Meghan Markle has said that she had been called “crazy,” “hysterical” and “nuts,” and that at one of her “lowest points” Prince Harry had referred to her a therapist.
Meghan opened the new episode of her podcast Archetypes that dropped Tuesday, saying, “Raise your hand if you’ve ever been called crazy or hysterical or what about nuts? Insane out of your mind, completely irrational, okay? You get the point.
“Now, if we were all in the same room and could see each other, I think it would be pretty easy to see just how many of us have our hands up. By the way, me too. And it is no wonder when you consider just how prevalent these labels are in our culture.”
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Meghan also said that she was referred to a therapist by Prince Harry when she was at her “lowest point.”
While she did not specify when this occurred, it seems likely that she was referring to her time in the royal family, having previously said during her interview with Oprah Winfrey that she “didn’t want to be alive anymore” but that she was not offered support.
Meghan also explored the etymology of the word hysterical, saying it comes from “hysteria” the Greek word for womb.
Meghan said: “Plato himself was actually amongst the Greek philosophers, who believed that the womb would travel around the body adding pressure to other organs, which would then lead to erratic and unreliable behavior.”
In her latest podcast episode, titled “The Decoding of Crazy,” Meghan spoke to three other actresses—Deepika Padukone, Jenny Slate, and Constance Wu—about their mental health journeys.
Wu broke down in tears as she described her own suicide attempt, saying it was provoked by sexual abuse she was suffering on the set of Fresh Off the Boat, and the backlash she suffered to a social media post.
Meghan said: “I remember at my worst point, being finally connected to someone that my husband had found, a referral for me to call, and I called this woman, she didn’t even know I was calling her, and she was checking out at the grocery store.
“I could hear the little beeps [of the checkout], and I was introducing myself, and I could literally hear her going, ‘Wait, sorry, who is this?’
“I was going, ‘I need help.’ And she could hear the dire state that I was in. I think it’s for all of us to be honest about what it is you need and to not be afraid to make peace with that.”
