“It was very very difficult for everybody, losing so many loved ones and dealing with such horrendous circumstances that no matter how much you can talk you were never going to fix the issue..
The prince went on to speak of his own experiences, as previously reported, while working in the air ambulance, before he quit back in 2017.
“I was dealing with a lot of trauma on a day in, day out basis, stuff that your body is not programmed to deal with,” the Duke said.
Mental health is also an issue close to the heart of Ardern, having lost friends to suicide. She told the panel that she did not have to look far in her Cabinet to find colleagues in the same position.
“One of the sad facts for New Zealand is that everyone knows someone who has taken their own life. We’re a small country, less than five million people, but last year more than 600 people committed suicide,” Ardern said.
Prince William spoke about the importance of removing the stigma around mental health.
“Ten years ago I knew nothing about mental health. I read about it, and became immersed in it, because it was a key social problem, globally, and someone had to burst the bubble,” he said.
The Prince now warns that the scale of the mental health problem is enormous.
“We’ve got to start tackling it now, because there are still so many people who are suffering in silence. There is still this stigma attached to mental health that we’ve got to completely obliterate before we can move to the next stage.”
Meanwhile, Ardern spoke on the steps New Zealand is taking to ensure a more open discussion around the issues of mental health and suicide, from a young age.
“When you provide service within schools that is incredibly beneficial – so we made a decision therefore that we would roll out through every state secondary school in New Zealand, nurses in our schools that work within health teams, knowing that a young person might not always go to their counsellor but they will often seek support around sexual heath or drugs and also just every day issues.
“Just having those nurses available has proven through evidence to be a really successful way of really dealing with youth mental issues.
“We’re particularly focused even on primary school-aged children in areas where we unfortunately have had the occurrence of severe earthquakes, because we know that’s affected our children and young people’s resilience,” Ardern said.
Ardern agreed that while mental heath was discussed in New Zealand society, it did not reduce the stigma attached to mental health issues.
