Prince Harry: There are big cultural differences about therapy in the UK & US

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I haven’t looked at the British media coverage of this yet, but I’m excited to see how my predictions stack up. Prince Harry did a podcast interview with Reid Hoffman at Masters of Scale. The discussion was about mental health, therapy and veterans. My predictions: the headlines will be about “Woke Harry dropping Truth Bombs” and “Mentally Fragile Harry making dark confessions about his weak mind” and “Harry talks too much, no one cares, when will he ever shut up!” When really, Harry was engaged in a substantive discussion normalizing mental health discussions and people seeking mental health treatment. Some highlights:

Harry on how therapy is pretty common & normalized in California: “You’re absolutely right, Reid, about the cultural differences, they’re immense. You talk about it here in California, ‘I’ll get my therapist to call your therapist.’ Whereas in the U.K. it’s like, ‘Therapist? What therapist? Whose therapist? I don’t have a therapist. No, I definitely don’t, I’ve never spoken to a therapist.’”

Through therapy, Harry said he gained “one of the biggest lessons” in his life. “You’ve sometimes got to go back and to deal with really uncomfortable situations and to be able to process it in order to be able to heal. For me, therapy has equipped me to be able to take on anything. That’s why I’m here now. That’s why my wife is here now.”

His role with BetterUp: “The chief impact officer role for me at BetterUp is 100% about driving advocacy and awareness for mental fitness. 99.9% of people on planet Earth are suffering from some form of loss, trauma, or grief. It doesn’t matter what age you are, but the majority of us have experienced a lot of that in our younger years, therefore we’ve forgotten about it. Now, the body doesn’t forget, the body holds the score as we know. And therefore just as much as there’s a mental health aspect to it, there’s also the emotional aspect to it as well. And I think the more that we can talk about it, the more we understand it. The more we understand it, well, the more we understand each other.”

The link between physical fitness and mental wellbeing. He recounted meeting a soldier suffering from post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) who was “physically shaking” and “unable to look me in the eye.” However, when the soldier returned from a ski trip, Prince Harry was amazed by his change. “It was maybe four months later or six months later after he came back from a ski trip, had basically almost completely healed him. He came back, and he was a different person, it was like I was speaking to his twin brother. But it wasn’t, it was the same guy. That’s the power of sport. It literally has the ability to completely transform an individual.”

Shifting the mindset: “Why do we keep calling it PTSD? Why do we keep calling it a disorder? If you’re going to turn around to someone and label them with a disorder, that’s them screwed for the rest of their life. Why are we not calling it PTSI? It should be an injury. And if you’re telling someone that they’ve got an injury, then guess what they’re going to do? They’re going to try and get better.”

[From People]

That’s an interesting linguistic argument, that it should be post-traumatic stress injury and not post-traumatic stress disorder. I think there’s probably a clinical, medical, DSM (Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders) reason for that. As for Harry and his commitment to being a mental health advocate, he’s great at it. This was never just a “soft” issue for him, something handed to him as an issue when he was a working royal. This has been his interest for years, not only healing himself and understanding his own journey, but trying to help other people, especially veterans.

Photos courtesy of Backgrid and Instar.

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