Harry says family tried to STOP him and Meghan from leaving after ‘she was going to end her life’

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Prince Harry has revealed he was discouraged from discussing his mental health as a child following the sudden death of his mother, and when he tried to ask his family for help more recently, when Meghan claimed she was feeling suicidal, he was ‘met with total silence’ and neglect. 

In candid interviews with Oprah Winfrey on his new show, The Me You Can’t See, he said: ‘I thought my family would help, but every single ask, request, warning, whatever, it is just got met with total silence, total neglect.

‘We spent four years trying to make it work. We did everything that we possibly could to stay there and carry on doing the role and doing the job. But Meghan was struggling.’

He said the way Meghan was feeling reminded him of his own mother’s final days.

‘History was repeating itself,’ he said in an interview with Oprah. ‘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.

‘It’s incredibly triggering to potentially lose another woman in my life. Like, the list is growing. And it all comes back to the same people, the same business model, the same industry,’ he said.

In the candid interviews, the prince discusses his failure to process the grief from the death of his mother; the helplessness he felt to protect her; his dependence on drugs and alcohol to numb the pain; his anxiety and sense of being trapped in the palace; his family’s refusal to help when Megan felt suicidal and how therapy helped him ‘break the cycle.’ 

‘For me, therapy has equipped me to be able to take on anything,’ he said. 

He says his family tried to prevent him and Megan from leaving when she claims she was suicidal and admits to drinking and doing drugs in his 30s. 

‘Eventually when I made that decision for my family, I was still told, ‘You can’t do this,’ Harry recounted to Oprah. ‘And it’s like, ‘Well how bad does it have to get until I am allowed to do this?’ She [Markle] was going to end her life. It shouldn’t have to get to that.’

When asked if he has any regrets, he says it is not taking a stand earlier in his relationship with Markle. 

The stand-out feature of the show comes as a 13-year-old Harry is seen watching his mother’s coffin – that of Diana, Princess of Wales – passing him during her funeral in London in 1997. 

Prince Charles can be seen speaking to his heartbroken son as a female voiceover says over dramatic music: ‘Treating people with dignity is the first act’.  

Harry tells Oprah: ‘To make that decision to receive help is not a sign of weakness. In today’s world more than ever, it is a sign of strength.’

It also features interviews with others discussing their struggles with mental health, including tearful interviews with singer Lady Gaga, actress Glenn Close and US chat show queen Oprah herself as well as a feature on a Syrian refugee named Fawzi, described as a hero on the program.

Along with Winfrey, the Duke of Sussex is an executive producer of ‘The Me You Can’t See’, which premiered on Apple TV+ on Thursday.  

The show’s release comes amid a backlash last week in the US after Harry’s attack on the ‘bonkers’ First Amendment and after his broadside at the Royal Family in which he appeared to suggest both his father and the Queen had failed as parents. 

Royal Family expert Katie Nicholl said that Harry’s recent comments have left Britons in ‘quite a bit of shock’ that he ‘went as far as he did’. 

She told Entertainment Tonight: ‘I think certainly people over here are a little disappointed and I think frustrated as well, hearing Prince Harry indirectly criticize the royal family, which I think is the interpretation by some over here in the UK’

Nicholl added: ‘A lot of people here think Prince Harry has overstepped a mark in talking so personally about his father, and his relationship with his father, in what most people have interpreted to be quite a critical way.’

The Duke of Sussex had told Dax Shepard, host of the ‘Armchair Expert’ podcast: ‘He (Charles) treated me the way he was treated, so how can I change that for my own kids?’ Harry then described his life as a cross between the film The Truman Show – in which a man discovers he is living in a reality TV programme – and a zoo.

Harry’s latest interview on The Me You Can’t See will likely be seen as another barbed attack on the Royal Family and spark fresh pain for Charles, coming so soon after Prince Harry said he quit as a frontline royal to ‘break the cycle’ of ‘genetic suffering’. 

At one point Meghan can be seen looking over Harry’s shoulder at a computer as she wears a ‘Raising The Future’ t-shirt in their LA mansion. 

The Sussexes’ son Archie is also shown sitting on his mother’s lap later on – in footage filmed around the time of his first birthday.

The duke and Winfrey have joined forces to guide ‘honest discussions about mental health and emotional wellbeing while opening up about their personal journeys and struggles’, the Archewell website said.

Harry adds in the footage: ‘The results of this year will be felt for decades. The kids, families, husbands, wives, everybody.’  

The Sussexes made a series of damaging allegations about the royal family when they were interviewed by Winfrey earlier his year.

The couple accused an unnamed royal, not the Queen or Philip, of raising concerns about how dark their son Archie’s skin tone would be, before he was born.

Meghan also said she asked for help when she was suicidal, but said the monarchy gave her no support.

Harry has spoken of the emotional turmoil he faced after his mother was killed in a Paris car crash in 1997, saying he spent nearly two decades ‘not thinking’ about her death before eventually getting help after a period of ‘total chaos’.   

It comes just days after Prince Harry suggested he took drugs as he spoke about ‘going wild’ during a chat with a Hollywood star about their own drugs and alcohol problems.

The Duke of Sussex, 36, was speaking on actor Dax Shepard’s ‘Armchair Expert’ mental health podcast when he made the remarks.

Harry was quizzing the star – who is married to Frozen actress Kristen Bell –  about the American’s substance use in high school. 

The Royal asked him about Shepard’s ‘awareness’ of what sparked his path towards drugs as a teenager.

Harry told him ‘For you it was your upbringing and everything that happened to you – the trauma, pain and suffering.

‘All of a sudden you find yourself doing a s***load of drugs and partying hard.

‘Look how many other people do that as well. They wouldn’t have the awareness at the time.

‘I certainly wouldn’t have had the awareness when I was going wild.

‘It’s like why am I actually doing this? In the moment its like, this is fun. I’m in my 20s – it’s what you’re supposed to do.’

Harry, who is expecting a daughter with Meghan this summer, suggested Charles had ‘suffered’ because of his upbringing by the Queen and Prince Philip, and the Prince of Wales had ‘treated me the way he was treated’, calling it ‘genetic pain’.

During the wide-ranging interview lasting 90 minutes, Harry – who appears to have developed an American twang to his British accent since leaving the UK – said: ‘I don’t think we should be pointing the finger or blaming anybody, but certainly when it comes to parenting, if I’ve experienced some form of pain or suffering because of the pain or suffering that perhaps my father or my parents had suffered, I’m going to make sure I break that cycle so that I don’t pass it on, basically.

‘It’s a lot of genetic pain and suffering that gets passed on anyway so we as parents should be doing the most we can to try and say ‘you know what, that happened to me, I’m going to make sure that doesn’t happen to you’.’

He added: ‘I never saw it, I never knew about it, and then suddenly I started to piece it together and go ‘OK, so this is where he went to school, this is what happened, I know this about his life, I also know that is connected to his parents so that means he’s treated me the way he was treated, so how can I change that for my own kids’. 

‘And here I am, I moved my whole family to the US, that wasn’t the plan but sometimes you’ve got make decisions and put your family first and put your mental health first.’

 ‘It was like that for me so it’s going to be like that for you’: Harry criticizes his father Charles for continuing the cycle of generational suffering

In the third episode of the series, Harry talks about how his family would not discuss their feelings, leading to more ‘generational suffering.’

‘My father used to say to me when I was younger, he used to say to both William and I, ‘Well, it was like that for me so it’s going to be like that for you,’ Harry says, ‘That doesn’t make sense. Just because you suffered, that doesn’t mean your kids have to suffer. In fact, quite the opposite. If you suffered, do everything you can to make sure that whatever negative experiences you had, you can make it right for your kids.’

‘Isn’t this all about breaking the cycle?’ he asked, rhetorically.  

Harry said in an interview with Dax Shephard before the series aired he doesn’t blame anyone, ‘but certainly when it comes to parenting, if I’ve experienced some form of pain or suffering because of the pain or suffering that perhaps my father or my parents had suffered, I’m going to make sure I break that cycle so that I don’t pass it on, basically.

‘It’s a lot of genetic pain and suffering that gets passed on anyway so we as parents should be doing the most we can to try and say ‘you know what, that happened to me, I’m going to make sure that doesn’t happen to you’.’

He added: ‘I never saw it, I never knew about it, and then suddenly I started to piece it together and go ‘OK, so this is where he went to school, this is what happened, I know this about his life, I also know that is connected to his parents so that means he’s treated me the way he was treated, so how can I change that for my own kids’. 

‘And here I am, I moved my whole family to the US, that wasn’t the plan but sometimes you’ve got make decisions and put your family first and put your mental health first.’

‘This is my mum. You haven’t even met her’: Harry hit out at mourners at Diana’s funeral who showed ‘ten times’ as much emotion as he could

In the first episode of the Apple TV+ series, the Duke of Sussex recounts how he was only allowed to show ‘one-tenth of the emotion everyone else was feeling,’ making him angry as he saw strangers on the street crying over Diana’s death.

‘This was my mother,’ he said, ‘you never even met her.’

The prince has previously spoken of the emotional turmoil he faced after his mother was killed in a Paris car crash in 1997, saying he spent nearly two decades ‘not thinking’ about her death before eventually getting help after a period of ‘total chaos’. 

He said on the show he was discouraged from talking about his mother’s death, and when people would ask him how he was feeling, he said, ‘fine was the easy answer.’  

Prince Harry suffered panic attacks and binged on drugs and drink for years to deal with his mother’s death – and says Meghan encouraged him to start therapy

But, the prince said in his new show, by the time he was 28 he would ‘freak out’ whenever he saw a camera flash or he had to get into a car, and over the weekends he ‘probably drank a week’s worth in a single day.’

He admitted he had tried drugs and alcohol to numb his pain, not realizing at the time that was what he was doing, and when people close to him told him to seek help, he would say he did not need help.

It wasn’t until he met Meghan, he said in the second episode, that he decided he needed help.  

‘I knew that if I didn’t do the therapy and fix myself that I was going to lose this woman who I could see spending the rest of my life with,’ he said, recounting how Meghan first suggested he go to therapy after they got into an argument.

He said he realized early on in therapy that he had never processed the loss of his mother, and was projecting that grief onto others.

‘That was the start of a learning journey for me,’ he said. ‘I became aware that I had been living in a bubble within this family, within this institution and I was sort of almost trapped in that sort of thought process or mindset.’

Six-month pregnant Meghan shared with Harry HOW she was going to kill herself before they attended charity function at Royal Albert Hall captured in now infamous squeezing hand pictures 

 He recalled in the second episode how difficult it was for Meghan to adjust to royal life as an outsider, noting, ‘There was a lot of learning in the beginning of our relationship.’

Soon after the relationship started, he said, Meghan was in the proverbial spotlight, with cameras following the couple around.

‘It made my blood boil,’ he said. ‘It makes me angry. It takes me back to my mum, to what I experienced as a kid.’

Making the situation worse, he said, were negative comments on social media.

‘I thought my family would help,’ Harry told Oprah, ‘but every single ask, request, warning, whatever, it is just got met with total silence, total neglect.

‘We spent four years trying to make it work. We did everything that we possibly could to stay there and carry on doing the role and doing the job. But Meghan was struggling.’

Before they walked into the Royal Albert Hall in London for a charity event when Meghan was already six months pregnant, gripping each others hands, Harry said on the show, ‘Meghan decided to share with me the suicidal thoughts and the practicalities of how she was going to end her life.

‘I’m somewhat ashamed of the way that I dealt with it,’ he said, ‘and of course because of the system that we were in and the responsibilities and the duties that we had, we had a quick cuddle and then we had to get changed and had to jump into a convoy with a police escort and drive to the Royal Albert Hall for a charity event.’

‘There wasn’t an option to say, ‘You know what, tonight we’re not going to go, because just imagine the stories that come from that,’ he said, recounting how once the lights dim Meghan started to cry and he felt ashamed he could not go to his family.

Prince Harry Told Oprah That Meghan Markle Didn’t Kill Herself Because She Didn’t Want Him To Lose Another Woman He Loved

Harry said in an interview with Oprah that the only thing preventing Meghan from killing herself was the thought that it would be unfair to him to lose another woman he loved in his life while also pregnant with their baby.

‘The scariest thing for her was her clarity of thought,’ he said. ‘She hadn’t lost it. She wasn’t crazy. She wasn’t self-medicating, be it through pills or by alcohol. She was absolutely sober. She was completely sane. 

‘Yet in the quiet of night, these thoughts woke her up.’

He says he now would like to focus on his son, Archie, ‘rather than every time I look in his eyes wonder whether my wife is going to end up like my mother, and I’m going to have to look after him myself.’

‘That was one of the main reasons to leave,’ Harry said.

Prince Harry says Royals tried to STOP him and Meghan leaving after ‘she was going to end her life’

But, the prince said, his family tried to stop him and Meghan from leaving, even as she was supposedly feeling suicidal.

‘That feeling of being trapped within the family, there was no option to leave. Eventually when I made that decision for my family, I was still told, ‘You can’t do this.’ And it’s like, ‘Well how bad does it have to get until I am allowed to do this?’ She [Markle] was going to end her life. It shouldn’t have to get to that.’