Which Princess Diana comes to mind when you think of her? Perhaps it is the doe-eyed Diana in a monumental dress on her wedding day, or the Diana gleefully twirling on the arm of John Travolta at the White House. Maybe it is the Diana screeching for joy with her young sons on a ride at Thorpe Park, or the Diana walking through landmine-infested land in Angola in a white shirt and jeans. The most-photographed woman in the world during her lifetime, there are a glut of Diana images to draw from.
And yet those moments are not the ones that spring to mind when I think of Diana. My Diana (because the consequence of being the most photographed woman in the world is that we all feel a connection and erroneous sense of ownership towards her) is one we never actually saw, but who coexisted alongside her luminous poise that whole time. My Diana is the one who struggled with her mental health and battled an eating disorder, which does nothing to diminish the beauty, charisma and style I simultaneously call to mind.
When Prince Harry was a guest on journalist Bryony Gordon’s Mad World podcast in 2017 he embarked on a frank discussion about his own mental health, telling her that his life had been ‘total chaos’ at one point: ‘I just didn’t know what was wrong with me’. That same year, Prince William appeared on Mark Austin’s documentary Wasting Away: The Truth About Anorexia, he spoke of the urgency to ‘normalise the conversation about mental health’, saying: ‘We need to be matter-of-fact about it, and not hide it in the dark where it festers’.
Would the princes have felt emboldened to have those conversations were it not for the legacy of their mother? Perhaps not. In the ‘90s, around the breakdown of her marriage – notably in Andrew Morton’s 1992 biography Diana: Her True Story and Martin Bashir’s controversial 1995Panoramainterview – Diana embarked on frank conversations about the crippling impact her own mental health struggles had had on her. At a time when conversations around mental health were kept in the dark, she didn’t so much shed light on them as flood them in the global spotlight.
Anecdotally I know how much her openness has helped people, but I can tell you personally what it has meant to me. When my own bulimia was uncovered by my family in my early teens, I remember my parents – not angry as I had unfairly thought they might be, but deeply concerned – telling me that this was the illness Princess Diana had suffered from. That this elegant and beautiful woman I had grown up with had battled the same brutal illness (illness! That was a revelation to me) provided me some comfort. Maybe I wasn’t inherently wrong or gross or greedy, maybe I was just unwell. To seek out her own words on the topic was a soothing balm and diminished the shame that had prevented me from seeking help.
Later, on what might seem a trivial-in-comparison note, but which was no less comforting to me, I was bolstered by the Diana who was romantically hurt and desperate to be loved. Rejection can be petrifying for me; it cuts to the core of my own self-worth. Stories about her cutting the interlocking Cs off her Chanel jackets(you do the math), or allegedly repeatedly calling a married lover late at night, or even turning up at the Serpentine in the ‘revenge dress’, I took as evidence that we can all be heartbroken, and that there is no ‘right’ way to respond to that.
What Diana did, for me, was not just put a voice to mental illness, but also a face to it. And, yes, it is a beautiful face – one that could twinkle with cheeky charm and that radiated compassion – but I think that only strengthens the message. Not because beauty makes everything more palatable, but because it is a reminder that all the apparent privilege in the world cannot immunise you against inner turmoil. We wince at the royal family’s purported ‘never complain, never explain’ policy, and yet it still runs rife in society today (consider the some of the cruel and sceptical reactions to Meghan Markle’s revelation that she had felt suicidal in the bombshell Oprah Winfrey interview. ‘Yeah, right! How could she? She’s Meghan Markle!’). Today, the choreography of social media has only widened the gap between our private and public personas.
Earlier this year, during a particularly bad bout of depression, a well-meaning friend said to me: ‘But look at everything you’ve got!’ And it’s true, I am blessed in so many ways. I have a wonderful family and a close-knit circle of friends, I love my job and my flat with its art on the walls and books on the shelves, I wear expensive clothes and (in normal life) travel frequently. I can even afford to do a grocery shop at Whole Foods when I’m feeling flush. I am bright and sparky and funny and kind. Of course there are things I lack, I know my flaws, and I suffered life-shattering grief in 2019, but, on paper, to the casual observer, and yes on social media, I am doing just great. I have the life I thought when I was younger would fix everything. It didn’t; behind closed doors I was crumbling.
But again, I thought of Diana and how ‘having it all’ didn’t protect her either (and spoiler alert: you can be great fun - as Diana was said to be - and be struggling with your mental health). Sometimes, to paraphrase Harry’s words, we just don’t know what’s wrong with us. In my experience (and again, I can talk only from my experience), talking helps because it is closes the gulf between what you see and what is really going on. We might not all be able to broadcast our own struggles on the BBC, but talking with friends is a small and potentially life-saving gesture of kindness. Some of the most valuable advice I have ever been given is to not compare your insides with other people outsides. To differing degrees and in a multitude of ways, we are all messy and chaotic just beneath the surface. For me, this is Diana’s most pertinent legacy: decisively smashing down the walls between fantasy and reality, and reminding us that if we are struggling, it’s something not to be ashamed of, and you are definitely not alone.