Prince Harry opens up about his and Meghan’s mental health struggles

Prince Harry is opening up about his mother’s death and the mental health struggles he says he and his wife, Meghan, Duchess of Sussex, faced before stepping down from their roles as full-time working members of the royal family.

“I was so angry with what happened to her and the fact that there was no justice at all,” Harry tells Oprah Winfrey in their new Apple TV docuseries, “The Me You Can’t See,” of his feelings after the 1997 death of his mother, Princess Diana, who was killed in a car crash in Paris after being chased by paparazzi. The crash occurred just ahead of Harry’s 13th birthday.

“I didn’t want the life. Sharing the grief of my mother’s death with the world,” the 36-year-old royal family member, who’s sixth in line to the British throne, said in the show’s premiere episode, released Friday.

Saying he was “all over the place, mentally,” and battling “panic attacks” and “severe anxiety,” Harry began drinking “a week’s worth” of alcohol on weekends.

“I found myself drinking not because I was enjoying it, but because I was trying to mask something,” he revealed.

Harry claimed his cries for help were met with “total silence” by his family.

“I wasn’t in an environment where it was encouraged to talk about it either. That was sort of like, squashed,” he said.

“Family members have said, ‘Just play the game, and your life will be easier.’ But I’ve got a hell of a lot of my mum in me.”

In therapy for the last four years, Harry said, “The only way to free yourself and break out is to tell the truth.”

It’s not the first time Harry has sat down with Winfrey — he and Meghan, a former “Suits” star, sat down for a bombshell interview with the media mogul in March. In the TV tell-all, the pair alleged that racism played a role in their decision to move to California last year, and the actor born Meghan Markle said that at one point in 2019 while pregnant with the couple’s first child, she “didn’t want to be alive anymore.”

“Meghan decided to share with me the suicidal thoughts and the practicalities of how she was going to end her life,” Harry said in the Apple TV series.

“The thing that stopped her from seeing it through was how unfair it would be on me after everything that had happened to my mum and to now to be put in a position of losing another woman in my life — with a baby inside of her, our baby,” Harry said.

“The scariest thing for her was her clarity of thought. She hadn’t ‘lost it.’ She wasn’t crazy. She wasn’t self-medicating, be it through pills or through alcohol. She was absolutely sober. She was completely sane, yet in the quiet of night these thoughts woke her up,” he described.

“I was ashamed to go to my family. Because to be honest with you, like a lot of people my age can probably relate to, I’m not going to get what I need,” Harry said as part of “The Me You Can’t See’s” second episode.

The couple spent four years “trying to make it work” with the royal family, according to Harry. “We did everything that we possibly could to stay there and carry on doing the role and doing the job. But Meghan was struggling.”

“I have no doubt my mum would be incredibly proud of me. I’m living the life that she wanted to live for herself. Living the life that she wanted us to be able to live.”

“Certainly now I will never be bullied into silence,” Harry said.

People experiencing suicidal thoughts or urges can call the National Suicide Prevention Lifeline at 1-800-273-8255 or visit SpeakingOfSuicide.com/resources for additional resources.