Prince Harry has accused the Royal family of “total neglect” in his new docu-series for Apple TV.
Speaking to Oprah Winfrey in The Me You Can’t See, the Duke of Sussex opened up about his wife’s mental health struggles during her time as a senior working royal.
Harry 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.”
The 36-year-old also recalled the time Meghan told him she wanted to end her life before they attended a charity event at the Royal Albert Hall in London.
The Duchess of Sussex was six months pregnant with their son Archie at the time.
“Meghan decided to share with me the suicidal thoughts and the practicalities of how she was going to end her life,” he said. “I’m somewhat ashamed of the way that I dealt with it.”
“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 OK.'”
“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.”
Harry said once the lights went down, Meghan began to cry.
“I was ashamed that it got this bad. I was ashamed to go to my family,” he recalled. “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.”
Speaking about Meghan’s suicidal thoughts, the father-of-one said: “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.”
“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,” he confessed.
Harry also revealed his “biggest regret” is not standing up for his wife sooner, and said he was afraid Meghan would end up like his mother.
“History was repeating itself. My mother was chased to her death while she was in a relationship with someone that wasn’t White and now look what’s happened,” he said.
Princess Diana was dating Egyptian film producer Dodi Al Fayed at the time of her death.
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