I was willing to take drugs: Harry on Di's death

May 21, 2021 18:06

Britain's Prince Harry has spoken out about how he used alcohol and even thought about drugs as he struggled with mental health issues following his mother Princess Diana's death in a car crash in Paris in 1997.

In a new documentary series for Apple TV which he has made with American talk show host Oprah Winfrey, the Duke of Sussex also accuses the British royal family of total neglect when his wife Meghan Markle was feeling suicidal amid harassment on social media.

"I felt completely helpless. I thought my family would help but every single ask, request, warning, whatever it is, just got met with total silence or total neglect," said the 36-year-old, who stepped back as a frontline royal last year and relocated to California, US, with his family.

"We spent four years trying to make it work. We did everything that we possibly could to stay there and carry on doing the role and doing the job," he said.

Speaking to Oprah Winfrey for the series The Me You Can't See', Harry described being aged 28 to 32 as "a nightmare time in my life", in which he had panic attacks and severe anxiety.

"I was just all over the place mentally," he said. "I was willing to drink, I was willing to take drugs, I was willing to try and do the things that made me feel less like I was feeling," he added.

Harry reveals that he would drink a week's worth of alcohol on a Friday or Saturday night, "not because I was enjoying it but because I was trying to mask something".

Prince Harry famously walked behind his mother's coffin at her funeral in 1997, alongside his brother William and father Prince Charles. "For me the thing I remember the most was the sound of the horses' hooves going along the Mall. It was like I was outside of my body and just walking along doing what was expected of me. Showing one tenth of the emotion that everybody else was showing: this was my mum you never even met her," he recalls.

The excerpts from the series were released just as a long-running inquiry into the BBC's handling of a 1995 interview with Diana two years before her death concluded that the late Princess of Wales had been deceived by the reporter in charge. In relation to that, Harry issued a separate statement to say that the "ripple effect of a culture of exploitation and unethical practices" ultimately took his mother's life. PTI

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