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Game of Thrones alum Hannah Murray says she suffered a catastrophic psychotic break after joining a wellness cult.
“It’s easy to go, ‘Well, that would never happen to me,’ but we do ourselves a disservice when we start saying that, because you don’t know,” Murray, 36, told The Guardian in an interview published on Saturday, May 23. “I had no idea I was going togo through any of the things in the book. I would’ve assumed I couldn’t, that I was safe. I was well educated, from a middle-class family; everything should have been fine.”
She continued, “I thought, “I’m smart. I make good choices.’ Well, I made terrible choices. But it’s important to understand why people do these things, rather than going, ‘Oh, they must be idiots.’ Or, ‘How stupid could you be?’”
Murray, who appeared in 25 episodes of the hit HBO series across Seasons 2 through 8 as Gilly, declined to name the wellness cult she says she joined at age 27, instead only referring to it as the “organization.” She told the outlet she was introduced to the cult via a so-called “energy healer,” who she met through her personal trailer on the set of Detroit.
“My own experience felt highly eroticized, without anything explicitly physical happening,” she said of her experience in the alleged cult. “There was just this charge to the energy in the room. I think there often is in these hierarchical spiritual organizations. I found it interesting that it was a primarily quite female space — the teachers, the healer — and then this man walks in and he’s incredibly confident and magnetic. The first thing he says is a joke about sex. From this quite floaty, quite gentle, wishy-washy energy, it was suddenly, like, ‘Hey, I’m here,’ and, ‘Let’s f***.’ I think he was doing that deliberately.”
The leader of the wellness cult, also not named by Murray, allegedly wrote a “symbolic necklace and carried a giant Starbucks cup” with him everywhere he went. The actress spent thousands of dollars to obtain “wisdom and specialness,” but ultimately suffered a psychotic episode so intense that she was admitted to a psychiatric unit and, later, diagnosed with bipolar disorder.
She documented her experience in her new book, The Make Believe: A Memoir of Magic and Madness, and today stays away from all things wellness industry-related.
“Even the tame stuff can feel quite distressing,” she explained. “I don’t meditate any more. I wouldn’t go into a crystal shop. I don’t do yoga, because I don’t quite know what might come up that might feel a bit too woo-woo for my personal threshold. But I realize now how pervasive it is. How often people you don’t know will offer it as a remedy.”
She added, ‘You’ll say, ‘I’m not really sleeping,’ and they’ll say, ‘Have you tried meditation?’ It’s everywhere, seen as an inherently positive solution. And there are harmless or positive versions. But as someone looking for something to fix me entirely, a magic wand or silver bullet, the promise felt seductive and addictive.”
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