Prince Harry discusses mental health and grieving Princess Diana

Since relinquishing his royal duties, Prince Harry has opened up about his personal experiences as a member of the royal family in his memoir titled ‘Spare’ and the six-part documentary series on Netflix with his wife, Meghan Markle, called ‘Harry and Meghan’.

Yet in a conversation with Hungarian-Canadian physician Dr. Gabor Maté, the Duke of Sussex dives further into how he’s dealt with his mental health over the years.

For starters, Harry expressed his fear of attending therapy to help him grieve the death of his mother, Princess Diana, even decades after the incident.

Harry told Maté: “One of the things I was most scared about, was losing the feeling that I had of my mom. I thought that if I went to therapy, that it would kill me, and that I would lose whatever I had left – whatever I had managed to hold on to of my mother.”

“It turns out that that wasn’t the case,” Harry added. “I didn’t lose that. It was the opposite. It turned what I thought was supposed to be sadness, to try to prove to her that I missed her into realizing that actually she really just wanted me to be happy. And that was a huge weight off my chest.”

Healing through grief

Although Prince Harry discussed concerns over forgetting his mother over time, he’s managed to draw similarities between himself and Diana.

Harry continued, “The times that I ventured towards being myself, being my authentic true self for one shape or another, whether it was through media or family or whatever it was, it was almost like ‘Don’t be yourself. Come back to what you’re expected to be.’”

The Duke of Sussex has been able to work through his trauma and grief through therapy and by writing out his story. At the end of the conversation with Dr. Maté, Harry notes how Meghan has been a light in an otherwise dark tunnel.

“People have said my wife saved me. I was stuck in this world and she was from a different world and helps sort of draw me out of that. But none of the elements of my life now would have been possible without me seeing it for myself,” Harry concluded.