I’ve been trolled too! Meghan speaks out on mental health
Meghan Markle said she was the world’s ‘most trolled person’ as she and Prince Harry spoke about their mental health.
After inviting three Los Angeles teenagers into their $14.5 million Californian home to mark World Mental Health Day, the couple recorded a podcast to discuss their own experiences.
Meghan, 39, said yesterday the impact of the Covid-19 pandemic had pushed people increasingly toward the internet, which opened up a ‘vulnerability’.
She added: ‘I can speak personally, too; I’m told that in 2019, I was the most trolled person in the entire world, male or female. Now, eight months of that, I wasn’t even visible. I was on maternity leave or with a baby. But what was able to just be manufactured and churned out... it’s almost unsurvivable.’
Meghan said: ‘That’s so big you can’t even think about what that feels like – because I
‘What was churned out... it’s almost unsurvivable’
don’t care if you’re 15 or 25, if people are saying things about you that aren’t true, what that does to your mental and emotional health is so damaging.’ Meghan’s last public engagement before Archie’s May birth was on March 13 last year. She then appeared in public pictures marking his birth, his July christening, on the couple’s Sussex-Royal Instagram account, and in videos and pictures to publicise her Vogue cover in August before her return to public work in September. She continued in the Teenager Therapy podcast: ‘Being able to talk to people and understand that even though our experience is unique to us – and obviously can seem very different to what people experience on the day-to-day – it’s still a human experience and that’s universal.
‘We all know what it feels like to have our feelings hurt, we all know what it feels like to be isolated... we are all figuring it out.’
Meghan later added that she was now ‘doing really well’ and said: ‘The past few months have been layered for everyone, we certainly can’t complain, we are fortunate we all have our health, we have roofs over our heads.’
Harry, 36, said: ‘The unique part of our work is whatever you’re going through and whatever other people are going through, it’s all relative to that environment that they’re in.
‘We’ve felt incredibly grateful and fortunate to be able to have outdoor space where our son can walk his first steps. It’s a huge blessing.
‘If you could safely say that 90 per cent of people on planet Earth have suffered some form of trauma, some form of loss, some form of grief... then certainly for this year, through Covid, I think it’s probably safe to say that 99.9 per cent, if not 100 per cent of people, have experienced some form of one of those, all those, at the same time.
‘Rather than mental health being focused on the people that are struggling, it needs to go much wider than that, and to the acceptance and the appreciation that every single one of us have mental health, and every single one of us have got stuff going on that we either need to talk about or that we need help with.’
Harry and Meghan also led the group during the podcast, which usually features five students from Loara High School in Anaheim, Orange County, in deep breathing exercises to calm their nerves.