma surrounding mental health, Prince William has said. The Duke of Cambridge revealed that “not one person wanted to be involved” when he, the Duchess of Cambridge and Prince Harry were recruiting support for their flagship campaign three years ago.

Heads Together, which focuses on fighting the prejudice associated with mental health and enabling people to access help, has since attracted the support of numerous celebrities, including Stephen Fry, Rio Ferdinand, Andrew Flintoff and Ruby Wax.

However, the Duke said that it was only after the royal trio put their “necks on the line” that they began to secure celebrity involvement.

Addressing the World Economic Forum at Davos, he said: “What was very interesting when we set up the campaign was that not one celebrity wanted to join us, not one person wanted to be involved.

“We reached out to a lot of people and no one, when we started, was interested in being part of Heads Together, because it was mental health.”

The initiative began breaking into the public consciousness in 2017, a year in which it was designated lead charity for the London Marathon and Prince Harry revealed he had sought counselling for mental health problems.

The Duke of Cambridge has also spoken of seeking help after witnessing traumatic incidents in his roles as an air ambulance pilot.

“Obviously once we started getting the ball rolling, once we started showing people a lot more what we were going to do, people realised Catherine, Harry and I had actually put our necks on the line here, that actually it was OK,” he said.

The Duke was speaking alongside Jacinda Ardern, prime minister of New Zealand, which has a high youth suicide rate, as well as John Flint, the chief executive of HSBC, who is driving an initiative to improve the mental wellbeing among the bank’s staff.

Improvements to mental health provision, including a possible four-week minimum treatment target for children and young people, formed a major plank of the NHS long-term plan announced earlier this month, following years of negative headlines about a “Cinderella service”.

The Duke added that society as a whole needed to become better at encouraging people to talk about mental health. He said the British were particularly embarrassed about discussing emotions while the Second World War had begun a culture of “not talking” that had continued down the generations.

Heads Together currently works with young people, emergency services, homeless and veterans charities.