Prince Harry's 'Spare' Promotion Left Gabor Maté Overwhelmed by the Negative Attention
Gabor Mate reveals that he regrets Prince Harry's 'Spare' promotional interview after the physician received negative backlash.
When Prince Harry was promoting his memoir, Spare, he hosted a live-stream interview with Gabor Maté to discuss mental health. Although the conversation explored Harry's emotional trauma, Maté revealed that he regrets the gathering.
The physician told an outlet that he didn't approve of Harry's decision to make their interaction exclusive.
"I had a gut feeling all along that I shouldn't agree to doing it the way they set it up," he said on "" podcast. "The way it was set up was, in order to watch it people had to buy a copy of Harry's book and I thought this is not fair, four million people have already bought the book, why can't they watch this interview?"
"Do they have to buy another copy?" he added.
Maté later noted that he had his doubts about working with Harry.
"I agreed to something that I didn't really like," he told Steven Bartlett. "Not that I didn't like the idea of talking with him [Harry] I didn't like the idea of putting this behind the paywall so I lost myself just in agreeing to it."
"It was for the most part so negative and so demeaning and so dismissive and so distorted that I barely even know how to talk about it," he said. "I thought by this age I would know better but you know what it really got to me it really got to me."
During their chat, the Duke of Sussex mentioned that Princess Diana's death greatly impacted him.
"I certainly don't see myself as a victim," Harry said. "I'm really grateful to be able to share my story in the hope it will help empower, encourage others and hopefully let people understand that, again, back to the human experience, that we are in some shape or form all connected, especially through trauma."
When meeting with Harry, the Hungarian-Canadian doctor diagnosed the royal with a learning disability.
“Whether you like it or not, I have diagnosed you with ADD. You can agree or disagree,” he said. “I don’t see it as a disease. I see it as a normal response to abnormal stress.”
“I certainly have felt throughout my life, from my younger years, that I always felt slightly different to the rest of my family. I felt strange being in this container. And I know that my mum felt the same," Harry explained.
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The veteran discussed the impact of Diana's passing in his new docuseries Heart of Invictus.
"The biggest struggle for me was no one around me really could help. I didn't have that support structure, that network, or that expert advice to identify what was actually going on with me," the Duke of Sussex stated.
"Losing my mum at such a young age, the trauma I had I was never aware of," Harry continued. "It was never discussed, and I didn't really talk about it, and I suppressed it like most other youngsters would have done. When it all came fizzing out, I was bouncing off the walls — what is going on here? — I am now feeling everything instead of being young."
