Prince Harry has officially pulled back the curtain on, well…
… everything.
The Duke of Sussex is featured in the new AppleTV+ docuseries The Me You Can’t See, which he co-created with Oprah Winfrey and which focuses on one’s mental health struggles.
This, of course, was a major topic of conversation in March when Harry and wife Meghan Markle sat down with Oprah for an earth-shattering interview.
Perhaps the most notable takeaway from Markle’s exchange with Winfrey took place when the former actress touched on her own battle with Depression.
She said she went to multiple people within Buckingham Palace and got turned away each and every time.
No one was willing to even point Markle in any direction to receive the help she so clearly needed.
Meghan went to Human Resources, she explained to Winfrey, but was told “there is nothing we can do to help you, because you’re not a paid member of the institution.”
This was in January 2019, back when Markle was pregnant and simply being trashed left, right and in between by the British press.
She says wasn’t allowed to seek help at the time “because it wouldn’t be good for The Institution,” according to all to whom she spoke.
“You were having suicidal thoughts?” Oprah asked during the two-hour interview.
“Yes. It was very clear and very scary,” Meghan replied in a heartbreaking confession. “I just didn’t see a solution.”
Wow, huh?
Simply awful.
Harry sat by and held his wife’s hand while she talked about this frightening time, and this abysmal response from The Royal Family.
But he elaborates in great and tragic detail on the docuseries, which was released on Friday, May 21.
“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 be put in a position of losing another woman in my life, with a baby inside of her, our baby,” Harry very candidly say.
He’s talking here, of course, about the death of Princess Diana in 1997.
He’s saying that Markle took that into consideration; that she didn’t kill herself because she knew how her loss, combined with the loss of his mother, would simple destroy Prince Harry.
Continued Harry on this topic:
“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.”
The Duke then admitted he felt “somewhat ashamed” of how he responded to his wife’s crisis.
Why?
Due to the job he had to do as an active member of The Royal Family.
“Of course, because of the system that we were in and the responsibilities and the duties that we had, we had a quick cuddle, and then we had to get changed and had to jump in a convoy with a police escort and drive to the Royal Albert Hall for a charity event and then step out into a wall of cameras and pretend as though everything’s OK.
“There wasn’t an option to say, ‘You know what? Tonight we’re not going to go.'”
Harry — who has also now compared life withn the Palace to growing up inside of a zoo — was “sorry” to put Meghan in such a public situation when she was struggling.
He felt “angry” with himself that he couldn’t do more to help.
“We’re stuck in this situation. I was ashamed that it got this bad. I was ashamed to go to my family,” he said.
“Because to be honest with you, like a lot of other people my age could probably relate to, I know that I’m not gonna get from my family what I need.”
Harry also also faced a number of struggles himself.
He lost his mother in a car accident as a young boy and was then thrust even more into the spotlight as a result.
He tried to mask his emotions early on, but this only caused him more pain and suffering as he grew older.
“From 28 to probably 32 was a nightmare time in my life,” he admits now.
“I was willing to drink. I was willing to take drugs. I was willing to try and do the things that made me feel less like I was feeling.
“But I slowly became aware that, OK, I wasn’t drinking Monday to Friday, but I would probably drink a week’s worth in one day on a Friday or a Saturday night.
“And I would find myself drinking not because I was enjoying it, but because I was trying to mask something.”
Harry says he also pondered suicide… and that his family members also ignored all the signs for help he was exhibiting.
“Towards my late 20s, I was starting to ask questions of should I really be here? And that was when I suddenly started going, ‘You can’t keep hiding from this.’
“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.
“I feel as though I’m outside of the system, but I’m still stuck there.”
Harry and Meghan essentially quit the Royal Family last year, and haven’t looked back.
The Duke, who says he’s in therapy, adds in the docuseries that he didn’t wanna take that step.
However, “every single ask, request, warning, whatever it is just got met with total silence, total neglect,” he claims.
“We spent four years trying to make it work. We did everything that we possibly could to stay there and carry on doing the role and doing the job.”
“But Meghan was struggling,” he says.
As a family man… as a husband and as a father… what choice did Harry have?
“We chose to put our mental health first. That’s what we’re doing. And that’s what we will continue to do,” he concludes.
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