Harry says return from Afghanistan made him confront ‘trauma’ of Diana’s death
Harry has appeared to take a new swipe at his family by claiming he didn’t have a support network when returning home from Afghanistan.
Speaking on his new ‘Heart of Invictus’ series on Netflix today, Harry said he wanted to cure the ‘stigma’ associated with mental illness, which he claims was a ‘dirty word’ when he first joined the military.
In the series, Harry said upon his return home from the war in 2008, the ‘biggest struggle for me was that no one around me really could help’, adding: ‘I didn’t have that support structure, that network or that expert advice to identify what was actually going on with me.’
He also told the show: ‘Unfortunately, like most of us, the first time you consider therapy is when you are lying on the floor in the foetal position probably wishing you had dealt with some of this stuff previously. And that’s what I really want to change.’
The docu-series, which launched in the UK at 8am on Wednesday, is the latest project from the Sussexes as part of their £80 million deal with Netflix.
It sees Harry follow a group of service members on their road to competing in the Invictus Games, a paralympic-style sporting event for sick and injured armed forces personnel set up by the Duke of Sussex in 2014.
Elsewhere during the show, Harry says: From my personal experience, my tour of Afghanistan in 2012, flying Apaches, somewhere after that there was an unravelling.
‘And the trigger to me was returning to Afghanistan, but the stuff that was coming up was from the age of – from 1992 – from the age of 12.
‘Losing my mum at such a young age, the trauma that I had I was never really aware of. It was never discussed, I never really talked about it, and I’ve suppressed it like most youngsters would have done.’
He adds: ‘But when it all came fizzing out I was bouncing off the walls. Like: what is going on here? I’m now feeling everything as opposed to being numb.’
Later in the show, Harry speaks about trauma to Canadian indoor rower Darrell Ling, who tells him: ‘I’m glad you’ve been through this stuff and know how we feel.
The Duke responds: ‘I can’t pretend to know what you’ve been through, but I had that moment in my life where I didn’t know about it but because of the trauma of losing my mum when I was 12, for all those years, I had no emotion, I was unable to cry, I was unable to feel.
‘I didn’t know it at the time. And it wasn’t until later in my life aged 28 there was a circumstance that happened that the first few bubbles started coming out and then suddenly it was like someone shook and it went ‘poof’ – and then it was chaos.
‘My emotions were sprayed all over.’
Heart of Invictus has been released in the run-up to next month’s Invictus Games, set to take place in Düsseldorf, Germany.
The series, which was announced over two years ago, has been made by Harry and Meghan’s Archewell Productions company.
It is directed by Orlando von Einsiedel and produced by Joanna Natasegara, who worked together on the Oscar-winning short The White Helmets.
As the follow-up to last year’s controversial Harry & Meghan documentary, which saw the Sussexes accuse the Royal Family of lying to protect Prince William, pressure is on the documentary to be a big hit.
It follows the collapse of the couple’s other big streaming deal with Spotify, who ended their partnership with the Sussexes after just one season of Meghan’s podcast Archetypes.
Earlier this week, Harry made a surprise appearance at a special US screening of the series in California ahead of its release.
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