Meghan has slammed popular TV shows Scrubs and How I Met Your Mother for their portrayal of "crazy" women. Photo / AP
Meghan has slammed popular TV shows Scrubs and How I Met Your Mother for their portrayal of "crazy" women. Photo / AP
Meghan Markle slammed the TV shows How I Met Your Mother and Scrubs in her new Spotify podcast as she discussed how women can be unfairly branded "crazy".
The Duchess of Sussex's latest Archetypes episode - the second to be released since the Queen's death - came out on Tuesday night, and began with a trigger warning.
The Duchess of Sussex, 41, urged anyone to "tune out" if they found the debate "too heavy".
"Raise your hand if you've ever been called crazy or hysterical or what about nuts? Insane, out of your mind, completely irrational, okay? You get the point," Meghan says in the podcast.
"Now, if we were all in the same room and could see each other, I think it would be pretty easy to see. Just how many of us have our hands up? By the way, me too.
"And it's no wonder when you consider just how prevalent these labels are in our culture."
Meghan - who starred in US legal drama Suits before becoming a royal - then played audio clips from popular sitcoms to prove her point.
One, from How I Met Your Mother, shows the Lothario-like character Barney saying: "If she's this crazy, she has to be this hot."
In another, female doctor Elliot Reid in Scrubs says: "I can't take it, Carla! I cannot hide the crazy a minute longer! I'm just this big mountain of coocoo is about to erupt and spew molten crazy, all over him and he's gonna die like this."
A third clip has controversial psychologist Jordan Peterson saying: "I don't think that men can control crazy women."
Meghan was joined on this week's podcast by actresses Jenny Slate, Deepika Padukone and Constance Wu.
Meghan has slammed popular TV shows Scrubs and How I Met Your Mother for their portrayal of "crazy" women. Photo / AP
The duchess later tells the women about the derivation of the word "hysteria".
"I just learned this when we were doing this episode that the word hysterical comes from hysteria, which is - wait for it - the Greek word for womb," she says.
"Plato himself was actually amongst the Greek philosophers, who believed that the womb would travel around the body adding pressure to other organs, which would then lead to erratic and unreliable behaviour."
She later said: "Calling someone crazy or hysterical completely dismisses their experience and minimises what they're feeling.
"It keeps going to the point where anyone who's been labelled it enough times can be gas-lit into thinking that they're actually unwell or sometimes worse, to the point where real issues of all kinds get ignored. Well, that's not happening today.
"I feel pretty strongly about this word, this label 'crazy' - the way that it's thrown around so casually and the damage it's wrought on society and women, frankly everywhere.
"From relationships to families, being shattered, the reputations destroyed and careers ruined the stigma surrounding the word. If it also has this silencing effect. Women experiencing real mental health issues, they get scared, they stay quiet, they internalise, and they repress for far too long."
