Netflix’s The Crown exposed Princess Diana and the UK royal family’s secret mental health struggles – today Prince William, Prince Harry and Meghan Markle are speaking up

Dec 14 , 2020

The Duke and Duchess of Sussex. Photo: @sussexroyal/ Instagram

Season four of the hit show introduces Emma Corrin as Diana, showing her struggles with life in the spotlight and Princess Margaret’s discovery of two cousins in a psychiatric institution

The Crown ’s acclaimed fourth season takes aim at the Windsors’ trademark, frosty stoicism, notably through the star-making debut of Emma Corrin as Princess Diana. The actress unflinchingly tackles Diana’s post-marriage isolation, subsequent self-harm and bulimia, to the extent that every episode featuring the People’s Princess is prefaced with a content warning.

The Crown’s fourth season comes with a warning to viewers. Photo: Netflix

Netflix’s drama also follows Prince Margaret as she investigates her family’s history of neurodiversity. She and viewers rediscover her maternal cousins Katherine and Nerissa Bowes-Lyon, who were committed to a psychiatric institution in 1941, forgotten, and mistakenly presumed deceased by 1961. The cousins’ fate would become a press scandal after Nerissa passed away in 1986, and once more in 2020 when a new generation was introduced to their story.

In light of the renewed conversation surrounding the British royal family and its notorious aloofness, we look back at its most vocal advocates for mental health.

Diana, Princess of Wales

As a patron of mental health charities, Princess Diana’s resistance to mental health stigma was clear. Society, she said in a speech in 1990, “should accept back into its midst many of those diagnosed as psychotics, neurotics and other sufferers who Victorian communities decided should be kept out of sight in the safety of mental institutions.”

It wasn’t just lip service, either. The late Princess’ explosive, post-divorce interviews lifted the veil on her post-partum depression, bulimia and self-injury, which she felt were exacerbated by the public scrutiny, a doomed marriage and unsupportive in-laws.