Royalist is The Daily Beast’s newsletter for all things royal and Royal Family. Subscribe here to get it in your inbox every Sunday.
Prince Harry has suggested that he never heard the words “therapy” or “coaching” when he was a working member of the royal family, in what many will interpret as yet another indictment of the institution of monarchy for failing to take care of its principals’ mental health.
Prince Harry was speaking at the Masters of Scale conference in his role as an ambassador for mental health coaching firm Betterup. No video of the event has been made public, but numerous attendees have tweeted the substance of Harry’s remarks, made in an on-stage conversation with the firm’s founder, Alexi Robichaux.
ADVERTISEMENT
Doron Weber, Vice President & Program Director of the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation, tweeted, “Prince Harry says growing up in the royal family & then spending 10 years in the military, he never heard the words ‘therapy’ or ‘coaching.’ Then the blinkers came off and his life changed.”
Harry said, “I have a coach. I wish I had two,” according to a tweet from the Financial Times’ West Coast correspondent Dave Lee.
And Mercy Corps CEO Tjada D’Oyen McKenna tweeted that Harry said, “From a boss standpoint, if you see your people as numbers, you will fail. You can’t treat them as numbers, but folks who need a human connection to fire on all cylinders.”
An emergency doctor who was present at the event said Harry discussed the idea of looking at mental health as way to “[unlock] human potential.”
Harry previously disclosed in an interview with Oprah Winfrey, for a show he co-produced with her entitled The Me You Can’t See, that it was Meghan who urged him to get therapy.
“It was meeting and being with Meghan, I knew that if I didn’t do therapy and fix myself, that I was going to lose this woman who I could see myself spending the rest of my life with,” Harry said.
