Prince William Admits It’s Still ‘Very Difficult’ to Talk About His Mental Health Struggles: ‘I Get Very Emotional’

Royal father-of-three Prince William continues to open up about how incredibly difficult it is to discuss his mental health struggles and just admitted he still gets “very emotional” while discussing the topic at the World Economic Forum.

On Wednesday, January 23, the 36-year-old took part in a mental health panel discussion at the event in Davos, Switzerland. William was there to speak about his belief that the world’s major employers have a role to play in promoting healthy communities and workplaces. “I think now, there’s a generation finally realizing that this is not normal, we should talk about it, we should get over [the stigma],” the Duke of Cambridge said. “We’ve got to start tackling it now so that our children and grandchildren don’t have to go through this process, and they can be a lot more open about it.”

The royal, who previously worked as an air ambulance pilot, once again spoke about his personal experience struggling with mental health. “I still find it very difficult to talk about it,” Kate Middleton‘s husband said. “I get very emotional about it because it relates very closely to my children and so it is very hard to talk about it.” William then revealed that people in the medical community don’t easily shake off tragedies that they experience on a daily basis but that the “most important” thing was “understanding and realizing it was there.”

“I think if I hadn’t been doing what I was doing, I might have gone into my shell a bit and gone, ‘I can deal with this myself.’ Then potentially, down the line, it manifests itself in a much worse situation,” he added. “I know that if I hadn’t taken the action that I did then, I would have definitely gone down a slippery slope and I would have been dealing with mental illness on a different level.”

This isn’t the first time the prince has openly discussed his mental health. At the This Can Happen conference in London back in November 2018, William said that his job began taking a toll on him after he became a dad and “worked several times on traumatic jobs involving children.” He admitted at the time, “The relation between the job and the personal life was what really took me over the edge. And I started feeling things that I’ve never felt before. And I got very sad and very down about this particular family.”

William — who is a parent to Prince George, 5, Princess Charlotte, 3, and Prince Louis, 9 months — added, “You start to take away bits of the job and keep them in your body. And, of course, you don’t want to share with your loved ones because you just don’t want to bring that sort of stuff home.”

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