The British royal family is rather famously stingy when it comes to mental health care. Even so, Meghan Markle said on her Archetypes podcast that it was her husband Prince Harry who found her first professional referral when she was at her “worst point.”
“My husband had found a referral for me to call,” the Duchess of Sussex told her guest, Hindi language film star Deepika Padukone. “And I called this woman—she didn’t know I was even calling her. And she was checking out at the grocery store. I could hear the little beep, beep, and I was like, ‘Hi…’ and I’m introducing myself and you can literally hear her going, ‘Wait, sorry. I’m just. Who is this?’” Meghan told the apparently confused woman on the phone that she was calling because she needed help. “And she could hear the dire state that I was in,” she explained. “But I think it’s for all of us to be really honest about what it is that you need and to not be afraid to make peace with that, to ask for it.”
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If anyone knows the importance of being honest about asking for help when you need it, it would be Meghan Markle. In her 2021 interview with Oprah, Meghan said she knows from personal experience how hard it is to be asking for help and be told “no.” At her darkest moment, she said, she was thinking seriously about suicide. “I went to the institution and said that I needed to go somewhere to get help, said that I’ve never felt this way before and I need to go somewhere, and they said I couldn’t, that it wouldn’t be good for the institution,” she told Oprah.
Later, in Oprah’s The Me You Can’t See docuseries, Harry admitted, “I was ashamed that it got this bad. I was ashamed to go to my family. Because to be honest with you, like a lot of other people my age could probably relate to, I know that I’m not gonna get from my family what I need.”
