I know the explanation behind all of Prince Harry’s terribly misguided actions in recent years. I’ve seen it so many times in my clinic. This is what’s going on… and the one question he must ask himself: DR MAX PEMBERTON

For four long years, journalists at this newspaper have worked in the shadow of a series of horrific accusations. They allegedly hacked phones, leaked medical and travel records, and carried out other ‘illegal information gathering’ acts.

They then had to endure an 11-week trial and were cross-examined individually regarding their working lives.

They are not princes. They are hard-working people with mortgages and tuition payments and the usual fear of an ordinary person being publicly accused of something they did not do.

Last week Mr Justice Nicklin dismissed all allegations. Each.

The man who put these people on the witness stand as a result of his lawsuit is the same man who has spent the past decade instructing the rest of us to be kind.

The question that interests me is not whether Prince Harry has the evidence to prove what he claims; The court answered this.

As a psychiatrist, what concerns me most is why he went to court? Why waste four years and probably a lot of money on such a misguided crusade?

I suspect the answer has almost nothing to do with newspapers. We all know the story. He was 12 years old. He walked behind his mother’s coffin, watched by 100 million people, and did not cry, because in this situation a 12-year-old understands that he is not allowed to cry.

Prince William and Prince Harry at the funeral of their mother, Diana, Princess of Wales, in 1997

Childhood grief does not revolve around a regular timeline. He goes underground and waits. And often what he’s waiting for is adulthood, because adulthood provides the one thing a grieving child lacks: the power to take action.

What grief wants above all else is to take back; to return. And since this cannot be done, the wish clings to anything that can provide answers.

The courtroom has this potential. It presents a defendant and presents a finding of fact and a verdict. This offers the one thing that grief does not always provide; someone to blame even if someone has done absolutely nothing wrong.

I have seen smaller versions of this played in my clinic for over 20 years. The widow who devoted ten years to a false complaint against the hospital. The son who could not allow his father to be buried until every question was asked and answered.

Somewhere along the way, the search ceases to be a route to grief and becomes the place where grief no longer lives. While the case is still open, the loss seems somehow less final.

And there’s another thing that happens to people who get caught up in what they perceive as a just cause, and that’s the part that I find hardest to forgive.

They stop seeing people standing in it.

Other people fall out of the frame not because they are deliberately cruel, but because of a complete narrowing of vision.

The reporter lying awake at three in the morning is not someone Harry treats rudely. Someone they act as if they never noticed them.

I’m not sure which is worse. Viewed from high above the moral high ground, little people can seem even smaller.

Harry has talked often about the therapy he’s had over the years, and I don’t doubt a word of it.

But this leads to a disturbing thought about my own profession. There is a type of therapy that gives a person a nice vocabulary related to his injury, but never once asks him to give it up.

They can describe their wounds in full detail, they are fluent and understandable, but they are not completely healed. Insight is not the same as change.

I have seen several people who, after years of therapy, remain so obsessed with their trauma that they are unable to heal and move on with their lives.

Good therapy will eventually leave you less interested in your own story than when you started. Harry didn’t get what he really wanted from this case. Not only because this newspaper did not do what it claimed, but also because there was no order that any judge in England could sign saying your mother should not have died, you were only 12.

No one can give him that. Not this newspaper, not his father, not a Supreme Court justice.

What can help is more boring, harder and freer. It is the slow, unpretentious work done to mourn something irreversible. This is the only way to let go of the weight we have been carrying since childhood.

The truth about infertility

New research has found that infertility in women aged 35 to 49 has increased steadily since 1990 and is expected to continue increasing.

Note that news of such findings always carries a slight note of reproach. It’s as if women postponed having children for fun. It’s like there’s a group of thirty-somethings choosing the second holiday for the first baby.

I’ve never met him. The ones I met were women who couldn’t afford a second-bedroom house. Contract women who know exactly what pregnancy will do to potential clients.

Women are still paying for the degree they are told to get. And women who haven’t met anyone.

Eva Beaujouan from the University of Vienna points out longer periods of education, economic insecurity and unemployment.

We ask women to establish themselves in their prime fertility years, then charge them in years when the sums don’t add up.

None of the women I sat with chose to fill out their time.

I once had a patient in his 50s who was shifting in his chair and grimacing about every 20 seconds. His scans were clear. For years he had been told there was nothing wrong with him. That’s why a study on back pain was conducted at Johns Hopkins University. Working on mice, the team found that in a degenerated spine, nerve fibers that detect pain grow into places where they shouldn’t be. But a hormone called PTH encourages bone cells to produce a protein that pushes them back. We now have a mechanism for why back pain occurs and a possible solution.

Ministers have pledged to end corridor care in hospitals by the end of this parliament. But Jason Killens of the London Ambulance Service says some are taking the problem outside to the car park. More than 20,000 patients a month are at risk of harm due to handover delays of more than an hour. Cleaning the hallways still might not help anyone.

Dr Max prescribes…

Sacrificial sun cream

Most of us don’t apply enough sunscreen. Studies show that we use a quarter to a half of the amount SPF was tested for, making your SPF 50 a much weaker value. And the reason we’re so stingy is because the bottle cost us £30.

So cheap sunscreen isn’t less sunscreen; This is the type most people will use correctly. Altruist was founded by consultant dermatologist and skin cancer surgeon Dr Andrew Birnie to offer excellent sunscreen at the lowest possible price (from £6.36). altruistun.com).

As a man who has undergone skin cancer surgery himself, I believe this. For every tube sold, sunscreen is sent to children with albinism who contracted skin cancer at a young age in Africa. This is worth almost £1.4 million so far.