Harry and Oprah’s Mental Health Series Sparks Controversy

The Me You Can't See, a mental health series featuring Prince Harry and Oprah, premiered on Apple TV Plus last week and has since sparked a heated debate.

The Duke of Sussex opened up about his struggles with mental health over the years and how he struggled to cope with life in the public eye.

He wasn't the only celebrity to appear on the show, as Lady Gaga and Richard Armstead also shared their own internal battles throughout the five episodes.

However, it was Harry's astounding honesty about his past that particularly captured the public's interest.

Not only did he touch on his concerns and helplessness about his mother's safety when he was growing up, but he revealed his own sense of panic when faced with the enormity of his royal role.

He also criticized the royal family for failing to address his overwhelming grief after Princess Diana's death and alleged that his relatives told him to “just play the game” when his life became too much.

TV critic Lucy Mangan's review of the series was headlined “Oprah, Harry and the Perils of A List Activism.”

In her scathing two-star piece, she described the show as well-meaning but sanitized and cloying.

While acknowledging that there are rare moments of jagged authenticity, she pointed out that despite the series being filled with celebrities, only Harry is interviewed by Oprah.

Others are interviewed by an anonymous figure behind a camera who is never seen.

Mangan also scrutinized the absence of any mention of deeper forms of mental illness which are still heavily stigmatized.

She conceded that the experiences discussed in the series are important and genuine, with no bad actors in this celebrity-filled venture.

However, she said that this does absolutely nothing to address how ordinary people are supposed to achieve this when the waiting lists for the services they need to access stretch to infinity.

This is all well and good and necessary, but it doesn't address the bigger picture.

Mangan, a proud feminist like both Harry and Meghan, has previously supported the Sussexes in their lives outside the firm.

Writing in Stylist last year, she praised it as a quite magnificently Bala move.

She added, “it is the greatest act of boundary-setting in living memory and an example to all of us whose lives are habitually more dictated by the wants and grabby demands of others than our own needs.”

Harry conveyed in his new series that he and Meghan did everything they possibly could to stay in their roles, but they were struggling, and the firm allegedly met their requests for help with total neglect.

He said, “eventually when I made that decision to leave for my family, I was still told, ‘you can't do this.'

And it's like, well, how bad does it have to get until I am allowed to do this?”

However, Harry has been faulted by others for being out of touch in his other ventures recently, too.

During his appearance on Dax Shepard's podcast, Armchair Expert, he said if he carries out one good deed in the morning, he can go home and then “put my feet up and have a really good day.”

He was heavily criticized both online and by royal commentators Anne Gripper and Russell Myers for not acknowledging how most people have to go to their day jobs and cannot afford to put their feet up.

Harry made a similar blunder during his interview with Oprah back in March, when he complained that his family had completely cut him off financially when he exited the firm a year ago.

However, he and Meghan are both millionaires in their own right.

Even before the couple's lucrative deals with Netflix and Spotify, Harry was estimated to be worth £30 million through items he inherited from Diana.

Meghan was believed to be worth £4 million at the time of their marriage in 2018, through her long stint on the legal drama Suits.

Despite the criticisms, others have praised the Duke's new TV venture for lifting the lid on such a stigmatized issue.

The Telegraph's Anita Singh claimed that to label this series as the follow-up to Oprah's sensational sit down with Meghan would be to do the program a disservice.

She added, “the program tries to offer solutions and to demonstrate that it's important to let all this out rather than bottle it up.”