Prince Harry, the Duke of Sussex, said he slipped into a depression lasting about two weeks after arriving in Canada in late 2019, in a MasterClass session on grief released Thursday, Oct. 8, 2026.
Harry recorded the session, titled “Redefining Grief: Building Resilience Through Loss,” with neuroscientist Mary-Frances O’Connor, a University of Arizona professor. He said the collapse struck within days of leaving Britain. He had arrived in Canada with his wife, Meghan, the Duchess of Sussex, and their infant son.
“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,” Harry said in the session.
“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. I actually slipped into depression for about two weeks and I felt like I couldn’t function without adrenaline,” he said.
From Vancouver Island to the Cotswolds
Vancouver Island became the family’s base once the Sussexes left the U.K. with their son, Prince Archie. Distance and room to think were what Harry said had drawn them to Canada, and he characterized what they left behind as a stressful environment.
An announcement that they would step back from royal duties came from the couple in January 2020. Los Angeles was their home by March 2020. Harry and Meghan returned to live in the U.K. in August 2026, six years after that departure, and are now thought to be living in the Cotswolds, in a private residence outside London.
Security concerns prompted the couple to switch schools for Prince Archie, seven, and Princess Lilibet, five, only two days after the term began.
An Oct. 9 report said the duchess does not plan to accompany Harry on all his work trips since the couple’s return, citing an unnamed source. “She’s focused on the kids and her brand,” the source said. “Her view is that they should divide and conquer and Harry agrees, but it does mean a whole lot more pressure on his shoulders and absolutely zero time to himself because the moment he’s free from work he’s got to rush home to give Meghan a break from parenting duties.”
The same source said: “Getting them all to England was just the first battle, now he has to prove that it was the right decision, which means a whole lot of hard work.” As of Oct. 9, a separate report states Harry and Meghan do not plan to apologize to the Prince and Princess of Wales, contrary to earlier reports.
A Decade of Denial
The session largely concerned the death of his mother, Diana, Princess of Wales. A high-speed car crash killed her on Aug. 31, 1997, at the age of 36, when Harry was 12. His brother, Prince William, was 15.
Being a prince, Harry said, left him nowhere to put what he was feeling. The funeral broadcast on television came back to him, along with the hands he shook. He described mourners weeping for a woman they had never met, and he felt everyone watching to see how he was holding up. He said that underneath his response was numbness and emotional shutdown, with adrenaline doing the driving.
“For 15 to 20 years, when I was being asked, ‘are you OK?’ my response was, ‘I’m fine,’” he said in the MasterClass session.
He said he remained in denial for a decade, holding a belief he first set out in his memoir “Spare”: his mother, he thought, had staged an escape from the forces wrecking her life, and she would return one day in disguise to carry him and his brother off with her.
The family-only burial was where Harry managed tears for the first time, he recalled, and nearly two decades passed before he cried again. He said he kept himself numb for years. Joy struck him as a betrayal, and only sadness, he felt, could prove that he missed her. He said he had forgotten the sound of her laugh.
A therapist suggested he spray her perfume. Harry called it a sensory key that opened feelings he had kept sealed away, and said it led him to conclude his mother had wanted him to be happy.
War, Panic Attacks and PTSD
Harry served two tours in Afghanistan with the British Army, and said he had treated the military as a way out of his own head. “In my 20s, I went to war twice thinking I could outrun my feelings. But that’s not what happened,” he said.
His body sounded the first warnings, he said: panic attacks, and a sense of suffocation whenever he tightened a collar. Coming home from his second tour left him with no mission in front of him, and only then did he grasp how much the adrenaline had been carrying him. He said his post-traumatic stress was not rooted in Afghanistan itself, and that what he saw there appeared to trigger older traumas already stored inside him.
The brain files a loved one as lost rather than gone, O’Connor explained, and it goes on searching until something teaches it otherwise.
Speaking in the session, Harry said: “The biggest factor for me is the energy and the joy and happiness that I get being with my family, especially our kids, and the joy and happiness I get by being on the ground for my work.” He added: “The key to finding the joy and happiness balance is no more than 10 days away from my wife and kids.”
Filmed in California Over Summer
MasterClass approached Harry last year about developing a segment on grief. Filming took place over the summer in California, though he did not use his Montecito house. Subscribers to the platform pay between £120 and £228 a year for an annual membership.
Meghan was seen in London having afternoon tea with human rights campaigner Malala Yousafzai at Claridge’s. With the 30th anniversary of Diana’s death approaching in August 2027, Harry is reportedly considering a documentary about his mother.