Prince Harry, the Duke of Sussex, said he slipped into a depression that lasted about two weeks after arriving in Canada in late 2019 with his wife, Meghan, the Duchess of Sussex, and their infant son — a collapse that struck within days of their leaving Britain. He described it in a MasterClass session on grief recorded with neuroscientist Mary-Frances O’Connor, a University of Arizona professor, released Thursday, Oct. 8, 2026.
“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 in the session, titled “Redefining Grief: Building Resilience Through Loss.”
He continued: “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.”
An Adrenaline Crash on Vancouver Island
The Sussexes stayed on Vancouver Island after leaving the U.K. with their son, Prince Archie. Harry said the family went to Canada seeking distance and room to think, and characterized what they had left behind as a stressful environment. In January 2020, the couple announced they would step back from royal duties. By March 2020 they had relocated to Los Angeles.
Six years later, the arc reversed. Harry and Meghan returned to live in the U.K. in August 2026 and are now thought to be living in the Cotswolds, in a private residence outside London. The move began roughly: the couple moved Prince Archie, seven, and Princess Lilibet, five, to a different school just two days into the term, citing security concerns.
Grieving Diana in the Public Eye
Much of the session turned on the death of his mother, Diana, Princess of Wales, killed in a high-speed car crash on Aug. 31, 1997, at the age of 36. Harry was 12. His brother, Prince William, was 15. Being a prince, Harry said, did not give him anywhere to put what he was feeling. He recalled the televised funeral, the hands he shook, the mourners weeping for a woman they had never met, and the sense that everyone was watching to see how he was holding up.
So he built an impression instead. “For 15 to 20 years, when I was being asked, ‘are you OK?’ my response was, ‘I’m fine,'” he said. Underneath, he said, was numbness and emotional shutdown, with adrenaline doing the driving.
He said he remained in denial for a decade, holding onto a belief he first set out in his memoir “Spare”: that his mother had engineered an escape from the forces wrecking her life and would one day reappear in disguise to take him and his brother away. He also recalled being able to cry for the first time at the family-only burial, and said he did not cry again for nearly two decades.
For years, he said, he kept himself numb because joy felt like a betrayal, and sadness seemed the only proof he could offer that he missed her. He had even forgotten the sound of her laugh. A therapist suggested he spray her perfume — a sensory key, he said, that opened feelings he had kept sealed away, and led him to conclude that what his mother had wanted was for him to be happy.
Two Tours and a 10-Day Rule
Harry, who served two tours in Afghanistan with the British Army, 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.
The first warnings were physical, he said: panic attacks, a feeling of suffocation when he tightened a collar. Coming home from his second tour, with no mission left in front of him, he realized how much the adrenaline had been carrying him. His post-traumatic stress, he said, was not rooted in Afghanistan itself; what he saw there appeared to trigger older traumas already stored inside him. O’Connor, for her part, explained that the brain registers a loved one not as gone but as lost, and keeps searching until it is taught otherwise.
He also described a personal rule he keeps now: never more than 10 days away from Meghan, Archie and Lilibet. MasterClass approached him last year about developing a segment on grief, and he filmed it in California over the summer, though not at his Montecito house. An annual membership to the platform costs between £120 and £228 a year.
Meghan, meanwhile, was seen in London having afternoon tea with the human rights campaigner Malala Yousafzai at Claridge’s. And with the 30th anniversary of Diana’s death approaching in August 2027, Harry is reportedly considering a documentary about his mother.
