Cressida Bonas Played Key Role in Prince Harry’s Mental Health Journey

Prince Harry and Cressida Bonas dated from 2012 to 2014. During their relationship, Bonas, according to Tina Brown’s book “The Palace Papers,” encouraged Harry to seek therapy for his mental health.

“His outbursts were ever more frequent and childlike,” Brown writes. “He took up boxing because, as he later said, he was always ‘on the verge of punching somebody.’ Cressida began to have serious worries about his mental health. It is not widely known that it was she who first persuaded Harry to see a therapist.”

An anonymous family friend told Brown that Cressida “got him to accept he had problems and see a psychoanalyst.”

A mutual friend of the couple also shared that when Harry and Cressida broke up, Harry wrote her a letter thanking her for encouraging him to seek therapy. “He wrote her a sweet letter saying, ‘I admire you, I wish you well, and above all, thank you for helping me to address my demons and seek help,'” the friend recalled.

According to the BBC, Harry and Cressida split because she wanted to focus on her acting career, though media scrutiny was also speculated to be a factor. Despite the breakup, the two remained friends, and Cressida attended Harry’s 2018 wedding to Meghan Markle.

“Last weekend I attended the royal wedding,” Cressida wrote in a blog about the day. “The invitation clearly stated that guests must wear hats. Yikes. I opted for a minimal feathered number—and can only hope I got it right.”

In 2020, Cressida married Harry Wentworth-Stanley in a small, pandemic-affected ceremony. “I had a lockdown wedding,” she wrote in the Spectator. “A 30-person, socially-distanced, sanitised church service was organised in under two weeks. Restrictions meant no hymns, no wind instruments, and no speaking too loudly. A disappointment for a musical family. Not what we’d envisaged, but a more intimate and special day than we could ever have imagined. Imperfect yet perfect—a day we will never forget.”