‘Depression is depression’: Prince Harry’s memoir

You’ve been burned. My Story. What I Know Now: Simple Lessons Learned The Hard Way. Finding Sarah: A Duchess’s Journey To Find Herself. The many self-help tomes by Sarah Ferguson, Duchess of York have set the expectation that we will be hunkering down to read, as one critic wrote facetiously of one of Fergie’s books, “homespun wisdom sure to be passed down from generation to generation”. (Excerpts from her books, which addressed everything from her mother leaving the family for an Argentinian polo player to facing near bankruptcy: “When you lie down with dogs, you can’t be shocked to get fleas.” Also: “I need healing.“)

It’s different this time.

The British royals do have a storied history of helping regular people navigate some of their most stressful times. When King George VI refused to leave London during the Blitz in World War II, and instead visited areas of the city that had been heavily bombed in a bid to show sympathy and solidarity with his fellow citizens, he helped build morale in a way that boosted mental health at the time, says Blazer.

“What they were expecting was a kind of collapse of morale, fear, and that people would be committing suicide; well they didn’t,” says Blaze, saying part of the reason was that the English people felt connected to each other as part of a common cause. “And the King is part of this, this really important message, ‘You’re connected to me, I’m connected to you’.”

Well, damn.

And Harry has long advocated to end the stigma surrounding mental health issues. Not to mention the release earlier this year of the multi-part documentary on mental health he made with Oprah Winfrey, The Me You Can’t See, in which he revealed the fears and anxiety he suffers as a result of his mother’s death in a car crash in 1997.

So, really, no strip billiards is what you’re saying.

The jury’s out. But we could get his advice on romance. “It would have been very difficult for him dating, as we know, in the public eye, so I think there are lots of interesting things to learn,” says Juliet Rieden, author of The Royals In Australia, and editor-at-large of The Australian Women’s Weekly.” And Harry having “the courage to stand up for what he wanted and for what he wanted for his own life” – he and Meghan left the royal family last year, and moved to California – “is something everyone can learn from, whether you’re a prince or a pauper.”

Could this usher in a new era of well-received royal advice?

“The kind of triumph over adversity, ‘What I learned from my mistakes’, this is very much the spirit of the age [now],” says Blazer, noting that this wasn’t the case either in 1951 or 1956 when, respectively, memoirs by The Duke of Windsor and his wife, The Duchess of Windsor, for whom he abdicated the British throne, came out. (“His reputation was already trashed,” says Rieden.)

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Still, there will always be some resistance to taking advice from the rich and the ultra-privileged. As Blazer points out about King George VI: “In George Orwell’s diaries of the war, he did note that when the King did go to the East end [of London to show solidarity] on one occasion he was booed…. Everybody knew well that [unlike them] he wouldn’t be sleeping in a bloody underground station that night.”

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