Lady Gaga opens up to Prince William on mental health

What’s a few thousand miles between friends? The Royal Family’s Facebook page has shared video of Prince William’s FaceTime chat with Lady Gaga about mental health issues.

With the pop star sipping coffee in her LA kitchen, and the Duke of Cambridge sitting in his Kensington Palace study, the two talked about the persistent stigma preventing people from discussing mental illness.

William said he found Lady Gaga’s open letter about living with PTSD after she was sexually assaulted at 19 years old “incredibly moving and very brave.”

The Born This Way singer, who performed at Coachella this weekend, said: “For me waking up every day and feeling sad and going on stage is something that is very hard to describe. There’s a lot of shame attached to mental illness. You feel like something’s wrong with you.

“And in my life you go look at all these beautiful and wonderful things that I have and I should be so happy. But you can’t help it if that in the morning you wake up, you are so tired, you are so sad, you are so full of anxiety and the shakes that you can barely think.”

It’s time that everyone speaks up and really feels normal about mental health.

Prince William, whose Heads Together charity arranged the conversation, said: “It’s time that everyone speaks up and really feels normal about mental health. It’s the same as physical health. Everybody has mental health. We shouldn’t be ashamed of it.”

Last week, Prince Harry opened up about his psychological struggle over the death of his mother. He said he finally sought counselling in his late twenties after shutting off his own grief for many years.

Harry told The Daily Telegraph: “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?…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.”