Prince Harry has found a new role for himself: instructor in grief. His latest commercial venture, a MasterClass tutorial titled Redefining Grief: Building Resilience Through Loss, puts his personal experience of bereavement at the center of a paid educational offering. The move raises questions about the relationship between his public image, his continuing struggles with the death of his mother, and his efforts to build a career outside the royal family.

The course features Harry alongside Dr Mary-Frances O’Connor, a grief expert. According to reports, instructors on the MasterClass platform can receive at least $100,000 upfront, along with an additional 30 percent share of the subscription revenue generated by an episode.

A source close to the prince told the Daily Mail: “I’d encourage everyone to watch it before casting any judgement.”

The appeal for an open mind is understandable. Yet Harry’s latest project arrives after years in which his personal pain has remained a prominent feature of his public life. For critics, the question is whether another paid appearance centered on grief offers a meaningful new perspective or simply revisits familiar territory.

A commercial career built around personal struggles

Harry’s latest venture comes against the backdrop of reported difficulties in establishing a lasting commercial identity after stepping back from royal duties. The lucrative deals he and Meghan Markle secured with Netflix and Spotify have reportedly lost momentum, while Meghan’s attempts to establish herself as a content creator have struggled to gain traction.

With those ventures failing to deliver the sustained success once anticipated, Harry has returned to a subject that has featured prominently in his public statements for years: the death of his mother, Princess Diana.

In the MasterClass, he reflects on the resources available to him and the emotional difficulties he continued to face.

“You would think I had the best help in the world. I’m a prince, for God’s sake,” he says. “But I was still grieving and didn’t have any place to put those feelings.”

The admission highlights a central tension in Harry’s public narrative. Despite his wealth, privilege and access to professional support, he says he struggled to process his loss. Whether that experience makes him a useful voice for others navigating grief is a separate question, particularly when the subject is being presented through a commercial platform.

Harry is now 42, a husband and father of two. In his memoir, Spare, he also described turning to drugs and alcohol to numb emotional pain. His account of bereavement has included deeply personal and sometimes startling details, including his description of using his late mother’s favorite face cream to soothe his frostbitten penis.

“My penis,” he wrote, “was oscillating between extremely sensitive and borderline traumatized.”

For detractors, such disclosures have become emblematic of a broader pattern in which Harry’s most intimate experiences repeatedly become public material. His willingness to discuss them may reflect a desire to be candid about suffering, but it has also helped make his private life a recurring source of public debate.

Life after Megxit and the search for stability

Harry’s account of his emotional struggles extends beyond Diana’s death. In the MasterClass, he acknowledges that he “slipped into depression” after his and Meghan’s departure from royal life, commonly known as Megxit.

He recalls experiencing an unexpected emotional crash after arriving in Canada.

“Being in Canada… within two or three days, I experienced an adrenaline crash, something that I’d never experienced before,” he says.

“It was as though I needed stress for my brain to function because I became useless around the house.”

The comments offer a glimpse into his adjustment to a life outside the royal institution. Having grown up within a system that gave him an established identity and public role, Harry faced the challenge of finding direction after leaving it behind.

That transition appears to have affected him differently from Meghan. She has pursued new commercial ventures and adapted to changes in cities, countries and professional ambitions. Harry, by contrast, has often spoken about his desire for security and stability, as well as the sense of safety he remembers from childhood before Diana died.

The contrast raises a question about what Harry hoped to gain from leaving royal life and whether the independence he sought has brought him the personal certainty he expected.

The question of Diana’s legacy

For critics, the most troubling aspect of Harry’s latest venture is the sense that his mother’s death has become inseparable from his public identity. Nearly three decades after Diana died, he continues to speak about the emotional consequences of losing her. The question is whether revisiting that experience in a paid course helps others understand grief or risks turning a deeply personal tragedy into a recurring commercial theme.

Harry’s brother, Prince William, also lost their mother. Yet Harry’s public reflections on bereavement have often occupied the foreground, while William’s experience receives comparatively little attention in this narrative.

There is no single timetable for grieving, and the passage of time does not automatically resolve loss. Still, Harry’s critics argue that his continued focus on Diana has come to define too much of his public persona, leaving little room for a broader account of his life and achievements.

The concern is sharpened by the commercial context. If Harry hopes to help people navigate bereavement, the value of his contribution will depend on what audiences can learn from his experience, rather than simply on the emotional force of his story.

A history of expensive appearances and unrealized ambitions

The MasterClass also recalls Harry’s earlier efforts to establish himself in the commercial world after leaving the royal family.

One reported proposal to Spotify involved a podcast in which he would interview prominent figures, including Donald Trump, Vladimir Putin and Mark Zuckerberg, about childhood trauma. Spotify reportedly declined the idea.

Harry’s first major paid speaking engagement after Megxit was at JP Morgan’s Alternative Investment Summit in Miami. His fee was estimated to have reached as much as $1 million. His speech reportedly focused on his late mother and his experience of grief.

That figure invites scrutiny of the opportunities available to someone with Harry’s background and public profile. A prince with global recognition can command fees that would be beyond the reach of most speakers, even when the subject is a personal experience shared by millions of people.

The distinction between personal testimony and professional expertise is therefore central to the debate surrounding his latest project. Harry brings firsthand experience of bereavement, while his co-instructor, Dr Mary-Frances O’Connor, brings a scientific perspective informed by her work on grief. The course combines those two approaches, but the extent to which audiences find it useful will ultimately depend on its substance.

When personal grief becomes a public product

Harry’s decision to speak openly about loss may resonate with people who have struggled to express their own emotions. His account of depression after leaving royal life also sheds light on the difficulties he says he experienced during a major personal transition.

Yet the repeated return to Diana’s death has become a source of frustration for those who believe Harry should now be building a public identity that extends beyond his childhood tragedy.

The criticism is not simply about whether he has the right to discuss his mother. It concerns the way those disclosures intersect with paid appearances, media projects and his efforts to establish a career independent of the monarchy.

There is also a broader question of perspective. Many people experience profound grief while lacking the financial security, professional assistance and public platform available to Harry. Their suffering may be just as intense, but they do not have the same opportunities to turn personal experiences into lucrative ventures.

Harry’s MasterClass will offer audiences another opportunity to hear his account of bereavement. Whether it marks a constructive new chapter or reinforces an increasingly familiar public narrative remains open to interpretation.

For his critics, however, the message is clear: Harry needs to develop a sense of purpose that reaches beyond his loss. They argue that honoring Diana’s memory does not require him to keep returning to her death in public, particularly when those reflections form part of a commercial enterprise.

At 42, with a family of his own and years of experience outside royal life, Harry has other parts of his story to tell. The challenge is to build a public identity around those experiences without allowing grief to remain its defining feature.