Prince Harry wishes he could go back in time and change the way he reacted to Meghan Markle’s mental health struggles when they were still living as senior royals.
In Episode 4, Volume II of their Netflix docuseries, Harry & Meghan, the Duchess of Sussex recalls wanting to end her life while at the height of her tensions with the rest of the royal family and the constant attacks from the British press. Meanwhile, Harry and Meghan’s mother, Doria Ragland, remember what it was like seeing Meghan reach such a low point in her life.
"I was like, ‘All of this will stop if I’m not here,’" Meghan recalls thinking amid the incessant media criticism. "And that was the scariest thing about it, is it was such clear thinking."
Ragland breaks down in tears on camera remembering the moment her daughter told her how much her mental health had declined while living in the palace and being painted as an enemy by British newspapers.
"I remember her telling me that she had wanted to take her own life, and that broke my heart, because I knew that it was bad," Ragland says, "but to constantly be picked at by these vultures, just picking away at her spirit, that she would actually think about not wanting to be here, that’s not an easy one for a mom to hear, and I can’t protect her. H can’t protect her."
Meghan’s depression battle reminded Harry of what he saw happen to his mother, the late Princess Diana, who openly struggled with her mental health while working as a senior royal. It upset him even more because he didn’t stop it before it could escalate, he says.
"I was devastated. I knew that she was struggling, we were both struggling, but I never thought that it would get to that stage, and the fact that it got to that stage, I felt angry and ashamed," Harry says.
The duke admits that while he understood Meghan’s struggle, he was so blinded by his commitment to his royal duties at the time that he didn’t give her the support she needed.
"I didn’t deal with it particularly well. I dealt with it as institutional Harry as opposed to husband Harry. And what took over my feelings was my royal role," Harry says. "I’d been trained to worry more about: What are people gonna think if we don’t go to this event? We’re gonna be late. And looking back on it now, I hate myself for it."
"What she needed from me was so much more than I was able to give," he adds.
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Meghan says she wanted to go somewhere to get help, but the palace didn’t allow it because they were concerned about how that would look for the institution.
"They knew how bad it was," Harry says of his royal family members. "They thought, Why couldn’t she just deal with it? As if to say, ‘Well, everybody else has dealt with it, why can’t she deal with it?’ But this was different, it was really different."
"But actually, if you strip all that away and say OK, fine, it was exactly the same, so do we still believe that she should’ve just sucked it up like other members of the family? Or does one think that maybe it’s about time that we stop?" Harry continues.
Harry says Meghan’s experience made evident just how little mental wellness is actually prioritized in the royal family (despite the fact that many senior members regularly champion mental health initiatives).
"When you’d expect support from the people closest, we got the opposite," he adds.
British press criticized Meghan when she seemingly broke royal protocol by speaking candidly about the state of her mental health in an interview during her 2019 South Africa tour with Harry—while she was pregnant with son Archie Harrison Mountbatten-Windsor.
"No one one sees what’s happening behind closed doors," Harry says, noting how his mom would head to public engagements in "floods of tears" while King Charles III (then the Prince of Wales) would warn her when she would need to ready herself to look presentable.
"No one in the family speaks that openly [about mental health]. No one had done, apart from one person, my mom," Harry says.
Without the ability to get the professional help she needed, nor support from the royal family, Meghan says she had to make a choice to protect herself and her new family.
"There’s one so much you can take on your own, so you end up saying, ‘Something has to change.’ It was a huge turning point. It’s when we started having harder conversations about what needs to happen for us to be able to continue to make this work," she recalls.
Harry and Meghan stepped back from their roles as senior royals in January of 2020. They now live in Montecito, California, with kids Archie and Lilibet Diana.
