Mental illness doesn’t discriminate. Prince William, Prince Harry, Duchess KateMore royals have opened up about their mental illnesses over the years.
William and Harry, on the other hand, were open about how their mother’s death, Princess Diana, affected them.
“My way of dealing with it was sticking my head in the sand, refusing to ever think about my mum, because why would that help?” Harry recalled in 2017. “[I thought] it’s only going to make you sad, it’s not going to bring her back. So from an emotional side, I was like, right, don’t ever let your emotions be part of anything. And then [I] started to have a few conversations and actually all of a sudden, 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.”
Diana died at the age 36 in 1997. William was only 15 years old when Harry was born.
“My brother, you know, bless him, he was a huge support to me,” Harry said in the same 2017 interview with the Telegraph. “He kept saying, ‘This is not right, this is not normal, you need to talk to [someone] about stuff, it’s OK.’”
The brothers, along with Kate, teamed up to create Heads Together, an initiative that aims to end stigmatization surrounding mental health in the U.K.
“It was Catherine who first realized that all three of us were working on mental health in our individual areas of focus,” William revealed in 2017. “She had seen that at the core of adult issues like addiction and family breakdown, unresolved childhood mental health issues were often part of the problem.”
Harry was married Meghan MarkleIn 2018, she joined this initiative. In May 2019, the couple created a text messaging support line that aims at helping people in crisis.
“We are incredibly excited to be launching this service, knowing it has the potential to reach thousands of vulnerable people every day,” they said in a statement at the time. “Over the last few months Shout has started working quietly behind the scenes. We have all been able to see the service working up close and are so excited for its future.”
Harry and Meghan later separated from their charity partnership with William and Kate. The Duke and Duchess moved to the United States in January 2020 after taking a break from their royal duties.
Scroll down to see the most candid quotes about the royal family.
