Prince Harry and the Queen of Talk, Oprah Winfrey, have teamed up for the documentary series The Me You Can’t See, which explores mental health and emotional well-being with stories from people around the world.
With guests like including Lady Gaga and NBA player DeMar DeRozan, the show features intimate interviews with mental health experts and public figures about mental health – from their struggles to how the worked to overcome their issues. And, Harry, who’s a big advocate of mental health, shares some of the struggles he and his wife Meghan Markle have had to overcome.
Back in March, Meghan told Oprah about how the pressure and constant bullying form the media had affected her to the point that she had very scary thoughts of not wanting to be alive anymore.
“I just didn’t want to be alive anymore. And that was a very clear and real and frightening constant thought,” Meghan said on the TV special Oprah With Harry And Meghan. “And I remember how [Harry] just cradled me.”
“We had to go to this event and I remember him saying, ‘I don’t think you can go.’ And I said, ‘I can’t be left alone,’” she continued. Oprah asked if it was because she was “afraid of what you might do to yourself,” to which Meghan tearfully nodded.
“One of the things that still haunts me is this photograph that someone sent me. We had to go to an official event. We had to go to this event at the Royal Albert Hall and a friend said, ‘I know you don’t look at pictures, but oh my god, you guys look so great,’ and sent it to me. I zoomed in and what I saw was the truth of what that moment was. Right before we had to leave for that, I had just had that conversation with Harry that morning and it was the next day that I talked to the institution [about how I didn’t want to be alive anymore],” Meghan said.
Prince Harry opens up about that moment on The Me You Can’t See, sharing why Meghan, who was pregnant with their son Archie at the time, decided not to act on those thoughts.
“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 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.”
“I’m somewhat ashamed of the way that I dealt with it,” Harry continued. “And 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.’ Because just imagine the stories that come from that.”
And it was seeing Meghan cry that night that really had him shook.
“While my wife and I were in those chairs, gripping each other’s hand, the moment the lights go down, Meghan starts crying,” he said. “I’m feeling sorry for her, but I’m also really angry with myself that we’re stuck in this situation. I was ashamed that it got this bad. I was ashamed to go to my family. 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.”
Elsewhere in the series, Prince Harry also shares his own struggles – of how he would have “panic attacks [and] severe anxiety” during royal engagements when he was in his twenties. “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,” he said.
He recalls reaching out to his family for help, only to be met with “total silence and total neglect.”
“I thought my family would help, but every single ask, request, warning, whatever, it is just got met with total silence, total neglect. 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.”
It wasn’t until they moved to the US that Harry felt he’d broken the cycle.
If you or someone you know is suicidal or in emotional distress, contact the National Suicide Prevention Lifeline at 1-800-273-TALK (8255).
