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In his new mental health series, The Me You Can’t See, Prince Harry opened up about the night Meghan Markle told him about her suicidal thoughts. The Duchess of Sussex, who was pregnant with her son Archie Harrison at the time, revealed to her husband the “practicalities of how she was going to end her life” prior to attending a performance at London’s Royal Albert Hall in January of 2019.
“What perhaps people don’t understand is earlier that evening Meghan decided to share with me the suicidal thoughts and the practicalities of how she was going to end her life,” he shared. “The scariest thing for her was her clarity of thought. She hadn’t lost it. She wasn’t crazy. She wasn’t self-medicating be it through pills or through alcohol. She was absolutely sober. She was completely sane, yet in the quiet of night these thoughts woke her up.”
However, Meghan did not act on her thoughts because of Harry. “The thing that stopped her from seeing it through was how unfair it would be on me after everything that had happened to my mum and to now be put in a position of losing another woman in my life with a baby inside of her. Our baby,” the Duke shared.
“I’m somewhat ashamed of the way that I dealt with it. 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 in a convoy with a police escort and drive to the Royal Albert Hall for a charity event and then step out into a wall of cameras and pretend as though everything’s okay. There wasn’t an option to say, “You know what? Tonight we’re not gonna go’ because just imagine the stories that come from that,” he continued.
The Duke recalled him and his wife “gripping each other’s hand” in their seats and Meghan crying when the lights went down. “I’m feeling sorry for her, but I’m also really angry with myself that we’re stuck in this situation. I was ashamed that it got this bad,” Harry admitted. “I was ashamed to go to my family because to be honest with you like a lot of other people my age could probably relate to, I know that I’m not gonna get from my family what I need.”
“I then had a son who I’d far rather be solely focused on rather than every time I look in his eyes wondering whether my wife is gonna end up like my mother and I’m gonna have to look after him myself,” he added. “That was one of the biggest reasons to leave. Feeling trapped and feeling controlled through fear both by the media and by the system itself, which never encouraged the talking about this kind of trauma, but certainly now I will never be bullied into silence.”
Earlier this year, Meghan spoke with Oprah about her suicidal thoughts, admitting that she did not “want to be alive anymore.” “Look, I was really ashamed to say it at the time and ashamed to have to admit it, to Harry especially, because I know how much loss he’s suffered,” the Duchess confessed. “But I knew that if I didn’t say it that I would do it and I just didn’t want to be alive anymore. And that was a very clear and real and frightening constant thought.”
The Me You Can’t See premiered on Apple TV+ May 21