Prince Harry and Meghan Markle Will Be in NYC This Week to Discuss Mental Wellness—as the Prince and Princess of Wales Host an Event on the Same Topic, on the Same Day, Across the Pond

Five months after their last visit to New York City—one that involved a dangerous and potentially fatal car chase through the city—Prince Harry and Meghan Markle are set to make their return to the Big Apple this week to mark an inaugural event for their nonprofit, The Archewell Foundation, and to champion a cause close to their hearts.

On Tuesday, the couple will host the first ever in-person event for the Foundation, set to coincide with World Mental Health Day. The event, “The Archewell Foundation Parents’ Summit: Mental Wellness in a Digital Age,” will zoom in on parents navigating mental health challenges in today’s digital age, People reports, and will “give voice to families who are passionate about building a safer online world for children and teens,” the outlet reports. “The conversation will explore how we as a community, both globally and locally, are creating positive change and supporting one another in developing solutions to empower families and uplift our collective mental well-being.” 

Poignantly, the summit will feature parents who have experienced tragic loss connected to their child’s social media use, and “Meghan and Harry have been working with the parents involved in next week’s event behind the scenes,” People writes.

“The families have been engaged with The Archewell Foundation for the past year, bolstering community and driving towards solutions,” a spokesperson for Harry and Meghan said. “Together, they are united in their mission to share personal experiences, data, and research to ensure the same does not happen to other families.”

Harry and Meghan will participate in the summit alongside Surgeon General Vivek Murthy in a conversation moderated by Carson Daly, a board member of Project Healthy Minds. The summit is part of Project Healthy Minds’ second annual World Mental Health Day Festival; the nonprofit is a longtime partner of The Archewell Foundation. Mental health has long been a focus of Harry and Meghan’s work together, and Harry’s work as a working member of the royal family before they met in 2016.

Across the pond—and on the same day—the Prince and Princess of Wales will host their own event to honor World Mental Health Day: “Exploring Our Emotional Worlds,” a forum for young people, “will bring together 100 young delegates nominated by 10 leading mental health and youth engagement charities to start a conversation about how they manage their emotions and how they can be supported to build their resilience and protective factors such as healthy relationships, which make it easier to navigate bumps in the road as they go through life,” William and Kate’s office at Kensington Palace said in a statement.

It will feature “famous races from [BBC] Radio 1 and the wider mental health space,” the statement said, and will provide a space for young people “to talk about the specific mental health challenges their generation faces, explore what more they could do to understand and manage their emotions, and discuss the solutions that could support them to better look after their own and each other’s mental well-being.” Per People, it will be one of several so-far-unannounced visits that the couple will undertake this week in support of World Mental Health Day. “The series of engagements follows Their Royal Highnesses’ longstanding commitment to encourage people to speak openly about their mental health, including through the milestone Heads Together campaign that was launched in 2016,” the Palace said. Heads Together, of course, was launched jointly by William, Kate, and Harry, which aimed to change the national conversation on mental well-being.

Their visit this week will mark the Harry and Meghan’s first return to New York City since May, when Meghan was honored with a Women of Vision Award by the Ms. Foundation and, after the awards ceremony, she, Harry, and her mother Doria Ragland were involved in a “near catastrophic car chase at the hands of a ring of highly aggressive paparazzi,” a spokesperson for the couple said at the time. They continued “This relentless pursuit, lasting over two hours, resulted in multiple near collisions involving other drivers on the road, pedestrians, and two NYPD officers. While being a public figure comes with a level of interest from the public, it should never come at the cost of anyone’s safety. Dissemination of these images, given the ways in which they were obtained, encourages a highly intrusive practice that is dangerous to all involved.”

Following the incident, Harry and Meghan faced backlash for it, and a source speaking to Us Weekly said the couple was “shocked” by the public’s response: “They insist their account of the car chase was absolutely not exaggerated, and for people to say otherwise is so hurtful and out of line,” they said.