Harry says he slipped into depression after leaving the UK

Prince Harry says he went through about two weeks of depression after he and Meghan relocated to Canada in 2019, a low he ties to the sudden end of a high-pressure routine. He gave this account in a recorded conversation about grief, released ahead of World Mental Health Day on 10 October.

The talk belongs to a paid-for online course on the Masterclass platform, in which the Duke of Sussex speaks with Dr Mary-Frances O’Connor, a neuroscientist and University of Arizona professor. The BBC reports that the session was filmed in California over the summer, before the couple returned to Britain, and cites People magazine for the detail that the company first approached him last year. In the BBC’s wording, Harry said he “slipped into depression for about two weeks”.

When the pressure suddenly stopped

Harry told O’Connor that the move was meant to give the family room to think. According to the Mirror, he explained that within two or three days of leaving a stressful setting, his body seemed to lose the adrenaline it had been running on. It was a sensation he said he had never known. He compared the effect to needing stress for his brain to work, and said he could do very little around the house.

Coverage does not always match his own words. One outlet’s headline speaks of a deep depression lasting weeks, which is stronger than the duration he actually gave.

Panic that came with public duties

Harry also looked back at the strain of royal engagements. He described a feeling of panic that came with getting dressed for an event, travelling to it and hearing cameras fire. A tightening shirt collar, he said, felt like suffocation, and he had panic attacks in the car while heading to work. That was the point, in his telling, at which he understood that something deeper needed attention.

The Sussexes arrived in Canada at the end of 2019 and stayed on Vancouver Island. They gave up their roles as working royals early in 2020 and later settled in the US. The BBC adds that they announced last month that they were returning to the UK with Archie, seven, and Lilibet, five, after six years in America, and that they are thought to be living in the Cotswolds.

Grief that had nowhere to go

Much of the conversation reaches further back, to the death of his mother, Diana, when he was 12. Harry said he spent years emotionally numb, uneasy at the idea of feeling happy without her and convinced that he had to stay sad to prove how much he missed her. He recalled that he did not cry when he was told she had died, wept at her burial, and then did not cry again for almost two decades. He had taken that for strength, he said, and later saw it differently.

“I was a 12-year-old boy with no permission to fall apart and no roadmap for how to heal.”

Prince Harry, Duke of Sussex

He told the neuroscientist that in his 20s he went to war twice believing he could leave his feelings behind, a reference, according to the BBC, to his Army service in Afghanistan. He also said he had feared losing the memory of his mother’s laugh and voice. A therapist then suggested spraying her perfume, which he described as opening up memories he had shut away. Through that exercise, he said, he came to see that “she just wanted me to be happy”. He now thinks of her most nights and most mornings, Metro reports.

O’Connor offered a scientific frame for the experience of bereavement: “Your brain doesn’t register your loved one as gone, it registers them as lost.”

A ten-day rule at home

On family life, Harry said the biggest factor for him is the energy and joy he draws from his wife and children, together with the satisfaction of doing his work in person. His way of keeping that balance, he said, is never to spend more than ten days away from them.

The BBC notes that Harry and his brother, the Prince of Wales, have both spoken openly about their mental health in the past, including after their mother’s death, and that each supports mental health charities. Metro also quotes Diana’s brother, Earl Spencer, who told the BBC that the way Harry and Meghan are treated has echoes of what happened to his sister, and said: “I think it would be really beholden on people to learn from Diana’s example,”.

Featured image. Source: Wikimedia Commons. Credit: frank mckenna (frankiefoto). License: CC0.