Prince Harry opens up about going to therapy to deal with the death of his mother, Princess Diana

The late Princess Diana's youngest son, Prince Harry, opened up to The Telegraph about going to therapy decades after losing his mother as a boy. "I can safely say that losing my mum at the age of 12, and therefore shutting down all of my emotions for the last 20 years, has had a quite serious effect on not only my personal life but my work as well," Harry said.

Princess Diana died in a car crash in 1997. In the years that followed, Harry went to war in Afghanistan but by his late 20s, he felt a "fight or flight" sensation during royal engagements and was struggling with anger issues where he felt "on the verge of punching someone."

"[I] started to have a few conversations and actually all of a sudden, all of this grief that I have never processed started to come to the forefront and I was like, there is actually a lot of stuff here that I need to deal with," Harry told The Telegraph's Bryony Gordon, who runs a podcast about her own struggles with obsessive-compulsive disorder called Mad World: Why It's Totally Normal to Feel Weird.

Subscribe to The Week

Escape your echo chamber. Get the facts behind the news, plus analysis from multiple perspectives.

SUBSCRIBE & SAVE

Sign up for The Week's Free Newsletters

From our morning news briefing to a weekly Good News Newsletter, get the best of The Week delivered directly to your inbox.

From our morning news briefing to a weekly Good News Newsletter, get the best of The Week delivered directly to your inbox.

Sign up

Harry, 32, said he is now in a "good place" after his older brother, Prince William, helped encourage him to get professional help. "I've done that a couple of times, more than a couple of times, but it's great," he said of seeing a therapist. Harry, alongside his brother William and sister-in-law, Kate Middleton, founded a mental health charity called Heads Together in 2016, which helps to fight mental health stigmas.

Harry added: "I have probably been very close to a complete breakdown on numerous occasions, when all sorts of grief and sort of lies and misconceptions and everything are coming to you from every angle ... The experience I have had is that once you start talking about it, you realize that actually you're part of quite a big club." Read his full interview at The Telegraph here.