Duchess of Sussex opens up about suicidal thoughts in TV interview

The Duchess of Sussex said on Sunday she wanted to share her own struggle to overcome thoughts of taking her own life in the hope that it helped the parents of children bullied on social media, as she launched an initiative intended to support them.
Seated beside her husband Prince Harry, the Duke of Sussex, Meghan said that there was “a through line” between the despair she felt as a serving member of the royal family and her and her husband’s efforts to launch a support network for parents, including those who have lost a child to suicide.
“When you’ve been through any level of pain or trauma, I believe part of our healing journey — certainly part of mine — is being able to be really open about it,” she told an interviewer on CBS Sunday Morning. “And you know, I haven’t really scraped the surface on my experience. But I do think that I would never want someone else to feel that way. And I would never want someone else to be making those sort of plans. And I would never want someone else to not be believed.”
The duchess has previously said that online abuse she suffered after she married Harry in 2018, and a feeling that she was not being protected or supported by the royal family, led her to the verge of suicide. “I just didn’t want to be alive any more,” she told Oprah Winfrey in 2021, after the couple left Britain and settled in California. “And that was a very clear and real and frightening constant thought.”
Asked if there was any connection between that experience and the couple’s new initiative, the Parents’ Network, launched by their charitable foundation, the Duchess said that “if me voicing what I have overcome will save someone or” or encourage someone “to check in” on a loved one and “not to assume that the appearance is good so everything is OK, then that’s worth it. So I’ll take the hit for that.”
The Duchess was speaking from her home in Montecito, California, where she and her husband hosted a meeting with a group of parents whose children had died after encounters online. Among them were Tony and Brandy Roberts, who said their daughter England had taken her own life at 14, after being bullied online, and a mother named Perla Mendoza, whose son Eli died from a dose of fentanyl, sold to him online as a painkiller.
In a statement, the Duke and Duchess’s Archewell Foundation said that their initiative aimed to provide a free peer-support network as well as advice and resources. After a two-year testing phase, it is now being opened to parents in North America and Britain, the foundation said.
In the couple’s interview with CBS, broadcast on Sunday, Harry said that “one of the scariest things” about the potential toll of online abuse is that “it could happen to absolutely anybody. We always talk about, in the olden days if your kids were under your roof, you knew what they were up to, at least they were safe, right? And now they can be in the next-door room on a tablet, or on a phone and can be going down these rabbit holes and before you know it, within 24 hours, they could be taking their own life.”