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.
The depression struck within days of the family leaving Britain, according to his account. Harry 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, titled “Redefining Grief: Building Resilience Through Loss.”
“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.
He recorded the session with neuroscientist Mary-Frances O’Connor, a University of Arizona professor. The approach came from MasterClass last year, which asked him to develop a segment on grief; the filming took place over the summer in California, away from his Montecito house. Membership costs between £120 and £228 a year.
From Vancouver Island to the Cotswolds
Vancouver Island became the family’s base once Harry, Meghan and their son, Prince Archie, had left the U.K. Distance and room to think were what Harry said drew them to Canada, and he characterized what they had left behind as a stressful environment.
A step back from royal duties was what the couple announced in January 2020. Los Angeles was home to them by March 2020.
The MasterClass remarks were reported on Oct. 8, with the note that Archie was born in May 2019 and that it was the months leading up to and after his birth when the couple fell out with Royal Family members.
Six years later, the arc reversed. Harry and Meghan came back to live in the U.K. in August 2026, and a private residence outside London, in the Cotswolds, is now thought to be their home. Security concerns led the couple to move Prince Archie, seven, and Princess Lilibet, five, to a different school just two days into the term.
An unnamed insider told RadarOnline on Oct. 8 that the Sussexes’ return to Britain has strained their marriage, with financial pressure and childcare falling to Meghan while Harry works on his relationship with King Charles III.
“Harry was very much the driving force behind the relocation, so naturally he feels an enormous responsibility to justify it. He knows Meghan gave up a lifestyle in California that she had worked extremely hard to establish, and he doesn’t underestimate what she sacrificed by agreeing to leave,” the insider said.
Unnamed sources say Meghan does not plan to accompany Harry on all his work trips, focusing instead on the children and her own brand. “She’s focused on the kids and her brand,” one unnamed source said. 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 report says Prince Harry and Meghan have no plans to apologize to the Prince and Princess of Wales, despite reports to the contrary. Meghan was seen in London having afternoon tea with the human rights campaigner Malala Yousafzai at Claridge’s.
A Decade of Denial
Much of the session turned on the death of his mother, Diana, Princess of Wales. A high-speed car crash killed her on Aug. 31, 1997, when she was 36. Harry was 12 at the time; his brother, Prince William, was 15.
Being a prince, Harry said, left him with nowhere to put what he was feeling. His memories of that period included the funeral carried on television and the hands he shook, along with mourners in tears over a woman who had never met them and the feeling that his composure was under general observation.
“For 15 to 20 years, when I was being asked, ‘are you OK?’ my response was, ‘I’m fine,’” he said. Numbness and emotional shutdown sat underneath that response, he said, and adrenaline did the driving.
Denial held him for a decade, he said, and through it he clung to a belief he first set out in his memoir “Spare”: his mother, he thought, had engineered an escape from the forces wrecking her life, and one day she would reappear in disguise and take him and his brother away.
The family-only burial, Harry recalled, was where tears came to him for the first time; nearly two decades then passed before he cried again. He said he kept himself numb for years because joy felt like a betrayal, and sadness seemed the only proof he could offer that he missed her. He said he had forgotten the sound of her laugh.
A therapist suggested he spray her perfume. That sensory key, he said, opened feelings he had kept sealed away and brought him to a conclusion: his mother had wanted him to be happy.
Two Tours and the Crash After
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.
He said the first warnings were physical: 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. He said his post-traumatic stress was not rooted in Afghanistan itself; what he saw there appeared to trigger older traumas already stored inside him.
O’Connor explained that the brain registers a loved one not as gone but as lost, and keeps searching until it is taught otherwise.
Harry described a personal rule he keeps now: never more than 10 days away from Meghan, Archie and Lilibet.
With the 30th anniversary of Diana’s death approaching in August 2027, Harry is reportedly considering a documentary about his mother.
