Mental health stigma must end, Prince William said on a panel at Davos. He also spoke of his own struggles with mental health and the British tradition of suppressing emotions.
LONDON — Prince William, who has long spoken publicly about his emotional struggles, has taken his campaign for mental health awareness to Davos, Switzerland, urging global leaders to help break the stigma. Prince William, the Duke of Cambridge, who is second in line to the British throne, spoke candidly on Wednesday about the difficulty he faced in trying to get celebrities to sign on to his cause, revealing — without naming names — that not one had initially offered to join the mental health campaign that he has run since 2016 with his wife and his brother.
It was only once they went public with their Heads Together campaign and “people realized that Catherine, Harry and I put our necks on the line here,” he said, that well-known names began supporting the effort. Its advocates now include the actress Judi Dench. At the World Economic Forum’s annual meeting in the Swiss mountain resort of Davos, Prince William interviewed David Attenborough, the film producer of nature programs and a respected voice on climate change, on Monday. But he also spoke of the silence about mental health that was common in his parents’ and grandparents’ generations, and he called for people to be more open about their emotions.
The duke, whose grandmother Queen Elizabeth II trained as a driver and mechanic during World War II, said the war had been so devastating that many people who had lived through it decided that keeping quiet about the traumas was the best way to deal with them. In many cases that stoicism was passed down to their children and grandchildren.
"You know, we all learn from our parents; we all learn from how they deal with things,” William said, adding that a whole generation had inherited the attitude that the way to deal with problems was not to talk about them. Now is the time to break that pattern, he added, saying: “We should talk about it, and we should get over it.”