- Prince Harry said he tried psychedelic drugs to deal with the death of his mother, Princess Diana.
- Harry opened up about the experience in his "60 Minutes" interview with Anderson Cooper Sunday.
Prince Harry opened up about using psychedelic drugs to help him deal with the grief from the death of his mother, Princess Diana.
The Duke of Sussex spoke with Anderson Cooper for "60 Minutes" in an interview that aired on Sunday. Harry is currently promoting his memoir, "Spare," set to be published worldwide on Tuesday.
The prince said he replayed memories in his head and watched old videos of Diana online to trigger his emotions, but he was unsuccessful.
"There was this weight on my chest that I felt for so many years, and I was never able to cry," the prince said. "So I was constantly trying to find a way to cry."
Harry later turned to therapy and experimental treatments to help him process his feelings, with Cooper noting that in his memoir, the prince listed ayahuasca and psilocybin (magic mushrooms) among the drugs he'd tried.
"I would never recommend people to do this recreationally, but doing it with the right people, if you are suffering from a huge amount of loss, grief, or trauma, then these things have a way of working as a medicine," he told Cooper.
Harry said the drugs cleared "the misery of loss" and reminded him what his mother really wanted for him.
"They cleared away this idea that I had my head that I needed to cry to prove to my mother that I missed her, when in fact, all she wanted was for me to be happy."
The prince said he had trouble accepting his mother's absence
Harry also spoke with Cooper and ITV's Tom Bradby on Sunday about the "guilt" he felt for crying less than the strangers at Diana's funeral. He was 12 when she was killed in a car accident in Paris, France, on August 31, 1997.
"Their hands were wet from wiping their own tears away," he told Cooper. "I do remember one of the strangest parts to it was taking flowers from people and then placing those flowers with the rest of them. As if I was some sort of middle person for their grief. And that really stood out for me."
He also said the only time he cried was "Once my mother's coffin actually went into the ground," but that there was "never another time" because he believed his mother would come back.
It was a notion he held onto until he was 23, he said, when he drove through the same tunnel where Diana died to recreate her final moments.
"William and I had already been told, 'The event was like a bicycle chain. If you remove one of those chains, the end result would not have happened,'" he said. "And the paparazzi chasing was part of that. But yet, everybody got away with it."