The Duke and Duchess of Sussex talked to CBS Sunday Morning anchor Jane Pauley about the dangers of social media and risks of suicide ideation. Photo / CBS
The Duke and Duchess of Sussex talked to CBS Sunday Morning anchor Jane Pauley about the dangers of social media and risks of suicide ideation. Photo / CBS
Warning: This story discusses suicide, mental health and online bullying.
As the Duke and Duchess of Sussex launch a new initiative focused on protecting children from online trauma, like online bullying and its effects, including self harm, the couple spoke to CBS. Meghan Markle shared her own experience with suicidal thoughts and “through line” with online trauma and risk for children. Prince Harry said online “rabbit holes” are “terrifying” and with the risks to young people’s mental health “almost every parent needs to be a first responder”.
The Duke and Duchess of Sussex made an appearance on CBS Sunday Morning, in a pre-recorded interview with Jane Pauley that aired over the weekend, coinciding with Meghan Markle’s 43rd birthday.
She’d only “scraped the surface” of her own experience, Markle told Pauley as part of a wider discussion around suicide and social media, who asked the duchess directly about her own experiences, noting that Markle “seemed uncomfortable” with the line of conversation.
“I wasn’t expecting it,” Markle admitted, before agreeing “there is a through line” with online bullying, social media and self-harm – which are the focus of the new initiative from Archewell Foundation, the couple’s non-profit organszation.
“I would never want someone else to feel that way, and I would never want someone else to be making those sort of plans, and I would never want someone else to not be believed,” Markle said. “So if me voicing what I have overcome will save someone,” she explained. “Then that’s worth it.”
The Foundation’s new programme, The Parents Network – launched in the US, UK and Canada – targets the impact digital platforms can have on children, aiming to help families impacted by social media-related traumas like online bullying.
“We can see what’s happening in the online space, we know that there’s a lot of work to be done there,” Markle told Pauley, adding that they hoped to be “part of change for good”.
Harry voiced concern for the opaque nature of online platforms, and the challenges of knowing what children and young people were accessing via tablets and phones. “They could be going down these rabbit holes,” Harry says. “Within 24 hours they could be taking their life.”
“That is the terrifying piece of this,” he said, that this could happen to “absolutely anybody” and that people needed to be aware and prepared.
“We’ve got to the stage where almost every parent needs to be a first responder,” Harry told Pauley, but he warned that even “the best” first responders couldn’t always see the first signs of suicidal ideation.
CBS also shared footage of the Sussexes meeting bereaved parents who Pauley explained had “lost a child, directly or indirectly, as a result of exposure to online social media”.
#NoChildLostToSocialMedia is The Parents Network’s call to action.
A clip from the CBS Sunday Morning package showed the Duchess of Sussex's previous disclosures to Oprah Winfrey. Photo / CBS
The problems underpinning the initiative are complex and well known, and the Sussexes have been candid about them before.
In 2021, during the couple’s sit-down interview with Oprah Winfrey, Markle told veteran broadcaster about the “bullying and abuse that I was experiencing on social media and online”.
In 2022 Harry revealed he had concerns for the next generation and online harm. “As parents, my wife and I are concerned about the next generation growing up in a world where they are treated as digital experiments for companies to make money and where things like hatred and harm are somehow normalised.”
In 2023 the couple appeared on a panel about online safety at a New York event for World Mental Health Day
This also isn’t the first time they’ve discussed mental health, with the couple working to normalise the subject in recent years.
The duke opened up to the Daily Telegraph in a revealing 2017 interview, where he said that he finally sought counselling after “20 years of not thinking about” the death of his mother Diana, and two years of “total chaos” in his 20s.
Harry opened up about his personal struggles in 2018 during a speech at an Invictus Games’ event in Sydney. “It’s okay to ask for help. I’ve been there, you’ve been there,” he said. “When you are brave enough to ask for help, you can be lifted up.”
That same year, in New Zealand, the duke and duchess met with Kiwi organisations like Voices of Hope, Key to Life, Lifeline in Wellington, telling them he felt there was no “silver bullet” to improving mental health that people needed “to understand that”.
During the 2021 interview with Winfrey the duchess revealed she had experienced suicidal ideation, saying that in the past she’d had feelings that she “just didn’t want to be alive anymore” and had been “ashamed to admit it to Harry because I know how much loss he’s suffered”, she told Winfrey. “But I knew that if I didn’t say it, I would do it.”
A docuseries that year, The Me You Can’t See – reportedly supported by the Queen – explored mental health with stories from around the world.
The subject of mental health has been an important one for the Duke and Duchess of Sussex – the Prince of Wales has advocated for mental health awareness – and the issue has a new focus with the Archwell Foundation’s latest initiative, which may see them sharing more of their own experience in the hope that it will help others.
“When you’ve been through any level of pain and trauma,” Markle told CBS, an important part of the healing journey is “being about to be really open about it”.
