Meghan Markle pointed to this 2019 photo to illustrate how she felt suicidal while working as a royal

• Meghan Markle said from a 2019 event shows “the truth” of her feelings at the time.
• While the picture shows the couple smiling, they were “just trying to hold on,” she told Oprah.
• That morning, Markle had told Harry she was contemplating suicide, she said in her CBS interview.
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A glamorous photograph of Meghan Markle and Prince Harry at a 2019 event reveals the truth of how she was really feeling behind the couple’s dazzling facade, the Duchess of Sussex told Oprah Winfrey.

In a bombshell interview aired Sunday on CBS, Meghan revealed that she had developed suicidal thoughts after she joined the British royal family, and had been prevented from getting any help. 

She related how a friend sent her a picture of her and Harry at London’s Royal Albert Hall, taken the same day she had told Harry she “didn’t want to be alive any more.”

The picture – part of a set that circulated widely of the couple’s appearance – showed a pregnant Meghan in a dark blue, sequinned maternity gown with Harry by her side, the couple smiling and holding hands. 

But, Meghan told Winfrey, “What I saw was the truth of what that moment was.”

The photograph "still haunts me," she said. "We had to go to an official event. We had to go to this event at the Royal Albert Hall, and a friend said, 'I know you don't look at pictures, but, oh, my god, you guys look so great.'

"And I zoomed in, and what I saw was the truth of what that moment was, because right before we had to leave for that, I had just had that conversation with Harry that morning."

Harry tried to persuade her not to go to the event, she said. But Meghan said that she had told him: "I can't be left alone."

"And that picture, if you zoom in, what I see is how tightly his knuckles are gripped around mine," she continued. "You can see the whites of our knuckles, because we are smiling and doing our job, but we're both just trying to hold on.

"And every time that those lights went down in that royal box, I was just weeping, and he was gripping my hand."

When the intermission came and the lights came up, Meghan said, she'd have to be ready to face the public and be "on again."

She said she had told Harry about her state of mind sitting on the front steps of their home, Frogmore Cottage, and the very next had approached "the institution" - royal staff - to ask for help that she said was never given. 

Markle suggested that her situation showed that you can never judge someone's state of mind from their outward demeanor. 

"You have no idea what's going on for someone behind closed doors," she said. "Even the people that smile the biggest smiles and shine the brightest lights, it seems, to have compassion for what's actually potentially going on."

As of Monday morning UK time the royal family had not responded to the interview.