The Duke of Sussex has said he felt an impact on his mental health after he moved to Canada.
Prince Harry has spoken about his feelings of depression (Image: Getty)
Prince Harry has revealed he “slipped into depression” for two weeks after he moved to Canada with Meghan Markle and their son, Prince Archie, back in 2019. The decision to relocate came shortly before the Duke and Duchess of Sussex made the bombshell announcement that they would step back from their senior royal roles and move to the US. In a new personal episode of MasterClass, released on Thursday, October 8, Harry, 42, recalls experiencing an “adrenaline crash” within days of arriving in Canada in late 2019, after several years in what he describes as a stressful environment.
He says: “Being in Canada, away from the stressful environment where presumably my body was just pumped full of adrenaline, within two or three days, I experienced this adrenaline crash, something that I’d never experienced before.
“It was as if I needed stress in order to get the adrenaline to make my brain function because I became useless around the house,” he continues. “I actually slipped into depression for about two weeks, and I felt like I couldn’t function without adrenaline.”
The new programme was filmed earlier this summer in California and sees Harry join neuroscientist Dr Mary-Frances O’Connor to explore the effects that grief has on the brain and body. It is understood that he discusses his own experience of losing his mother, Diana, Princess of Wales, at the age of 12, and the long-lasting impact that has had on him.
Prince Harry revealed all in a discussion with Dr. Mary-Frances O’Connor (Image: Masterclass)
For Harry, the experience in Canada followed years of struggling with the grief of losing his mother, who tragically died in a Paris car crash in 1997. He says in the episode: “For 15, 20 years, when I was being asked, ‘Are you okay?’ My response was, ‘I’m fine.’ It was numbness, emotional shutdown. And without knowing it, adrenaline was pushing me, was driving me.”
“It was the driving force of what led me to join the military at the age of 20. It was the perfect distraction. I couldn’t really think about much else apart from the task at hand,” he adds.
After returning from his second tour in Afghanistan in 2013, Harry explains how he began to recognise that his experiences in the military had triggered his earlier trauma. “The things that I saw, the things I experienced, appeared to be a trigger for other traumas that had stored themselves within me,” he says.
“I started to realise that I probably had become seriously depleted when just putting a simple dress shirt on — the tightening of the collar — literally felt like I was suffocating, and I would be experiencing panic attacks just in the car on the way to work,” he recalls. “And that’s when I realised, ‘Okay, there’s something bigger, there’s something else that you need to look into here.’ ”
The family took an extended break in Canada at the end of 2019 (Image: Instagram)
The Duke and Duchess of Sussex originally undertook an extended break in Canada at the end of 2019 with their son, Prince Archie. The family would spend Christmas in the country that year, rather than travel back to the UK to spend Archie’s first Christmas with the Royal Family at Sandringham.
Shortly into the new year, Harry and Meghan made a brief return to the UK without Archie and visited the Canadian Embassy in London. Then, on January 8, they made the shock announcement that they would be stepping back from their senior royal roles, with a view to splitting their time between the US and the UK.
Following a meeting with Queen Elizabeth, the then Prince Charles and Prince William – dubbed the Sandringham Summit – it was announced that the Sussexes could not have the ‘half-in/half-out’ dream they had wished for, and they subsequently announced that they would move to the US permanently.
After settling in Montecito, the family grew when Princess Lilibet Diana was born on June 4, 2021, in Santa Barbara.