Prince Harry “slipped into a depression” after moving to Canada in 2019 with his wife and son, he has revealed.

The 42-year-old prince has reflected on the “adrenaline crash” he experienced after years of living in a stressful environment in Britain after he and wife made the move across the Atlantic.

“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 a release for online learning platform MasterClass 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.”

Harry stepped back from royal duties with wife Meghan Markle in January 2020. The Duke and Duchess of Sussex moved to Canada to be able to “get some space away from everything just to be able to think”.

They recently returned to Britain with Prince Archie, now seven, and daughter Princess Lilibet, five, after six years living in California.

Harry was just 12 when his mother Diana, Princess of Wales, died in a car accident. He believes his desire to join the military stemmed from being driven by adrenaline while experiencing “emotional shutdown”.

“For 15, 20 years, when I was being asked, ‘Are you OK?’, my response was, ‘I’m fine’. It was numbness, emotional shutdown,” he tells neuroscientist Mary-Frances O’Connor in the MasterClass.

“Without knowing it, adrenaline was pushing me, was driving me.

“It was the driving force of what took me to joining the military at the age of 20. It was the perfect distraction. I couldn’t really think about much else apart from the task at hand.”

But after returning from his second tour of Afghanistan in 2013, Harry began to realise his military experiences had triggered trauma from earlier in his life.
“The things that I saw, the things I experienced, appeared to be a trigger for other traumas that had stored themselves within me,” he said.

“I started to realise that I probably had become seriously depleted when just putting a simple dress shirt on – the tightening of the collar – literally felt like I was suffocating, and I would be experiencing panic attacks just in the car on the way to work.

“That’s when I realised, ‘OK, there’s something bigger, there’s something else that you need to look into here’.”

According to People magazine, MasterClass approached Harry last year about developing a class centred on grief. He filmed it in California earlier this year.

It has been released ahead of World Mental Health Day on October 10 and benefits two bereavement charities: Comfort Zone Camp and Scotty’s Little Soldiers.