Prince Harry has revealed that he experienced depression for about two weeks after moving to Canada with his wife, Meghan Markle, and their infant son, Archie, in late 2019, describing an unexpected “adrenaline crash” after leaving what he called a stressful environment.
The Duke of Sussex shared the experience in Redefining Grief: Building Resilience Through Loss, a new MasterClass session in which he spoke with neuroscientist Dr Mary-Frances O’Connor about grief, emotional health and his journey towards healing.
Harry said the change in environment left him struggling to function after years of relying on stress and adrenaline to keep going.
“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.
He explained that he had grown so accustomed to operating under pressure that the sudden change affected his ability to carry out everyday tasks.
“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,” Harry said.
“I actually slipped into depression for about two weeks and I felt like I couldn’t function without adrenaline.”
Harry and Meghan spent part of late 2019 in Canada with Archie, who was born in May that year. The couple announced in January 2020 that they intended to step back from their roles as senior working members of the British royal family. They later settled in the United States.
Harry said the move to Canada offered the family an opportunity to step away from the pressures surrounding their lives.
“We moved to Canada to get some space away from everything just to be able to think,” he said.
His account provides a glimpse into the emotional difficulties he experienced during a major
During the MasterClass session, Harry also discussed how the death of his mother, Princess Diana, affected him long after she died in a car crash in Paris in August 1997. He was 12 at the time.
The prince said he spent years concealing his feelings and responding to questions about his wellbeing by insisting that he was fine.
“For 15, 20 years, when I was being asked, ‘Are you okay?’ My response was, ‘I’m fine.’ It was numbness, emotional shutdown,” he said.
“And without knowing it, adrenaline was pushing me, was driving me.”
Harry explained that he came to view his military career as a way of distracting himself from grief he had not fully processed. He joined the British Army at the age of 20 and served in Afghanistan.
“It was the driving force of what took me to joining the military at the age of 20. It was the perfect distraction. I couldn’t really think about much else apart from the task at hand,” he said.
He later recognised that his military experiences appeared to trigger other unresolved trauma.
“The things that I saw, the things I experienced, appeared to be a trigger for other traumas that had stored themselves within me,” Harry said.
He also recalled experiencing panic attacks before public engagements, describing how putting on a simple dress shirt could leave him feeling as though he was suffocating.
“I started to realize that I probably had become seriously depleted when just putting a simple dress shirt on — the tightening of the collar — literally felt like I was suffocating, and I would be experiencing panic attacks just in the car on the way to work,” he said.
Harry said those experiences prompted him to recognise that he needed to examine what was happening beyond the immediate pressures of his daily responsibilities.
The discussion also explored how Harry struggled to reconcile his grief with the possibility of being happy after his mother’s death.
He said he felt that moving forward with his life could amount to disloyalty towards Diana, leaving him emotionally numb for years.
“I’d spent so long emotionally numb, to a large extent, because I felt disloyal and guilty for the possibility of being happy and joyful without her,” he said.
“I felt like I had to be sad and I had to be emotionally numb in order to prove to her that I missed her.”
Harry explained that therapy helped him confront those feelings and reconsider what happiness meant in the context of his loss.
“The reality is, what I discovered was actually she just wanted me to be happy,” he said.
“And that was a huge mental shift for me. It freed me, and it gave me a whole different outlook on life.”
He also revealed that a therapist suggested using his mother’s perfume as a way to reconnect with memories he had struggled to access. Harry said the experience helped him unlock emotions that he had kept buried.
