Prince Harry’s Depression (An insight)
By
OptimistMinds
As a BetterHelp affiliate, we may receive compensation from BetterHelp if you purchase products or services through the links provided.
Author bio
The Optimistminds editorial team is made up of psychologists, psychiatrists and mental health professionals. Each article is written by a team member with exposure to and experience in the subject matter. The article then gets reviewed by a more senior editorial member. This is someone with extensive knowledge of the subject matter and highly cited published material.
In this article, we will highlight and provide insight into Prince Harry’s depression and his struggle with mental health.
Mental health continues to remain, globally, a stigmatized and tabooed topic, despite the excitement about the transparency of the contemporary world we inhabit. Against this context, when a high-profile royal celebrity such as Prince Harry talks about the mental torment he suffered after the sudden death of his mother Diana, Princess of Wales in 1997, the truthful disclosure can become a possible catalyst for breaking the silence around mental illness, at least temporarily. Prince Harry was 12 years old at the time of his mother’s death.
Prince Harry’s Depression
Prince Harry defied British royal tradition in a remarkable and exceptionally frank interview, detailing years of pain handling his life and mental health, issues that he relates directly to his mother’s early death, and admitting that he needs counseling to deal with it.
He confessed to years of panic and anger attacks, revealing for two years that his life was in “chaos”
“He said I just couldn’t put my finger on it I just didn’t know what was going wrong with me.”
The prince said that on several occasions where all kinds of grief and lies and myths come at you from every perspective, he has been very close to total breakdown.” As part of a campaign to raise awareness of mental health problems, the prince recognized that for years, an ostrich policy that resulted in extreme psychological consequences, he had completely blocked his emotions.
Reasons for Prince Harry’s Depression
After the tragic death of Lady Diana in 1997, it took him two decades to come to terms with his pain and struggles.
Prince Harry was 12 years old when on August 31, 1997, a car carrying his mother, Princess Diana, crashed into a Paris tunnel.
He spent most of the following two decades staying largely quiet about her death, through conspiracy theories, constant trials, and royal family chaos.
In Afghanistan, he went to war. In the Telegraph interview, Harry said I can safely say it is not Afghanistan-related.” I’m not one of those guys who had to see my best friend blowing up next to me, and both of their legs had to wear a tourniquet. Luckily, I wasn’t one of those people, thank Goodness.
Then in his late 20s, in a new, revealing interview that offered “unprecedented insight into his past,” Harry crumbled, the Prince told the Daily Telegraph.
“I can safely say that losing my mother at the age of 12, and thus shutting down all my feelings for the last 20 years, has had a very serious impact not only on my personal life but also on my job,” he confessed. I was thinking that thinking about her was only going to make me unhappy and not get her back. So from an emotional point of view, I was like, “Right, don’t ever let your feelings be part of anything.”
The prince said he spent his teenage years and 20s avoiding Princess Diana’s feelings, whose death came at the same time as the royal family was planning to introduce Prince Charles as a couple with his longtime love (and current wife) Camilla.
My way of coping with it the death of his mother] was to stick my head in the sand, to fail to ever think of my mother, so why would it help? “In the podcast, Harry said. “He believed that there was no point in talking about the loss because it would only make him sad and that he would not “get her back.” He believed that his feelings were not “part of anything.
And so, he explained, he “ran around going ‘life is great’ or ‘life is fine'” during his 20’s.
That was a time when as “Crazy Harry,” he generated considerable hype, constantly making smoking marijuana news, getting wild at drunken parties, attending a costume ball in a National Socialist German Workers’ Party uniform, well-oiled evenings with a series of stunning young women in revealing outfits.
And then I began having a lot of discussions,” he said in the podcast.” “And, all of a sudden, all this grief I’ve never dealt with began to come to the fore and I was like, ‘there’s a lot of things I need to deal with here.'”
He also spoke of his family’s “day-to-day pressure.”
“I have no idea how to stay sane with any of us. But it comes with the job, and not being able to have a voice and stand up for yourself is one of the hardest things. You just have to let it wash over you.”
Prince Harry’s recovery from Depression
It wasn’t until Harry started talking to friends and family, then a psychiatrist, that he understood that it was the unattended, unresolved pain of losing his mother so young that he may have been paralyzed.
Harry said that when he was able to invoke the loss of his mother and his inner rage with specialized therapists, especially in recent years, things began to shift and open up to the feelings that he had kept bottled up.
On the advice of several relatives, particularly his brother, who was also profoundly injured by the death of Diana and suffered from seeing his brother struggle, he sought professional assistance.
Harry took up boxing as a means of mitigating the rage, which he joked in the interview was better than hitting someone who did not deserve it.
For those dealing with mental health, finding support, he said is vital, “not just for you, but also for everyone else around you because you become a problem.”
Now, said Harry, he’s in a “good place.”
Prince Harry’s work on mental health awareness
Harry’s candid statement comes as he advocates for the mental wellbeing organization Heads Together that he, his brother William and sister-in-law Kate, the Duke and Duchess of Cambridge, collectively champion and that aims to end the stigma surrounding mental health issues.
But the prince wanted to go public with his emotional turbulence after twenty-odd years of dealing with grief. Not only has he just launched a movement called Heads Together with his brother William and his partner, the Duchess of Cambridge, to de-stigmatize mental illness.
One day at work, he described the mental burden of his numerous charitable causes: “In the morning, I spoke to a girl who had tried to commit suicide, met another guy who suffered so badly from PTSD (Post Traumatic Stress Disorder) that he was shaking, blinking and unable to talk to me and another guy who had tinnitus from a practice grenade, meaning he had to go to bed with me.”
Then I was at a Wellchild event in the afternoon, meeting terminally ill children and talking to their parents. I just was, like, ‘Aargh! ‘You’re parking your problems with what you’re facing.
All you want to do is listen and help, but then you walk away wondering, “How the hell am I supposed to do this?”
Prince Harry on speaking up about Depression
For his part, Prince William praised high-profile public figures who publicly talked about their mental health and said that at the detriment of their well-being, no one should “keep a stiff upper lip.”
The Duke claims that it is appropriate to end the stigma of talking about such essential problems and that the belief that wealthy, influential people do not endure their emotional difficulties is false. He said, “ We all do.” “It’s just that few of us are talking about it.”
The response of people on Prince Harry’s Depression
The interview with Prince Harry “ranks as one of the most candid insights into a senior royal’s troubled inner world ever made public,” as royal correspondent Tom Sykes reports.
“Although Prince Charles opened up to his biographer, Jonathan Dimbleby, the level of detail and the searing honesty Harry put on display in this new interview about the perceived failures of his parents and his anger towards them are unprecedented for the traditionally reserved royal family,” Sykes believes.
There is also the precedent of the open and frank comments of his mother about her collapsing marriage, her issues with the royal family, and her turmoil and eating disorders, which helped raise the lid on those problems – just as her son now seeks to inspire people with mental problems to open up and seek psychological support with his truthful admission.
It has always been a symbol of strength and integrity to hold something inside and our Royal Family has always been the embodiment of that, blessed by God. But for a new generation, Prince Harry has just redefined power and integrity. And, she wrote, Gordon could “think of no more fitting tribute than that to his mother.”
Prince William on Depression
Prince William speaks about his expectations from future generations in an interview with Harry before the podcast, stressing that “Catherine and I are clear that we want both George and Charlotte to grow up feeling able to talk about their feelings and emotions.”
“It’s all about clicking,” confessed Harry. “My brother, God bless him, has been a tremendous help to me.”
His brother, Prince William, who one day is supposed to take the throne, was a “great support,” Harry said, urging him to speak to a specialist.
Here is a link to the speech made by Prince Harry on mental health.
In this article, we highlighted and provided insight into Prince Harry’s depression and his struggle with mental health.
BetterHelp: A Better Alternative
Those who are seeking therapy online may also be interested in BetterHelp. BetterHelp offers plenty of formats of therapy, ranging from live chats, live audio sessions and live video sessions. In addition, unlimited messaging through texting, audio messages and even video messages are available here.
BetterHelp also offers couples therapy and therapy for teenagers in its platform. Furthermore, group sessions can also be found in this platform, covering more than twenty different topics related to mental health and mental illness. The pricing of BetterHelp is also pretty cost-effective, especially considering the fact that the platform offers financial aid to most users.
FAQs: Prince Harry’s Depression
Is Harry mentally unwell?
Prince Harry has previously acknowledged that when coping with the media and handling the sorrow of losing his mother, Princess Diana, he struggled with his mental health. Prince William has often spoken about the value of preserving good mental health, but his struggles have scarcely been discussed.
How does Prince Harry get paid?
The wealth-tracking website celebritynetworth.com reports that Prince Harry is worth $40 million, an amount he has accrued from funds left to him by his mother, Princess Diana, an inheritance from the Queen Mother (which supposedly included her jewels), and his former salary as a British Army captain (where according to Forbes, he received between $50,000 and $53,000 a year).
Did Harry have a nervous breakdown?
Before seeking treatment, Prince Harry admitted he had been very close to a complete nervous breakdown.”
How much did Prince Harry make as a royal?
The net worth of Prince Harry is at least $25 million, which consists of Princess Diana’s inheritance and Prince Charles’ annual allowance.
Does Meghan leave Harry?
Prince Harry and Markle declared in January that they would move back as senior royal family members. Many thought that it was a decision by Markle.
References
Overcome Depression and Find Joy in Life Again with BetterHelp
