Prince Harry 'slipped into depression' after relocating to Canada

Prince Harry has revealed that he “slipped into depression” for about two weeks after relocating to Canada from the U.K. in 2019.

The Prince opened up about his mental health during an episode on the online educational platform, MasterClass. It’s part of a course designed to help people coping with grief.

Harry and his wife, Meghan, welcomed their son Archie in May 2019, spending the end of that year in Canada. They eventually moved to California, with Harry and Meghan giving up their royal duties. However, they announced last month they were returning to the UK with their children Prince Archie, seven, and Princess Lilibet, five, after six years in the U.S., reports the BBC.

Harry described being in Canada, away from the stress of his life in Britain, when he experienced an adrenaline crash. “I actually slipped into depression for about two weeks. I felt like I couldn’t function without the adrenaline,” he revealed.

Harry also said that he felt “emotionally numb” after the death of his mother, Princess Diana, because he felt “disloyal and guilty for the possibility of being happy and joyful without her.”

During the MasterClass session, Harry said he struggled to process his grief in the years after the death of his mother when he was 12. He recounted that after crying at Diana’s funeral, he did not cry for nearly two decades, adding that a therapist suggested he spray Diana’s perfume to “unlock everything.”

The MasterClass also featured Mary-Frances O’Connor, a neuroscientist and University of Arizona professor who told Harry: “Your brain doesn’t register your loved one as gone. It registers them as lost. And it will keep searching until you teach it otherwise. We still expect that they’re going to walk through the door.”

MasterClass approached Harry about appearing in the program last year, reports reports People Magazinec. It was filmed in California over the summer.

The course is titled ‘Redefining Grief: Building Resilience Through Loss,’ It explores the effects of grief on the brain and body through Harry’s experience of losing his mother.

“Grief is physiological as well as emotional, and what we know from research is that there are very common responses to the loss of someone important in our life,” O’Connor says in the episode.

After returning from his second tour in Afghanistan in 2013, Harry said he began to see that his military experiences triggered 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 realize 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 recalled. “And that’s when I realized, ‘Okay, there’s something bigger, there’s something else that you need to look into here.’”

O’Connor speaks in the session about how prolonged stress can affect the body. She compared the nervous system to parts of a car, and cortisol to its fuel injection system.

Harry also said he eventually came to the realization that his mother “just wanted me to be happy. And that was a huge mental shift for me. It freed me, and it gave me a whole different outlook on life.”

He said his charitable work gives him a meaningful way to carry Diana’s legacy.

It has been released ahead of World Mental Health Day on Oct. 10, and will benefit two bereavement charities, Comfort Zone Camp and Scotty’s Little Soldiers, a charity for which Harry is a global ambassador.

The Daily Mail reported Friday that Harry was paid US$100,000 for participating in the MasterClass.

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