James Middleton says he ‘pushed away’ his family during difficult times in his life

James Middleton has been candid about his mental health, detailing a period when he was “unavailable” to his “loving and close-knit” family.

In an excerpt from his forthcoming memoirs Meet Ella: The Dog Who Saved My Lifepublished by the Daily Mail On September 14, Kate Middleton’s 37-year-old brother wrote that several years ago he felt “suicidal” and that life was “no longer worth living.”

“I’m thinking about different ways to die so I can get off the dizzying roller coaster that’s sending me to the brink of madness. I can’t sleep because my mind is in turmoil,” he writes in the book, which is due out September 24 in the United States.

“The insomnia is dizzying. I am completely exhausted. I feel misunderstood, a total failure. I would not wish this feeling of uselessness and despair, this isolation and loneliness on my worst enemy. I think I am going crazy.”

“I know I am privileged and lucky to have a loving and close-knit family – Mum and Dad, my sisters Catherine and Pippa, their husbands William and James – but I push them all away,” continued James, the Princess of Wales’s younger brother. “I don’t answer their phone calls. Emails go unanswered. Invitations to visit me go unanswered. I hide behind a double-locked door, inaccessible.”

James then reflected on a night in November 2017 when he reached his “lowest point” – when he considered “jumping off the roof” of a building in London.

“I wonder if I could possibly think it was a tragic accident if I jumped. That way, my family, although desperately grieving, would be spared the additional torture of knowing that I had ended my life by suicide,” he continued, adding that someone was watching him during the disturbing moment as he stood on the roof.

“As I pace back and forth, I look out the skylight and see the gentle eyes of my spaniel Ella looking down at me. Like me, she has been awake all night. She senses my strange, agitated state of mind.”

As he wrote in the excerpt, he then saw his dog “begging me with his eyes to come down” from a ladder and thought about what life would be like if he and the spaniel were not together. After an hour of walking, he wrote, Ella still “had not moved.”

“I pull myself up from the edge, slowly climb down the ladder, and stroke Ella’s silky head. It’s because of her that I don’t make that fatal leap,” James writes. “It’s Ella, the dog who saved my life.”

James announced Meet Ella Last March, he noted in an Instagram video, in which he proudly held the first manuscript, that he and his dog were “inseparable for 15 years” before his death in 2023.

“I know many of you have your own Ella or could use one. I hope this book will also help us talk more openly about our mental health, our need for connection, and how the animals we think we care for are actually caring for us in return,” he said at the time.

She died in January 2023 following a “short illness,” James revealed at the time.

As he said TatlerThe dog was there for “many important moments in my life,” including when he met his wife Alizee Thevenet. The couple, who are parents to six other dogs, announced the birth of their baby boy Inigo in October 2023, less than a year after Ella’s death.

“Another reason I wanted to write this book was so I could tell Inigo the story of how I met his mother,” James told the outlet, the story being that his dog ran up to Thevenet in a restaurant.

“I hope that by writing this book I can help other people talk about their mental health, whether their struggles are in the past or they’re going through something right now,” James later said. Tatler.

If you or someone you know needs mental health help, text “STRENGTH” to the Text Crisis Line at 741-741 to be connected to a certified crisis counselor.