"It was myself, my wife and our son Archie, and we moved to Canada to get some space away from everything just to be able to think," Harry said in the class, Redefining Grief: Building Resilience Through Loss, released October 8. The paid session pairs him with neuroscientist and grief expert Dr. Mary-Frances O'Connor for a long, personal conversation about loss and how the body carries it. It is a class, not a news interview, and everything in it is his own account, not a doctor's diagnosis.
Harry said the crash hit within two or three days of leaving what he called the stressful environment of royal life in Britain. "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."
Then the line that has traveled around the world: "I actually slipped into depression for about two weeks and I felt like I couldn't function without adrenaline." He described years of running on that adrenaline without realizing it, and what happened once the pressure stopped and there was nothing left to run on.
The Canada stay was temporary. The family spent the time on Vancouver Island, and within weeks, in January 2020, Harry and Meghan announced they were stepping back as senior working royals. They later moved to California, where their daughter Lilibet was born in June 2021. Six years later, this past August, the family returned to England so Archie, now seven, and Lilibet, five, could start school there.
Harry tied the crash to a much older wound. He was 12 when his mother, Princess Diana, died in a car crash in Paris in 1997. He said he spent 15 to 20 years emotionally numb, answering "I'm fine" whenever anyone asked if he was okay, and feeling guilty at the idea of being happy without her. He said he cried at her burial and then not again over her death for nearly two decades, forgot the sound of her voice and laugh, and later used her perfume to reconnect with memories of her. The shift came when he concluded she would have wanted him to be happy. "What I discovered was actually that she just wanted me to be happy. And that was a huge mental shift for me. It freed me," he said.
He also said adrenaline had been quietly driving him for years. Joining the British Army at 20, he said, was "the perfect distraction." After returning from a tour in Afghanistan, ordinary things felt unbearable: he said putting on a dress shirt could feel suffocating, and car rides to work brought panic attacks. In the class he also shared a practical rule he lives by now: no more than 10 days away from his wife and children at a stretch, his way of balancing work, fatherhood, and marriage.
The class was released just ahead of World Mental Health Day and supports two bereavement charities, America's Comfort Zone Camp and Britain's Scotty's Little Soldiers. Whether people love the Sussexes or can't stand them, this much is plain: the man spent two decades insisting he was fine, and he is only now saying out loud that he wasn't.