Story at a glance
- Prince Harry appeared on his and Oprah Winfrey’s new Apple TV+ show, “The Me You Can’t See.”
- The show is a mental-health docuseries, which also features disclosures from Glenn Close and Lady Gaga.
- Harry opened up about entering therapy and receiving EMDR treatments.
Prince Harry appeared on his new Apple TV+ show in partnership with Oprah Winfrey to discuss mental health and trauma, opening up about his own hardships stemming from the sudden death of his mother, Princess Diana.
Harry revealed on “The Me You Can’t See” on Thursday that in the wake of his mother’s death he suffered from severe panic attacks and spiraled into a cycle of binge-drinking and drug use.
Diana died in a car crash in Paris in August 1997 while being chased by paparazzi, weeks before Harry’s 13th birthday.
“I was willing to drink, I was willing to take drugs, I was willing to try and do the things that made me feel less like I was feeling,” Harry said.
“But I slowly became aware that, OK, I wasn’t drinking Monday to Friday, but I would probably drink a week’s worth in one day on a Friday or a Saturday night,” he said. “And I would find myself drinking, not because I was enjoying it but because I was trying to mask something.”
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Harry said that growing up, his family didn’t support the idea of receiving help. “I wasn’t in an environment where it was encouraged to talk about it either, that was sort of, like, squashed,” he said.
“Every time I put a suit and tie on and having to do the role and sort of like go, let’s go. Before I even left the house I was pouring with sweat, my heart rate was … I was in fight or flight mode. Panic attacks, severe anxiety — so 28 to probably 32 was a nightmare time in my life, freaking out,” he said.
Harry went on to divulge to Winfrey that it was his wife, the former Meghan Markle, who led him to seek therapy about four years ago. The show then featured scenes of Harry undergoing therapy and an EMDR treatment, or eye movement desensitization and reprocessing, which is a psychotherapy practice to treat trauma and PTSD through the recall of distressing images.
“People who are hurt, understandably hurt, from their upbringing, their environment, what’s happened to them, what they’ve been exposed to, what they’ve seen — whatever it is,” Harry said, “if you don’t transform, if you don’t process it, then it ends up coming out and in all sorts of different ways and you can’t control.”
The “The Me You Can’t See” also features discussions and disclosures with Winfrey, Lady Gaga and Glenn Close.
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