Prince Harry has opened up about feeling like he didn’t have support in the aftermath of Princess Diana’s death.
In a new Netflix doco-series, Heart Of Invictus, which focuses on injured and ill military veterans who take part in the Invictus Games, the royal reflects on his own experience in the army.
“I can only speak from my personal experience —My tour of Afghanistan in 2011 flying Apaches,” Prince Harry says. “Somewhere after that there was an unravelling and the trigger to me was returning from Afghanistan.
“But the stuff that was coming up was from 1997 – from the age of 12.
“Losing my mum at such a young age, the trauma that I had, I was never really aware of.”
Prince Harry then reflects on “lying in the foetal position” and “bouncing off walls” on his return from the army, due to having suppressed his emotions as a child.
While Prince Harry admitted that suppressing his emotions is what “most youngsters would have done,” he also said that he didn’t have a “support structure” to help him process his grief.
“I was thinking what is going on here – now I’m feeling everything as opposed to being numb.
“The biggest struggle for me was that no one around me could really help.
“I didn’t have that support structure that network or that expert advice to identify what was actually going on with me.
“Unfortunately like most of us, the first time you really consider therapy is when you’re lying on the floor in the foetal position probably wishing that you dealt with some of this stuff previously.”
The documentary series, which is produced by Prince Harry And Meghan’s production company Archewell Productions, is made of of five episodes. While the documentary doesn’t focus on Harry and Meghan specifically, the couple do feature in the series.
Archewell Productions currently has a deal with Netflix to produce a number of feature films, scripted shows, documentaries and children’s programs. Next up, the company is planning to adapt Carley Fortune’s novel Meet Me at the Lake into a film.
