Prince Harry’s trauma doctor says he didn’t mean to diagnose the royal with a “disease” when he told him he had Attention Deficit Disorder.
Prince Harry’s trauma doctor says he didn’t mean to diagnose the royal with a “disease” when he told him he had Attention Deficit Disorder
Dr Gabor Maté, 79, who specialises in traumas and childhood development, told the Duke of Sussex, 38, in March during a paid-for online question and answer session the royal was suffering from the neurological condition as they also discussed the impact of Princess Diana’s death.
The self-help guru has now said in a chat with The Guardian newspaper: “I wasn’t diagnosing him with a disease.
“I said, ‘You’ve got no disease.’ I said, ‘You've got a normal response to abnormal circumstances.’
“Because if a child is stressed like he was, or I was, what do you do with that stress? You can’t escape it, so what do you do? The brain tunes out?
“But this is happening when the brain is developing and that affects its circuitry.”
Dr Maté told Harry in March: “Whether you like it or not, I diagnosed you with ADD. It takes one to know one, so I share that diagnosis.”
Dad-of-two Harry, who has children Archie, three, and 22-month-old Lilibet with his wife Meghan, Duchess of Sussex, 41, responded: “Okay. Should I accept that or should I look into it?”
He also joked to Dr Maté during the £19-per-ticket chat: “Thanks for the free session.”
Dr Maté, 79, is a controversial figure who has provoked outrage due to past comments, including a comparison of Hamas to the Jewish heroes of the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising against Nazis.
The Holocaust survivor has also defended Palestinian rocket attacks on Israeli civilians and he once branded the Israeli government “terrorists”.
Dr Maté was branded in stories about his chat with Harry as a “so-called ‘trauma expert’”, and a “Holocaust survivor who hails Hamas as ‘heroes’”, which he told The Guardian left him upset.
He said: “I thought by this age I was past that stuff.”
The doctor added the stories and social media trolling left him “roiling inside with upset and even some degree of shame”.
He added about reaching out to a psychiatrist friend who he said asked him: “What is it about this whole thing that upset you so much?”
Dr Maté said: “That’s my trigger. If somebody disagrees with me, that’s great, I don’t care. But let them see me and let them disagree with what I actually say and who I actually am and not their distortion.”
Tagged in Prince Harry