(Trigger Warning: This article discusses suicide ideation and mental health.)
In his own one-on-one interview with Oprah Winfrey for their new Apple TV series, The Me You Can’t See, Prince Harry is opening up like never before. From coping with drugs and alcohol to the real reason his wife, Meghan Markle, didn’t take her own life, it’s all out in the open now.
Since Prince Harry and Meghan Markle made the decision to step away from the Royal Family, Harry has been a fairly open book in the interviews he has done since moving to America with Markle and their young son, Archie.
And if you thought his truth-telling was eye-opening before, his new interview in the series The Me You Can’t See is what some are describing as jaw-dropping. While talking about mental health, Harry admitted that the years he was 28 to about 32 years old were “a nightmare time in my life.”
“I would probably drink a week’s worth in one day on a Friday or a Saturday night,” he told Winfrey. “And I would find myself drinking not because I was enjoying it but because I was trying to mask something. 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.”
It was after marrying Markle and starting a family with her, that he knew he needed to break the cycle, Harry said in a separate interview with Dax Shepard. He alluded to that same notion in his interview with Oprah.
He admitted that his role within the British monarch was destroying his mental health and Markle’s mental health as well.
As Mamas Uncut previously reported, in a different interview with Oprah, Markle admitted to experiencing suicide ideations during her few years as a senior member of the royal family. It was something she tried to seek out help for, but was allegedly met with resistance by the Firm, a term used to describe the British Monarch.
It was a moment in time that Harry also addressed in his interview with Oprah. The prince said for four years, he tried to make life better for Meghan in an attempt to remain a working member of the Royal Family.
“I thought my family would help, but every single ask, request, warning, whatever it is, just got met with total silence or total neglect. We spent four years trying to make it work.” But nothing help, and as Harry added, “Meghan was still struggling.”
Struggling to the point that she didn’t want to live anymore. “Meghan decided to share with me the suicidal thoughts and the practicalities of how she was going to end her life.”
“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.”
As Harry admitted there were only two things that made Meghan hesitant to go through with it.
“The thing that stopped her from seeing it through was how unfair it would be to me after everything that happened to my mum and to now be put in the position of losing another woman in my life with a baby inside of her, our baby.”
Harry admitted to being “ashamed” that things had gotten this far and this bad. “I was ashamed to go to my family. Because to be honest with you, like a lot of other people my age can probably relate to, I know that I’m not going to get from my family what I need.”
Then Archie was born.
“I then had a son, who I’d far rather be solely focused on, rather than every time I look in his eyes wondering whether my wife is going to end up like my mother and I’m going to have to look after him myself,” Harry said. “That was one of the biggest reasons to leave, feeling trapped and feeling controlled through fear, both by the media and by the system itself, which never encouraged the talking about this kind of trauma. Now, I will never be bullied into silence.”
Harry noted that his “biggest regret” wasn’t stepping down from his role, it was “not making more of a stance earlier on in my relationship with my wife and calling out the racism when I did.”
He began to see “history repeating itself.”
“My mother was chased to her death while she was in a relationship with someone who wasn’t white. And now look what’s happened. You want to talk about history repeating itself? They’re not gonna stop until she dies.”
Harry admitted that he has now been in therapy for four years. And Meghan was his motivation for taking that step. “I knew that if I didn’t do the therapy and fix myself, that I was going to lose this woman that I could see spending the rest of my life with.”
As Harry continued to be candid, he admitted that he always felt trapped as a member of the Royal family. “I was trapped, but I didn’t know I was trapped,” Harry said in the interview. “My father and my brother, they are trapped. They don’t get to leave. And I have huge compassion for that.”
He further opened up about how he wants to stop genetic suffering when it comes to his own children. “My father used to say to me when I was younger, he used to say to William and I, ‘Well, it was like that for me, so it’s gonna be like that for you.’ That doesn’t make sense. Just because you suffered, it doesn’t mean that your kids have to suffer. In fact, quite the opposite. If you suffered, do everything you can to make sure that whatever experiences, negative experiences that you had, you can make it right for your kids.”
Wow. With Harry now living in California with his two children and wife, Meghan, and with William preparing to be the King of England with is wife, Catherine, and their three children by his side, it remains unclear if the brother relationship will ever be what it once was.