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

Prince Harry.
(Image credit: Joe Giddens - WPA Pool / Getty Images)

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.

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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.

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Jeva Lange

Jeva Lange was the executive editor at TheWeek.com. She formerly served as The Week's deputy editor and culture critic. She is also a contributor to Screen Slate, and her writing has appeared in The New York Daily News, The Awl, Vice, and Gothamist, among other publications. Jeva lives in New York City. Follow her on Twitter.