harry and oprah
Getty Images

Harry and Oprah’s Mental Health Series Is Genuinely Moving

From his mum's death to his wife's distress, Harry gets so vulnerable

It’s not every advance screener that arrives accompanied by a note from Oprah, but the first three episodes of Oprah and Prince Harry‘s mental health-focused series The Me You Can’t See did. While admittedly not personally addressed (one day!), the note set the tone for the entire viewing experience: It creates a warm, gentle world where you’d feel safe sharing whatever emotional chord your life is striking at the moment, no matter how difficult.

In the note—and in the second episode of the documentary series, which drops on Apple TV+ today—Oprah talks about her experiences with the girls at her leadership academy in South Africa, many of whom have had difficult childhoods. Not knowing how to help them—despite having herself suffered terribly as a child, including experiencing sexual abuse—she spoke to a child trauma expert, neuroscientist Dr. Bruce Perry. He helped her to “understand how the events of their past were impacting their lives, and how symptoms of their mental health challenges were showing up.” Years later, Oprah and Prince Harry had a conversation about their shared passion for mental wellness, and the idea for this series was born. “Our intention is to lift the burden of shame that surrounds mental health,” Oprah writes. “Our hope is that people feel encouraged and comfortable having these conversations with loved ones and their communities, and that we all learn to have more empathy for our loved ones and ourselves.”

The series weaves in the stories of the famous (like Lady Gaga, introduced simply as Stefani, and Demar, as in NBA star DeRozan) and the unknown (a college athlete with depression, a young woman with schizophrenia). But one of the most fascinating arcs is Oprah’s journey with a woman with PTSD whom she met on the Oprah Winfrey show—in fact, on the indelible “You get a car!” episode—and has mentored ever since. We see Oprah’s struggle to understand her mental illness, why she can’t seem to grasp all the opportunities she’s being given. That generation gap—also seen in parents unsure how to help their children, while carrying their own unresolved trauma—is a recurring theme in the series, one that Harry picks up on in his own story…but we’ll get to that.

This series was first announced back in early 2019—before the pandemic, before Harry left the Royal Family, well before he and Meghan sat down for a bombshell interview with Oprah—but it was filmed last year, during a time when a focus on mental health became even more resonant, more urgent—and more universal.

“Grief is the loss of anything that matters,” says Oprah in the first episode, pointing to the fact that on some level, everyone has been traumatized by what we’ve been through. Harry echoes her—in a matching chambray shirt, we must note—adding, “The results of this year will be felt for decades; the kids, the families, husbands, wives, everybody.”

The series’s approach is to open a door to vulnerability, an essential part of healing. Leading the way is Harry, whose story is a throughline, often opening the conversation for others—Gaga, Demar, Rashad the chef, Robin Williams’s son Zak—to talk about their own trauma. Seeming much more relaxed than in his *other* interview with Oprah, Harry is candid, if still stoic, and determined not to “be bullied into silence any longer.” (You can feel the palace staffers bracing for impact from here.) He even undergoes therapy on camera, a type called Eye Movement Desensitization and Reprocessing, where he talks through a particular trigger event with a therapist, practicing self-soothing techniques as he goes. “Pain that is not transformed is transmitted,” he says at one point, opening the floor for what The Sun has snidely called “truth bombs” about his own life experiences. Here are a few:

1. When Harry thinks about his mother, he thinks about being chased by paparazzi

“Unfortunately, when I think about my mum, the first thing that comes to mind, over and over again, is being strapped in the car with the seatbelt across, my brother there as well, with my mother driving, chased by three, four, five mopeds with paparazzi on, and she was almost unable to drive because of the tears,” Harry says in the first episode, revealing the sense of helplessness he felt as a small child, unable to help his mother. “That happened every single day until the day she died.” He says that initial trauma was triggered when he saw the same thing happening to Meghan (albeit the 2021 version, where the pursuit happened online). “I could not lose another woman in my life,” he says. It’s the only time he comes close to tears.

2. For many years, Harry’s grief manifested as anger

While growing up in the spotlight was tough—Harry calls it “a puzzling life”—his mother’s death when he was 12 was the defining trauma of his life so far. “I didn’t want that life, sharing the grief of my mother’s death with the world,” he says, recalling feeling angry and baffled at these people weeping over someone who wasn’t their mum. “The thing I remember the most was the sound of the horse’s hooves going along the pavement,” he says of her funeral, whose enduring image is of young William and Harry walking behind their mother’s coffin. “By this point, both of us were in shock. It was like I was outside my body, walking along, doing what was expected of me, showing one-tenth of the emotion that everybody else was showing.” When he did feel something, it was anger. “There was no justice at all, nothing came from that. At all. The same people that chased her through the tunnel photographed her dying in the back seat of the car.” For years, he says, he chose not to think about it because there didn’t seem to be any point in being sad about something he couldn’t fix.

3. The royal family discouraged him from talking about his feelings, and he turned to alcohol and drugs to mask them

“No one around me was talking about it,” Harry says about his mother’s death. It’s why he only started going to therapy four years ago, nearly 20 years after it happened. “I wasn’t in an environment where I was encouraged to talk about it either. It’s like, squashed.” In his late 20s and early 30s, Harry began self-medicating as a way of dealing with the unresolved feelings. “I was willing to drink, I was willing to take drugs, I was willing to do the things that made me feel less like I was feeling.” Yes, this period coincided with his “party prince” phase, and those infamous naked poker images taken in Vegas. “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. I would find myself drinking not because I enjoyed it, but because I was trying to mask something.”

4. He was deeply anxious during official engagements

Around the same time, Harry developed anxiety around going on public engagements, which manifested itself as panic attacks and self-consciousness that everyone could see how nervous he was.“I would convince myself that my face was bright red and everybody could see how I was feeling and no one would know why,” he says, recalling feeling a bead of sweat trickling down his face, and being sure his whole face was pouring with sweat. It didn’t help that, as the single guy, he became the royal “yes man,” sent on trips that nobody else wanted to do. “That led to burnout,” he says.

5. A fight with Meghan was a catalyst for seeking help

The timeline on this one is a bit fuzzy—before he met Meghan, Harry says family members urged him to get help, and he did see therapists and even founded a mental health charity with William and Kate in 2016. But it seems like he only found treatment that really worked for him after he had an argument with Meghan, and she said he needed help. “In that argument, not knowing about it, I reverted back to 12-year-old Harry,” the now 35-year-old remembers, recalling how defensive he got when his therapist pointed this out. “My therapist said, ‘I’m expressing sympathy and empathy for what happened to you as a child, because you were never able to process it, you were never allowed to talk about it.’ And all of a sudden now it’s coming up in different ways as projection.”

6. He explains how he felt when Meghan expressed suicidal thoughts

We also hear Harry’s side of a story that Meghan shared in the Oprah interview, in which she recalled wanting to end her life during her first pregnancy; the toxicity of royal life just feeling unbearable. “The thing that stopped her from seeing it through was how unfair it would be to me, after everything I’d been through, after everything that happened to my mum—losing another woman in my life, with our baby inside of her,” says Harry, who is “ashamed” of the way he reacted. “Because of the system we were in, and the responsibility and the duty that we had, we had a quick cuddle, and then we had to get changed, jump in a convoy with a police escort and drive to the Royal Albert Hall, and then step out into a wall of cameras and pretend as though everything was okay.” Not going that evening was “not an option,” he says, because of the stories that would be written about their no-show.

He reiterated what the couple told Oprah about the Royal Family’s unwillingness to help, and mentioned that Prince Charles told both his sons that he’d been treated badly by the press, and they should expect it, too. “The system never encouraged talking about this kind of trauma,” Harry concludes. “Certainly now, I will never be bullied into silence.”

 

    More Royal Report