Prince Harry and Meghan Markle kiss at their wedding in Windsor on May 19
Last Saturday, something extraordinary happened.
While the Royal Wedding was, on the surface, little more than two people publicly acknowledging their love, the way it gripped the nation suggested something else was going on.
Even those who are indifferent to the royals were mesmerised.
One friend who considers herself anti-monarchy sent me countless text messages on everything from Meghan’s dress to the flowers.
When I went out that evening for dinner with friends, it was all we talked about. The table next to us even joined in.
It clearly resonated on a profound level, speaking to us all about something. But what?
A few years ago, I read a fascinating book called When A Princess Dies.
Written by a group of psychoanalysts, it explored the psychology underpinning the public grief that followed the death of Princess Diana.
The book argued that what we were witnessing was not mass hysteria.
Rather, Diana had — as do many people in the public eye — key characteristics that resonate inside us.
When we grieve for them, we are really grieving for something else — yet it is actually easier to cry for someone you have never met, but whose story chimes with some unresolved issues of our own.
This might sound fanciful, yet what’s interesting is that in the months after Diana’s death, psychiatric units reported a decrease in admissions by 50 per cent.
Princess Diana in Sydney, Australia, in 1996
Suddenly, so the thinking goes, people had an outlet for their pent-up distress.
Carl Jung, the 20th-century Swiss psychiatrist, was convinced that everything in the universe is intimately connected through a thing called the collective unconscious.
Though Jung’s ideas have rather fallen out of fashion, I think he provides a useful insight into the psychology behind these public, collective displays of emotion.
He argued that the collective unconscious mind pooled our thoughts and experiences and put them in a sort of melting pot which we could all access.
It is rich in imagery and explains why we share common fears, desires and beliefs.
It is something we all tap into without realising it, and sometimes a person or event comes along that resounds with something deep in our collective unconscious.
I think this is what was happening last Saturday.
It was impossible to watch Prince Harry’s wedding without thinking of Diana and the haunting image of that little boy walking behind her coffin.
In that image, Harry represented our deepest fears — being bereaved or abandoned, left alone and defenceless.
And here was the resolution of that harrowing image: our desperate need to see that, however awful something is, things will turn out well in the end.
For me, what happened last Saturday was each of us coming together to collectively remind ourselves that, even in the darkest moment, there is hope.
That, in the end, everything will be fine.
Great news that the Government is sending debt recovery ‘hit squads’ into NHS hospitals to ensure that overseas patients not entitled to free care pay for their treatment.
About time. If we want to ensure the NHS’s survival, we must protect it from so-called health tourism.
But while these hit squads are welcome, why are they needed at all?
When someone enters the country, why, as a condition of entry, don’t we simply insist that they have appropriate private medical insurance?
That way, any NHS treatment that those people from overseas have can be billed straight to their insurer.
Problem solved.
Why Britain must talk about abortion, too
The abortion debates in the Republic of Ireland have been fascinating to follow — not least because yesterday’s referendum forced the country to have a discussion that involved the latest medical information.
We, in Britain, desperately need to do the same.
Our abortion laws are out of date.
When they were written in 1967, there was a safe margin between the upper limit for termination, which in most cases was 24 weeks, and the number of weeks at which premature babies could survive.
But as medicine has advanced, the age of viability has got lower and lower, until now this ‘safe margin’ no longer exists.
Today, we are at the ethically questionable point where doctors can try to save the life of a premature baby born at 23 weeks, while, in the same hospital, a woman is legally allowed to undergo an abortion on a foetus of the exact same gestation.
It makes no sense, and — despite being pro-choice — I feel very uncomfortable about this. As, privately, do many doctors.
However, this is not something we openly discuss because, as soon as we try, we are denounced as anti-choice.
Of course, the vast majority of terminations are done at 13 weeks or before, with only a fraction — less than 2 per cent — occurring after 20 weeks.
But, even so, this still accounts for about 3,000 terminations a year. That’s getting on for ten a day.
Now consider this: currently, a premature baby born at 21 weeks is unable to survive.
At 22 weeks, there is a 1 per cent survival rate. But at 23 weeks, the survival rate increases to between 11 and 40 per cent.
Based on current premature survival rates, it would seem to me that a cut-off of 22 weeks for an abortion would make sense.
Or 20 weeks, if we wanted to be cautious — but that should be up for debate.
Yet part of the problem is that as soon as anyone tries to have this discussion, they are drowned out by the pro-choice lobby who see any questioning about abortion as an attack on women’s rights.
We need to have this conversation because all of us — men, as well as women — should have a say on such a complex ethical issue.
Give new mums depression check-ups
A cross-party group of 60 MPs has written to the Minister for Public Health asking that all new mothers are given a mental health check-up at six weeks.
This is a fantastic idea. It’s sobering to think that the latest Confidential Enquiry into Maternal Deaths, published in 2016, found that suicide was still the number one cause of death among new mums.
Something urgently needs to be done.
One in nine women experience post-natal depression, and we know this has a direct link with those who take their own lives.
Yet often, GPs and health visitors simply don’t know that mothers are struggling until it’s too late.
A few years ago, working in a busy inner city hospital covering the maternity ward, I saw first-hand the psychological problems that women face.
I’m not surprised that so many new mums struggle. They are bombarded with contradictory advice and given idealised views of childbirth and motherhood.
If you don’t breastfeed, you’re a failure. If you had a caesarean, you’ve cheated.
There’s an expectation that you will immediately love your baby and everything will be wonderful — when in reality you’re feeling overwhelmed and an emotional and physical wreck.
Countless times, I was asked to see a new mum convinced that she was the worst mother on the planet — when actually she was doing admirably.
Along with the six-week check, I’d also propose a ban on all mothering magazines and unsolicited advice.
No Instagram photos of babies happily breastfeeding. No twee cards saying how great it is to be a mum.
If you’ve got a baby, give yourself a break. You’re doing fine!
