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Prince Harry: I regret not talking about my mother's death sooner | Prince Harry: I regret not talking about my mother's death sooner |
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Prince Harry has drawn on his experience of losing his mother to highlight mental health issues, revealing that he regrets not talking sooner about how her death affected him. | |
The 31-year-old spoke to footballer Rio Ferdinand, a father of three whose wife, Rebecca Ellison, died from cancer last year, about dealing with the death of a parent. | |
Harry, who first spoke publicly three years ago about the impact of the death of Diana, Princess of Wales in a car crash in 1997, when he was 12, told the former England and Manchester United footballer: “You know, I really regret not ever talking about it.” | |
The exchange took place at a Kensington Palace barbecue attended by a number of sports stars hosted by Heads Together, set up by Harry with the Duke and Duchess of Cambridge to bring together eight mental health charity and organisations with the aim of tackling the stigma around depression and other mental health problems. | |
Ferdinand, the athletes Dame Kelly Holmes and Iwan Thomas, and the cyclist Victoria Pendleton were among guests. | |
The prince told the BBC: “The key message here today is that everyone can suffer from mental health. Whether you are a member of the royal family, whether you are a soldier, whether you are a sports star, whether you are a team sport, individual sport, whether you are a white van driver, whether you’re a mother, father, a child, it doesn’t really matter.” | |
Ferdinand later told the broadcaster: “He’s [Harry] gone through different stages in his life that my kids are going to be going towards. So, to get some of his experiences is very rewarding for me and every educational in many ways.” | |
Harry said later: “It is very easy 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 event was an opportunity to show that even “unflappable” sporting personalities could experience mental health problems. He told BBC Breakfast: “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 it.” | |
He also spoke to Holmes, who won gold in the 2004 Olympics in the 800 metres and 1,500 metres, and who revealed her experience of depression in her autobiography. She said: “I had depression going through my athletics career, no one knew at all what I was going through.” She said it had only been in the last few years that she had been more open. | |
Thomas advised anyone experiencing mental health issues: “Don’t feel embarrassed, don’t feel shameful about it if you deem it as a weakness, as I did. | |
“I felt mentally I was weak, because I had gone from someone who was mentally tough, mentally very strong, someone physically strong, to someone who felt vulnerable and weak. And you are not weak. You are just going through a tough time in your life, where, if you can talk to someone, hopefully, they will help you through the other side.” |