Today, January 17, 2017 The Duke and Duchess of Cambridge with Prince Harry held a briefing for their Heads Together Campaign ahead of the London Marathon at the Institute of Contemporary Arts. The purpose of today’s engagement was to outline where they plan to take their charity in the year 2017. You can read what the Duchess had to say below, you can also read what The Duke and Prince Harry had to say at the Heads Together Official Website:
As William has said we have heard time and time again in the course of our work how talking can help heal the hidden challenges we can’t deal with alone. We have seen that two heads are better than one when dealing with a mental health problem.
Yet, the challenge that so many people have is not knowing how to take that first step of reaching out to another person for help. Admitting that they are not coping. Fear, or reticence, or a sense of not wanting to burden another, means that people suffer in silence – allowing the problem to grow larger and larger unchecked.
William, Harry and I have been very privileged to witness in the course of our work countless examples of simple conversations that have changed lives, which were the first step on a path to recovery. Just last week at the Anna Freud Centre, I heard from one mother how talking to a support worker was – in her words – like medicine. Simply by having someone there to have a conversation with helped her immensely.
So the question that William, Harry and I have asked ourselves is how we can get more people to start talking. How do we encourage people to take the first step.
What Heads Together is proposing is that in the weeks leading up to the Marathon, our campaign will showcase people from all walks of life, talking about the life-changing conversations that have helped them with their mental health challenges.
We hope that these real-life examples will serve as encouragement to others to do the same.
If we succeed with this, we will have taken a powerful step in normalizing mental health as an issue in our society, thinking about it as we do our own physical health.
Harry will explain more in a moment about what you can do to help us with this challenge.
But first I would like to introduce Jon, who is running for Heads Together in the Marathon; and Steve, who will tell you the story of how a conversation made such a big difference to their mental health.
Jon and Steve … thank you.
