Prince Harry Spent Nearly Two Decades 'Numb' After Mom Princess Diana's Death

The following article includes mentions of mental health.

Prince Harry was only 12 years old at the time of Princess Diana's tragic death in August 1997, but it took him two decades to allow himself to cry over it. He did so only after he started seeing a therapist. "When I tried therapy, it didn't take me that long to realize, 'Wow, I've been numb to this,'" Harry told GQ in October 2026. For all those years, the Duke of Sussex wanted to just get over his grief and move on because that's what he thought was expected of him.

Part of it was in his mind, but part of it was also his reality. He was a royal, a direct descendant of the monarch. His life wasn't ordinary and he felt pressured to play his part well. In 2017, Harry opened up about developing a panic disorder after Diana's death. "Every single time I was in any room with loads of people, which is quite often, I was just pouring with sweat, like heart beating," he said on Forces TV (via Today).

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But instead of seeking help, he tried to hide it. "I was like, 'Oh my God, get me out of here now. Oh, hang on, I can't get out of here, I have got to just hide it,'" he added. Thanks to therapy, Harry began to undo the damage done by suppressing his grief. "It gave me permission to grieve and acknowledge the fact that, yeah, losing your mom really sucks. You're allowed to cry about it," he shared in the GQ interview. It took him reaching his 30s and looking at a different kind of trauma in the eye to realize he needed to address his grief.

As part of Prince Harry's military service in the British Army, he was deployed to Afghanistan twice — in the winter of 2007-2008 and then again between 2012 and 2013. After seeing the widespread effect of trauma right in front of him, he was able to recognize it in himself. "Afghanistan was the thing that triggered everything else," he said in the Forces TV interview. He realized suppressing the grief over losing Princess Diana as a boy had snowballed instead of gone away like he had initially thought it would.

It was time to do something about it. "If you lose your mum at the age of 12 then you've got to deal with it and the idea that ... 15, 17 years later I still hadn't dealt with it, Afghan was the moment," he said. The change didn't happen overnight, though. While his military service was the initial push he needed, it would be another few years before he started therapy. In fact, things actually got worse before they got better, with Harry's mental health deteriorating between 2015 and 2016. "It was 20 years of not thinking about it, and then two years of total chaos," he shared on The Telegraph's "Mad World" podcast in April 2017.

To help cope with the anger he developed, he took up boxing. It helped, but letting out his aggression didn't address the core issue. Therapy was ultimately the beginning of his healing process. "I know there is huge merit in talking about your issues," Harry explained, "and the only thing about keeping it quiet is that it's only ever going to make it worse."

If you or someone you know needs help with mental health, please contact the Crisis Text Line by texting HOME to 741741, call the National Alliance on Mental Illness helpline at 1-800-950-NAMI (6264), or visit the National Institute of Mental Health website.