Harry and Meghan’s revelations engulf palace in racism storm
The duchess’s admission that she battled depression while pregnant brought back painful memories for BethAnne Linstra Klein. Chrissie Russell reports
Prince Harry and Meghan Markle’s explosive TV interview has rocked a British royal family already struggling to modernise, with claims of racism and callousness toward a woman struggling with suicidal thoughts broadcast to millions around the world. Buckingham Palace has yet to respond to Meghan’s claims a member of the family had ‘concerns’ about the colour of her unborn son’s skin.
There’s a photo of BethAnne Linstra Klein has of her when she was pregnant with her first child. The mum-oftwo from Bray, Co Wicklow is smiling and squinting in the bright sunshine of Sydney Harbour, looking to an outsider like the perfect image of a happy holidaymaker, her growing bump just out of shot. But the picture-perfect moment doesn’t tell the whole story.
“I went to Australia to visit a friend hoping that somehow I could come back and not be pregnant anymore or just not be alive any more,” BethAnne reveals candidly. “I wanted to be dead but I didn’t have the courage to kill myself.”
Meghan Markle (39) has revealed that she has a photo that haunts her too. To all the world, the duchess looked the radiant epitome of a happy, pregnant newlywed when she appeared on the red carpet, alongside husband Harry, in a sequin Roland Mouret gown for an event at London’s Royal Albert Hall in January 2019.
But the truth of that moment, as she told Oprah Winfrey in her two-hour long interview this week, was that hours before that photo was taken she had told the prince that she “just didn’t want to be alive anymore”. That every time the lights dimmed in the Royal Box, she was sobbing her heart out.
The lives of the two women, Meghan and BethAnne, could not be any more different but they share a common bond. Both suffered depression while pregnant and neither felt heard when they tried to access help.
“I understand how Meghan Markle felt with thoughts of suicide,” says BethAnne. In 2011, in the first trimester of her first pregnancy, she told her GP she was feeling low. She continued to repeat this at hospital appointments and doctor’s visits but never felt heard.
“I had medical professionals telling me ‘ah, no, it’s normal to feel a bit sad when you’re pregnant, it’s the hormones’,” she says. “No one else I knew felt this way and the midwife I spoke to didn’t know a thing about it either. It made me feel worse because I felt I shouldn’t be feeling this way, I should feel happy. But I didn’t feel happy so something must be wrong with me.” Pregnancy comes with its own set of clichés: the image of the ‘blooming’ mum to be, always ‘glowing’ and ‘radiant’. Every time BethAnne encountered a wellwisher, gushing “you must be so excited!” she felt like a fraud for not feeling this way, and that made her feel worse.
But the reality is that depression in pregnancy is very common. “I think we didn’t allow depression during pregnancy to become a known fact because there was a mythology around pregnant women that they were always happy,” explains Professor Veronica O’Keane, Trinity Centre for Health Services and author of The Rag and Bone Shop. “When the fact is that, not only are women not always happy to be pregnant but there are also very high rates of depression during pregnancy, probably due to a high rate of secretion of stress hormones.
“High levels of cortisol are required to sustain pregnancy and these high levels of cortisol also create mood disturbances — similar to the way people who have to take steroids for medical conditions very frequently get mood disorders as a consequence of that — part of the physiology of pregnancy is that you’ve high stress hormones in your blood which translates subjectively into a depressed and anxious mood.”
Professor O’Keane has published multiple papers looking at depression in pregnant women and the impact on children. In 2018, she led a ground-breaking study, tracking levels of perinatal depression in 5,000 women in Irish maternity services. It found that 16pc of women attending a number of maternity hospitals in Ireland are at probable risk.
More recently, her team has just completed a study showing that “if pregnant women are treated in pregnancy then their outcome is very good and the outcome of the baby is very good. However, if women are not treated in pregnancy, then the outcome is very poor both for the woman and recurrent depression, and for the baby’s cognitive and emotional development.”
But her concern would be that, because of continued stigma around the myth of the ‘happy’ pregnancy, there could be more women suffering in silence.
Meghan, who is now pregnant with her second child, doesn’t claim to have been diagnosed with perinatal depression, instead saying her unhappiness was caused by the “stress” and “isolation” of the unique position she found herself in.
But having spoken out like this, she is shining a light on the fact that not every woman’s mental state fits the mould of the ‘happy’ pregnancy.
The fact that she says she spoke out about her concerns for her mental health at the time,