Prince Harry has taken a new job at mental health charity BetterUp.
The Duke of Sussex will become chief impact officer at the coaching and mental health group, the organisation has confirmed.
As part of his new role, Prince Harry will advocate publicly on topics related to mental health and will also be involved in initiatives including product strategy decisions and charitable contributions.
The 36-year-old royal has spoken on numerous occasions on his struggle to come to terms with the death of his mother Diana, Princess of Wales, in a car crash in 1997 when he was 12 and once admitted that he almost suffered a “complete breakdown” as he grew up determined not to think about the loss.
Harry – whose father is heir to the British throne Prince Charles – said: “I can safely say that losing my mum 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 my work as well.
“I have probably been very close to a complete breakdown on numerous occasions when all sorts of grief and sort of lies and misconceptions and everything are coming to you from every angle.”
The prince – who stepped down as a senior member of the British Royal Family to relocate to the United States with his wife Meghan, Duchess of Sussex, last year – claims that he refused to open about his grief at first as it wouldn’t bring Princess Diana back, but admits after two years of “total chaos” he began talking and felt better for doing so.
He said: “My way of dealing with it was sticking my head in the sand, refusing to ever think about my mum, because why would that help? [I thought] it’s only going to make you sad, it’s not going to bring her back.
“So from an emotional side, I was like ‘right, don’t ever let your emotions be part of anything’. So I was a typical 20, 25, 28-year-old running around going ‘life is great’, or ‘life is fine’ and that was exactly it.
“And then [I] started to have a few conversations and actually all of a sudden, all of this grief that I have never processed started to come to the forefront and I was like, there is actually a lot of stuff here that I need to deal with.”