It does feel like I’ve been ignoring Prince Harry, right? I didn’t mean to. It’s just that he’s so consistently awesome these days, and I feel like sometimes you guys might be tired of Honking For Harry. So, what has Harry been up to recently? He’s doing consistent events every week, but he’s not always getting attention and coverage for the events. Over the weekend, he hosted a barbecue for Heads Together, the mental health umbrella organization he started with William and Kate. William and Kate did not attend the BBQ, even though it went down at Kensington Palace. Harry spent a lot of time with mental health care providers and people struggling with mental health issues. Harry even spoke about how he wish he had started talking about his mother’s death much sooner. Prince Harry has revealed that he regrets ‘not talking’ about the death of his mother Princess Diana for much of his life. Speaking with former football star Rio Ferdinand, who lost his wife to cancer last year, Harry, 31, discussed bereavement at a Kensington Palace barbecue for mental health campaign group Heads Together. The young royal discussed the impact the Princess of Wales’ death in 1997, when Harry was 12, has had on him when asked by Ferdinand how he coped with the loss. The prince admitted that it was only three years ago that he began to open up about how he felt about losing his mother, saying he didn’t speak about Diana’s death ‘for the first 28 years of my life.’ He said he’d come to realise that talking was the key: ‘It is OK to suffer, but as long as you talk about it. It is not a weakness. Weakness is having a problem and not recognising it and not solving that problem. A lot of people think if you’ve got a job, if you’ve got financial security, if you’ve got a family, you’ve got a house, all that sort of stuff, everyone seems to think that is all you need and you are absolutely fine to deal with stuff.’ ‘It is very easy for someone to look at someone like Rio Ferdinand and say, “You get paid all the money in the world, you are a successful footballer, you have fast cars.” But at the end of the day his wife was snatched from him at an early stage of his life with her. So of course he is going to suffer, it doesn’t matter if he has an amazing job.’ The prince said the ‘key message’ is that ‘anyone can suffer from mental health problems, whether you’re a member of the Royal Family, whether you’re a soldier, whether you’re a sports star, whether you’re a team sport, individual sport, whether you’re a white van driver, whether you’re a mother, father, a child, it doesn’t really matter. What you’ve had to go through in your day, week, year, (the) experience you’ve had – whether it’s losing a parent, whether it’s depression, whether it’s anxiety, whatever it is – you are actually unbelievably similar to each other in the way you have to deal with it.’ [From The Daily Mail] I just love him. And notice that his message seems contrary to the often-bungled message from the Duchess of Cambridge, who often seems to indicate that mental health issues mostly occur when children don’t have two parents and a home. Harry’s message is universal. And I like how personal he is, talking about his mother and how he closed up and didn’t talk about her death for sixteen years. While talking (and talk therapy) doesn’t solve every mental health problem, it’s the first step and just talking about it and de-stigmatizing mental health issues is a great thing. It’s a shame that Will and Kate wanted to go sailing instead. Photos courtesy of WENN.
