Prince William Opens up About How Having Children Affected His Mental Health

Prince William is a proud advocate of mental health, and during a recent speech, opened up about his own struggles following the birth of his children.

William, who shares Prince George, 5, Princess Charlotte, 3, and 6-month-old Prince Louis with his wife Kate Middleton, joined in on a discussion about mental health on Tuesday in London at the This Can Happen conference, where he reflected on how his “traumatic “experiences as an air ambulance pilot resurfaced after becoming a father.

“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,” he said, according to PEOPLE. “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.”

“So the only place you can talk about it is at work and if you don’t necessarily have the right tools or the right environment at work, you can see why things can snowball and get quite bad,” he continued.

He went on to praise the military for taking steps to incorporate mental health into their training.

“We all have mental health. Just as we look after our physical health, we look after our mental health,” the 36-year-old Duke of Cambridge continued. “What I’ve noticed is we could really use some more voices in the workplace. Standing up and saying, ‘Yeah, I’ve been there. I’ve done that, and I could have done more. I think setting a culture of this open, understanding, supportive environment in the workplace where HR is a door that people feel they can go to, I think that’s really important.”

William’s younger brother, Prince Harry, has also been open when it comes to his own struggles with mental health, recently revealing that he pursued therapy to deal with the death of his mother, Princess Diana. He credited his brother, along with other family members, for surrounding him with support and encouragement, which helped him seek treatment.

Prince William and Prince Harry, along with their wives, Kate Middleton and Meghan Markle, have put a special focus on mental health in recent years, creating the Heads Together initiative to help end the stigma surrounding mental health awareness and treatment.