Prince Harry has revealed more of his mental suffering – and anger at his father, Prince Charles – in a series of interviews with his production partner, Oprah Winfrey

The British royal revealed that he spent years drinking excessively and taking drugs to numb the pain of his mother’s death and to calm his anxiety at performing royal duties.

The deeply personal narrative by the prince is being rolled out in a series of episodes of a new documentary series, called The Me You Can’t See, that the prince is co-creating with Winfrey for the streaming service Apple TV Plus.

The series deploys celebrities – Harry, singer Lady Gaga, actress Glenn Close, basketball star DeMar DeRozan – to both destigmatise mental illness and to draw more eyeballs.

Harry described his years from age 28 to 32 as “a nightmare time in my life”, when he suffered from panic attacks and severe anxiety.

“I was just all over the place mentally,” Harry said, revealing that he frequently drank to excess, consuming a week’s worth of alcohol in a single Friday or Saturday night.

He did not say exactly how much he drank or what drugs he took, nor does he say he is an alcoholic or addict.

“I was willing to drink, I was willing to take drugs, I was willing to try and do the things that made me feel less like I was feeling,” said the 36-year-old prince, now married to Meghan Markle, an American actress, and living in a seaside mansion in southern California with their son Archie and another baby on the way.

Harry blamed his trauma on his mother Princess Diana’s death in a high-speed car crash in a Paris tunnel in 1997 and the stress of living the royal life, which he earlier compared to being an animal in a zoo, to be put on display and gawked at.

He directs some of his anger at his father, claiming Charles made him “suffer” as a child. He also says his family never spoke of Diana’s death. “My father used to say to me when I was younger, he used to say to both William and I, ‘Well, it was like that for me so it’s going to be like that for you’,” Harry said.

One of his most traumatic moments as a child, Harry said, was when he followed his mother’s horse-drawn casket in a public funeral cortege at age 12, passing by throngs of onlookers, many of them openly sobbing – and staring at him.

“For me, the thing I remember the most was the sound of the horses’ hooves going along the Mall,” Harry told Winfrey.

“It was like I was outside of my body and just walking along doing what was expected of me. [I was] showing one-tenth of the emotion that everybody else was showing: This was my mum – you never even met her,” he said.

Harry said that, even today, returning to London from abroad could be a “trigger” for fight-or-flight emotions. He returned briefly for the funeral of his grandfather, Prince Philip.

“I was aware of it, I wasn’t aware of it at the time when I was younger, but after I started doing therapy stuff I became aware of it,” he said. “I was like, why do I feel so uncomfortable? And of course for me London is a trigger, unfortunately, because of what happened to my mum, and because of what I experienced and what I saw.”

The interviews are very intimate – perhaps too much for some. In one scene, Harry is filmed by Winfrey’s cameras during a therapy session known as Eye Movement Desensitisation and Reprocessing, showing the prince closing his eyes, deep breathing and crossing his arms across his chest, as he recalls past trauma.

In an explosive interview that Harry and his wife gave to Winfrey in March, Meghan said she was suffering from depression and considered suicide. Harry and Meghan claim the royal family were little help

and he repeats his charges in the Apple series. “I thought my family would help, but every single ask, request, warning, whatever it is, just got met with total silence, total neglect,” he said.