Prince Harry is no stranger to the harsh public eye. Over the years he’s made more than a few mistakes that made their way to the front pages of tabloids and lived up to his party boy reputation. But now, Prince is both changing his image and sharing with the world the very deep struggles he faced following his mother’s tragic death.
“I sort of buried my head in the sand for many, many years,” he said during a 30-minute interview with London's Daily Telegraph for its “Mad World” podcast. “I can safely say that losing my mom at the age of 12 and therefore shutting down all of my emotions for the last 20 years has had a quite serious effect on not only my personal life, but also my work as well.”
He explained in the podcast that he chose to ignore his mother’s passing and the subsequent trauma for two decades, “and then two years of total chaos.” The Prince added, “And I just … I couldn’t put my finger on it, I didn’t know what was wrong with me. I thought this was part of you know, growing up or whatever.”
It was then, Prince Harry said, his brother Prince William suggested he seek counseling. “My brother you know, bless him, he was a huge support to me and kept saying ‘You know this is not right, this is not normal, you need to talk about this stuff, it’s ok.’”
Prince Harry has long been involved in making the world more aware of mental health issues. Along with his brother and sister-in-law Duchess Kate, Harry is spearheading the campaign “Heads Together,” which promotes mental health awareness and provides practical tools to friends and family of those suffering.
“I do feel in a good place,” Harry said of his post-counsel life. “Because of the process that I’ve been through over the last two and a half years, three years, I’ve now been able to take my work seriously, been able to take my private life seriously as well. And be able to put blood, sweat, and tears into the things that really make a difference. The things that I think will make a difference to everybody else.”
Prince Harry is far from alone in his struggles with mental health, however, he is one of the lucky few to receive appropriate access and care to professionals. Researchers from NYU Langone Medical Center announced Monday their findings after analyzing a federal health information database. The research team concluded that 3.4 percent of the U.S. population (more than 8.3 million) adult Americans suffer from serious psychological distress, or SPD.
Sadly, one of the study’s other key findings is that, over the course of the surveys taken from 2006 to 2014, access to health care services deteriorated for people suffering from severe distress when compared to those who did not report SPD.
“Although our analysis does not give concrete reasons why mental health services are diminishing, it could be from shortages in professional help, increased costs of care not covered by insurance, the great recession, and other reasons worthy of further investigation,” Dr. Judith Weissman, lead study investigator and a research manager in the Department of Medicine at NYU Langone, said in a statement.
The NYU Langone research team estimated that nearly one in 10 distressed Americans (9.5 percent) still did not have health insurance in 2014 that would give them access to a psychiatrist or counselor.
The Department of Health and Human Services has shared a few resources so Americans can find health care with or without insurance, if they need it here.
Ladder leads out of darkness.Photo credit 
Woman's reflection in shadow.Photo credit 
Young woman frazzled.Photo credit 
Robin Williams performs for military men and women as part of a United Service Organization (USO) show on board Camp Phoenix in December 2007
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Will your current friends still be with you after seven years?
Professor shares how many years a friendship must last before it'll become lifelong
Think of your best friend. How long have you known them? Growing up, children make friends and say they’ll be best friends forever. That’s where “BFF” came from, for crying out loud. But is the concept of the lifelong friend real? If so, how many years of friendship will have to bloom before a friendship goes the distance? Well, a Dutch study may have the answer to that last question.
Sociologist Gerald Mollenhorst and his team in the Netherlands did extensive research on friendships and made some interesting findings in his surveys and studies. Mollenhorst found that over half of your friendships will “shed” within seven years. However, the relationships that go past the seven-year mark tend to last. This led to the prevailing theory that most friendships lasting more than seven years would endure throughout a person’s lifetime.
In Mollenhorst’s findings, lifelong friendships seem to come down to one thing: reciprocal effort. The primary reason so many friendships form and fade within seven-year cycles has much to do with a person’s ages and life stages. A lot of people lose touch with elementary and high school friends because so many leave home to attend college. Work friends change when someone gets promoted or finds a better job in a different state. Some friends get married and have children, reducing one-on-one time together, and thus a friendship fades. It’s easy to lose friends, but naturally harder to keep them when you’re no longer in proximity.
Some people on Reddit even wonder if lifelong friendships are actually real or just a romanticized thought nowadays. However, older commenters showed that lifelong friendship is still possible:
“I met my friend on the first day of kindergarten. Maybe not the very first day, but within the first week. We were texting each other stupid memes just yesterday. This year we’ll both celebrate our 58th birthdays.”
“My oldest friend and I met when she was just 5 and I was 9. Next-door neighbors. We're now both over 60 and still talk weekly and visit at least twice a year.”
“I’m 55. I’ve just spent a weekend with friends I met 24 and 32 years ago respectively. I’m also still in touch with my penpal in the States. I was 15 when we started writing to each other.”
“My friends (3 of them) go back to my college days in my 20’s that I still talk to a minimum of once a week. I'm in my early 60s now.”
“We ebb and flow. Sometimes many years will pass as we go through different things and phases. Nobody gets buttsore if we aren’t in touch all the time. In our 50s we don’t try and argue or be petty like we did before. But I love them. I don’t need a weekly lunch to know that. I could make a call right now if I needed something. Same with them.”
Maintaining a friendship for life is never guaranteed, but there are ways, psychotherapists say, that can make a friendship last. It’s not easy, but for a friendship to last, both participants need to make room for patience and place greater weight on their similarities than on the differences that may develop over time. Along with that, it’s helpful to be tolerant of large distances and gaps of time between visits, too. It’s not easy, and it requires both people involved to be equally invested to keep the friendship alive and from becoming stagnant.
As tough as it sounds, it is still possible. You may be a fortunate person who can name several friends you’ve kept for over seven years or over seventy years. But if you’re not, every new friendship you make has the same chance and potential of being lifelong.