Prince Harry Says There Was No Royal 'Support Structure' After Diana Death

Prince Harry described "lying on the floor in the fetal position" as grief from Princess Diana came back to him following front-line service in Afghanistan—while he "didn't have that support structure" to understand "what was actually going on with me."

The Duke of Sussex risked criticism as he took a new swipe at the monarchy by calling out the lack of support when he returned home from his second tour of Afghanistan, which ran from September 2012 to January 2013.

During his new Netflix docu-series Heart of Invictus, he delved into the impact of front-line service on his mental health and said it brought back suppressed grief for his mother.

Harry told the Netflix documentary: "My tour of Afghanistan in 2012, flying Apaches, somewhere after that there was an unraveling and the trigger to me was actually returning from Afghanistan and the stuff that was coming up was from 1997 from the age of 12.

"Losing my mum at such a young age, the trauma that I had I was never really aware of. It was never discussed, I didn't really talk about it and I suppressed it like most youngsters would have done, but when it all came fizzing out, I was bouncing off the walls.

"Like, 'what is going on here? I'm now feeling everything as opposed to being numb.' The biggest struggle for me was no one around me really could help.

"I didn't have that support structure, that network or that expert advice to identify what was actually going on with me.

"Unfortunately, like most of us, the first time you really consider therapy is when you're lying on the floor in the fetal position, probably wishing that you dealt with some of this stuff previously. And that's what I really want to change."

Princess Diana died in a Paris car crash in August 1997 when Harry was 12 and Prince William was 15.

Harry and Meghan Markle have repeatedly dropped bombshell allegations about the royals, beginning with their 2021 Oprah Winfrey interview, but also in Harry's book Spare and their first Netflix project Harry & Meghan.

However, the memoir sparked a collapse in their U.S. net approval ratings which sank into negative numbers, though they have since recovered.

Heart of Invictus mostly focuses on the inspiring stories of competitors in the Invictus Games, a paralympic style tournament for injured veterans that Harry created.

And he spoke of his own feeling of responsibility for the mental health of the members of the military community: "I feel it really personally because I've always felt as though every life that is lost could have been a life saved and I feel we as a society could do better, especially for people who have served their country.

"But what I've seen through the Invictus Games and through this community and through my own experiences as well, when you put your mind to something there is nearly always a positive that comes out of it."

Jack Royston is chief royal correspondent for Newsweek, based in London. You can find him on Twitter at @jack_royston and read his stories on Newsweek's The Royals Facebook page.

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