How Meghan's and William's Mental Health Appearances Went Head-to-Head

Meghan Markle spoke out about the way mental health slurs are used to undermine emotional experience on the same day that Prince William made a veiled reference to the impact of Princess Diana's death.

The latest episode of Meghan's Spotify podcast, Archetypes, is titled "The Decoding of Crazy" and deals with some of the most difficult subject matter yet confronted in the series. On Monday, Meghan talked about the way words like hysterical and crazy can be used to undermine women's experiences, while one of her guests, Crazy Rich Asians actress Constance Wu, discussed a suicide attempt.

On the same day, Prince William took to the airwaves as part of World Mental Health Day activities in the U.K. and made what was seen in the media as a subtle reference to his mother's 1997 death in a Paris car crash, when he was 15.

Prince William on the BBC

William and his wife, Kate Middleton, visited BBC Radio One and spoke to experts about mental health among young people for a special episode of Newsbeat, which was broadcast the following day.

The Prince of Wales appeared to refer to the death of Princess Diana when he said: "A lot of the work we've done on mental health and listening to lots of people talk about it, everyone likes a toolbox—particularly men. A toolbox is quite a useful analogy to kind of use.

"A lot of people don't realize what they need until it actually comes along. You can be living one life one minute and something massively changes and you realize you don't necessarily have the tools or the experience to be able to tackle that," he said.

Meghan Markle's 'Archetypes' Podcast

The duchess's podcast was paused for several weeks after Queen Elizabeth II died on September 8, but following that hiatus her "Decoding Crazy" episode landed this week.

Meghan told listeners: "I feel pretty strongly about this word, this label, crazy. The way that it's thrown around so casually and the damage it's wrought on society and women, frankly everywhere. From relationships to families being shattered, reputations destroyed and careers ruined.

She went on: "The stigma surrounding the word, it also has this silencing effect. This effect where women experiencing real mental health issues, they get scared. They stay quiet, they internalize, and they repress for far too long."

Meghan took time to discuss the word hysteria in particular, including its etymological route in the ancient Greek word for womb.

Meghan said: "And I just learned this when we were doing this episode. The word hysterical, it comes from hysteria, which is—wait for it—the Greek word for womb.

"Plato himself was actually amongst the Greek philosophers who believed that the womb would travel around the body adding pressure to other organs, which would then lead to erratic and unreliable behavior.

"By the way, in the DSM—the book used to diagnose mental health disorders—hysteria was an actual medical diagnosis until 1980," she said, referring to the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders.

Princess Diana's Relevance to Both Segments

The link between William's comments and his experience after the death of his mother is fairly straightforward. But Diana's life was a backdrop to Meghan's discussion as well.

William's description of the way a person can be destabilized because "something massively changes" relates to the time he was on what, for the royals, was an ordinary summer holiday at Scotland's Balmoral Castle as a teenager.

While there, the prince and his brother, Harry, spoke to Diana on the phone, not knowing it would be their last call with their mother.

In 2017, William told the ITV documentary Diana, Our Mother: Her Life and Legacy: "It's like an earthquake's just run through the house, through your life and everything. Your mind is completely split. And it took me a while for it to actually sink in."

Referring to the phone call, he said, "If I'd known now, obviously, what was going to happen, I wouldn't have been so blasé about it and everything else. But that phone call sticks in my mind quite heavily."

Diana's relevance to Meghan's comments about hysteria may appear less obvious, but the princess was described by some as "hysterical" during her lifetime.

During a 1995 interview with the BBC, she said that her depression was also used as a label. "Well, maybe I was the first person ever to be in this family who ever had a depression or was ever openly tearful. And, obviously, that was daunting, because if you've never seen it before how do you support it?" she said.

She went on: "Well, it gave everybody a wonderful new label—'Diana's unstable' and 'Diana's mentally unbalanced.' And, unfortunately, that seems to have stuck on and off over the years."

On her podcast, Meghan said, "Calling someone crazy or hysterical completely dismisses their experience.

"It minimizes what they're feeling, and, you know, it doesn't stop there. It keeps going to the point where anyone who's been labeled it enough times can be gaslit into thinking that they're actually unwell. Or sometimes worse. To the point where real issues of all kinds get ignored."