It took almost twenty years for Prince Harry to understand how much his mother’s death had affected his life, and even more for him to find a way to publicly tell what happened to him when he decided to leave the British royal family behind. Because behind the break with Buckingham Palace, the tensions with his father Charles III, the now compromised relationship with his brother William and the move overseas together with Meghan Markle, there is also a personal story of psychological suffering that the Duke of Sussex has decided to face openly, saying that he fell into depression for about two weeks just as he was trying to build an existence away from the pressures of the monarchy.
The confession comes from Redefining Grief: Building Resilience Through Lossa new MasterClass published on October 8, on the eve of World Mental Health Day, in which Harry, now forty-two years old, talks with Mary-Frances O’Connor, a neuroscientist and psychologist at the University of Arizona, specialized in the study of grief and its effects on the brain and body. Not a simple interview about life at court, but a long conversation in which the prince retraces some of the most difficult moments of his existence, trying to explain how the loss of a loved one can continue to influence behavior, relationships and choices even decades later.
Depression after escaping from the Royal Family
It is the end of 2019 when Harry and Meghan, together with little Archie, decide to spend some time in Canada, far from the media and institutional pressure that now accompanies every public appearance. The official decision to renounce the role of active members of the royal family would have arrived in January 2020, but the transfer already represents the first step towards a separation that would have profoundly changed the balance of the British monarchy.
For Harry that period, imagined as an opportunity to find serenity, instead turns into something unexpected. After years spent in a state of constant stress, he says he experienced what he calls a real adrenaline crash.
“We went to Canada to get away from everything and finally have the space to think,” explains the duke, recalling that two or three days away from the environment he was used to was enough to feel a sensation he had never experienced before.
His organism, according to the reconstruction he offers, seemed to have become accustomed to functioning only under pressure. With that tension gone, Harry says he suddenly felt unable to tackle even daily activities. “It was as if I needed stress to produce the adrenaline needed to make my brain work. I felt useless even at home,” he recalls, adding that he fell into depression for about two weeks and felt like he could no longer function without that constant push.
A personal statement which is not equivalent, in itself, to the communication of a clinical diagnosis, but which describes a period of profound emotional difficulty. For the prince it represents above all the discovery of a mechanism which, according to his story, had unconsciously regulated a good part of his life: using tension, work and adrenaline as tools to avoid having to deal with a much older pain.
Lady Diana, the baby who couldn’t cry
To understand Harry’s words we need to go back to August 31, 1997, when Diana Spencer died at the age of 36 in a car accident in Paris. William is fifteen, Harry just twelve. A few days later, the images of the two brothers walking behind their mother’s coffin, before the eyes of millions of people, become one of the most dramatic moments in the contemporary history of the British monarchy.
Harry has said several times that he experienced that experience as a fracture destined not to heal easily. In the new conversation he returns to a particularly painful detail: after Diana’s death, for years he was unable to cry.
He remembers not shedding tears when the news was told to him, crying during the burial and not being able to do so again for almost two decades due to that loss. Back then he thought that holding back his emotions was a show of strength. Today he recognizes that behavior as the reaction of a child who did not have the necessary tools to deal with such a devastating loss.
But there is another passage that makes the confession even more intimate. Harry explains that for years he felt almost obliged to remain sad, as if returning to being happy would mean betraying his mother’s memory. Suffering had become, in his perception, a demonstration of love, while the possibility of feeling joy again seemed accompanied by a sense of guilt that was difficult to overcome.
Over time, he says, a different awareness came: Diana would have wanted to see him happy. A change of perspective that the prince considers decisive in his personal journey.
Panic attacks and years in the army
Military life had long offered Harry a way to keep his mind occupied. Having enlisted at the age of twenty, he found in the army a discipline and intensity capable of absorbing almost all of his energy. The mission to be accomplished, the constant attention and the need to act became a form of distraction from the emotions that he struggled to recognize.
However, upon returning from the second mission in Afghanistan in 2013, something began to change. Harry says some of his experiences during his military service seemed to bring back previous traumas. Panic attacks arrive and a feeling of suffocation which, at certain moments, emerges even when wearing a shirt with a tight collar.
Seemingly ordinary situations become difficult to manage and the prince begins to understand that the problem is not just about the stress associated with public commitments. It is the moment in which he recognizes the need to face what he had continued to hide, even from himself.
In his therapeutic journey there is also space for a particular experience, linked to the mother’s scent. Harry says a therapist suggested he use a fragrance associated with Diana to recover memories that seemed to have disappeared. For years he couldn’t clearly remember even the sound of her laughter or her voice. Finding a familiar smell again allowed him to get closer to a part of his childhood that he had unconsciously tried to erase together with the pain.
Charles, William and a divided family
The new declarations inevitably arrive in a family context still marked by the consequences of the separation between Harry and the monarchy. The relationship with her father Charles III and above all that with William have gone through years of tension, fueled by interviews, by the documentary made with Meghan for Netflix and by the publication of her autobiography in 2023 Sparein which the Duke of Sussex told his version of the dynamics within the Windsor family.
The prince has never hidden that he felt, in various circumstances, little understood and little protected by the institution to which he belonged by birth. A distance that ended up superimposing two dimensions that are difficult to separate: the private one, made up of misunderstandings between a father and his children and between two brothers, and the public one, in which every conflict inevitably takes on a political and dynastic meaning.
It would not be correct to interpret the depression described by Harry today as an exclusive consequence of the arguments with Charles and William. His testimony describes a much longer emotional journey, in which the loss of Diana, his military experiences, the burden of public life and the difficulty of adapting to radical change come together.
Yet it is precisely the contrast between the search for freedom and the discomfort experienced once achieved that makes his confession significant. Leaving an environment perceived as oppressive, the Duke’s story suggests, does not necessarily mean freeing oneself at the same time from the psychological consequences that that experience has left.
Meghan, her children and the search for balance
In the new phase of his life, Harry attributes a central role to his wife Meghan Markle and his children Archie and Lilibet. The family he built represents, in his words, one of the main sources of emotional stability, so much so that it pushed him to establish a personal rule: not to spend more than ten consecutive days away from his wife and children.
It is a choice that speaks of the desire to find a balance between professional commitments, charitable projects and the need to be present in everyday family life. A dimension that Harry considers an integral part of his well-being, after years in which work, pressure and continuous public exposure had occupied an enormous space.
Today the Duke continues to dedicate himself to promoting mental health, supporting veterans through the Invictus Games and initiatives aimed at children who have lost a parent. The MasterClass, created with O’Connor, also supports two organizations dedicated to assisting grieving families, Comfort Zone Camp and Scotty’s Little Soldiers.
The mental health message behind Harry’s confession
The testimony comes on the eve of World Mental Health Day on 10 October and brings to the center an issue that goes beyond the prince’s private life: the way in which pain can be hidden, postponed and apparently overcome, while continuing to influence everyday life.
The path told by Harry cannot be generalized or used to explain every depressive experience, because mourning, chronic stress and depression are different conditions, which can intertwine but do not necessarily coincide. His personal experience, however, highlights how difficult it can be to recognize discomfort when for years one has learned to identify the ability to resist with the obligation not to show any fragility.
Perhaps this is precisely the most significant aspect of the Duke of Sussex’s new declarations. For a long time, Harry’s story has been told through the rebellion, his marriage to Meghan, the break with Buckingham Palace and his increasingly distant relationship with William. But behind the public figure of the prince who left the monarchy emerges once again that of the child who, at the age of twelve, had lost his mother and did not know how to express his pain.
The freedom sought far from London did not immediately erase that suffering. However, according to her story, she offered him the opportunity to finally look her in the face. And to recognize that becoming happy again does not mean forgetting those who are no longer there.
