As the Duke and Duchess of Sussex launch The Parent Network, a program that supports parents of children who experienced trauma and died by suicide due to social media abuse, they explained on “CBS Sunday Morning” that the topic is especially important to them due to Meghan Markle’s own history of experiencing suicidal ideation due to abuse from the press and on social media.
“I haven’t really scraped the surface on my experience,” Markle admitted, “but I do think that 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 fought a well known battle against online abuse while the pair lived in Britain with their young son and first revealed her history with suicidal ideation in a 2021 interview with Oprah Winfrey. Harry is clearly no stranger to loss and grief himself, having lost his mother, Princess Diana, when he was just 12 years old. These experiences have nurtured an empathy in the pair for parents who have lost children to similar abuse — and they have the platform to share those stories and hopefully save lives, utilizing the new program supported by the pair’s Archewell Foundation.
“I think, one of the scariest things that we’ve learned over the course of the last 15, 17 years of social media’s been around, and moreso recently, is the fact that it could happen to absolutely anybody,” Harry said. “I mean, we always talk about, in the olden days, if your kids were under your roof, you knew what they were up to. At least they were safe, right?”
“And now they can be in the next door room on a tablet, or on a phone, and can be going down these rabbit holes. And before you know it, within 24 hours they could be taking their life,” he added.
Markle had earlier grabbed her husband’s hand as she prepared to talk about her history with suicidal ideation. While their own children are young — son Archie is 5 and their daughter Lilibet is 3 — “all you want to do as parents is protect them,” Markle said.
“At this point, we’ve got to the stage where almost every parent needs to be a first responder,” Harry added. “And even the best first responders in the world wouldn’t be able to tell the signs of possible suicide.”
Parents like Donna and Chris Dolly, whose 17-year-old died by suicide due to depression that stemmed from social media use, said their son CJ “was happy” as they too spoke with the CBS program. Donna explained, “We had no idea what happened to our son. You know, he had a beautiful car. He worked and did that. He had a job he liked. Sisters that loved him, parents that adored him.”
CBS journalist Jane Pauley also asked the Duke and Duchess what motivated them to start The Parent Network, even with its “modest beginning” of a handful of parents being involved.
“I think you have to start somewhere,” Markle answered. “I think the simplest thing, that anyone watching this, or anyone who’s able to make change, to look at it through the lens of, ‘what if it was my daughter, what if it was my son? My son or my daughter who comes home who are joyful, who I love, and one day, right under my roof, our entire lives change because of something that was completely out of our control.’”
“And if you look at it through the lens as a parent, there is no way to see that any other way than to try to find a solution,” she added.
You can watch the full interview with the Duke and Duchess of Sussex in the video above.
