Prince Harry feared therapy 'would kill' him following Princess Diana's death

Prince Harry has reflected on his reluctance to go to therapy following his mother’s death.

While speaking to Hungarian-Canadian physician Dr Gabor Maté for a recorded conversation streamed on Saturday, the British royal opened up about having feared meeting with a psychologist in the immediate aftermath of his mother Princess Diana’s death.

Diana died in August 1997 at the age of 36 after a car accident in Paris.

“One of the things I was most scared about, was losing the feeling that I had of my mum,” the Duke of Sussex said of his therapy-related reservations. “I thought that if I went to therapy, that it would kill me, and that I would lose whatever I had left - whatever I had managed to hold on to of my mother.”

“It turns out that that wasn’t the case. I didn’t lose that. It was the opposite,” he continued.

“It turned what I thought was supposed to be sadness, to try to prove to her that I missed her into realising that actually she really just wanted me to be happy. And that was a huge weight off my chest.”

Elsewhere in the conversation, Harry pointed to some ways he is similar to his late mother.

“I always felt slightly different to the rest of my family. I felt strange being in this container and I know that my mum felt the same,” the 38-year-old added. “The times that I ventured towards being myself, being my authentic true self for one shape or another, whether it was through media or family or whatever it was, it was almost like, ‘Don’t be yourself. Come back to what you’re expected to be.’”