Prince Harry, the Duke of Sussex, said he slipped into depression for about two weeks after arriving in Canada in late 2019.
He gave that account in a MasterClass session on grief with neuroscientist Mary-Frances O’Connor, a University of Arizona professor, titled “Redefining Grief: Building Resilience Through Loss” and released Thursday, Oct. 8, 2026. The depression set in within days of his leaving Britain, he said, while he was staying on Vancouver Island with his wife Meghan, the Duchess of Sussex, and their infant son, Prince Archie.
Harry said the couple went to Canada for distance and room to think, away from what he described as a stressful environment. His body, as he tells it, did not adjust quietly.
“Being in Canada, away from the stressful environment where presumably my body was just pumped full of adrenaline, within two or three days, I experienced this adrenaline crash, something that I’d never experienced before,” he said.
“It was as if I needed stress in order to get the adrenaline to make my brain function because I became useless around the house. I actually slipped into depression for about two weeks and I felt like I couldn’t function without adrenaline,” he continued.
The couple announced in January 2020 that they were stepping back from royal duties, and by March 2020 they had relocated to Los Angeles.
Behind the “I’m Fine” Answer
“For 15 to 20 years, when I was being asked, ‘are you OK?’ my response was, ‘I’m fine,’” Harry said. His mother, Diana, Princess of Wales, was killed in a high-speed car crash on Aug. 31, 1997, at the age of 36; Harry was 12 and his brother, Prince William, was 15.
Being a prince, Harry said, left him nowhere to put what he was feeling. He recalled the televised funeral, the hands he shook, mourners weeping for a woman they had never met, and the sense that everyone was watching how he was holding up.
Beneath that impression, he said, were numbness, emotional shutdown and adrenaline doing the driving. The denial lasted a decade, by his account.
Harry first set out in his memoir “Spare” his belief that his mother had engineered an escape from the forces wrecking her life and would reappear in disguise to take him and his brother away. He cried for the first time at the family-only burial, he said, and then did not cry again for nearly two decades.
He kept the numbness deliberately, he said: joy felt like a betrayal, and sadness was the only proof he missed her. He had forgotten the sound of her laugh.
A therapist suggested he spray her perfume. Harry called it a sensory key, one that opened feelings he had kept sealed away, and he concluded from it that what his mother wanted was for him to be happy.
Panic Attacks and a Tightened Collar
“In my 20s, I went to war twice thinking I could outrun my feelings. But that’s not what happened,” Harry said. He served two tours in Afghanistan with the British Army, and he described the military as a way out of his own head.
The first warnings were physical, he said — panic attacks, and a feeling of suffocation when he tightened a collar. Returning from his second tour with no mission left, he realized how much the adrenaline had been carrying him.
His post-traumatic stress was not rooted in Afghanistan itself, he said; what he saw there appeared to trigger older traumas already stored inside him. O’Connor explained in the session that the brain registers a loved one not as gone but as lost, and keeps searching until it is taught otherwise.
A School Move Over Security
Harry and Meghan returned to live in the U.K. in August 2026. Their home is thought to be in the Cotswolds, a private residence outside London.
Prince Archie, seven, and Princess Lilibet, five, moved to a different school two days into the term, with security concerns given as the reason. Harry now keeps a personal rule: never more than 10 days away from Meghan, Archie and Lilibet.
The couple made their first joint public appearance since returning to England on Thursday, Oct. 15, visiting three charities in Nottingham. Meghan has also been seen in London, having afternoon tea with human rights campaigner Malala Yousafzai at Claridge’s.
MasterClass approached Harry last year about developing a segment on grief. He filmed it in California over the summer, not at his Montecito house, for a platform whose annual membership costs between £120 and £228 a year.
The 30th anniversary of Diana’s death falls in August 2027, and Harry is reportedly considering a documentary about his mother.