GoT star Hannah Murray reveals why she joined cult that led to psychotic episode
Topics: Celebrity, Game of Thrones, Mental Health
Britt Jones
Featured Image Credit: FilmMagic/FilmMagic
Topics: Celebrity, Game of Thrones, Mental Health
Hannah Murray, who is best known for playing Gilly in Game of Thrones, has opened up about her journey to a wellness cult, that led to her suffering a psychotic episode and being sectioned to hospital.
While Game of Thrones may have ended around five years ago, the characters have kept a special place in fan’s hearts.
For those who like to follow the careers of the actors they love, Murray’s was definitely one to watch.
However, once the curtain closed on Gilly, things took an unexpected turn.
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Revealed in her memoir, The Make-Believe, which will be released at the end of this month, Murray was sectioned due to her involvement with a wellness cult after wrapping up her scenes for the seventh season of Game of Thrones.
Occurring around 2016 and 2017, the 35-year-old actress was filming another project at the time, the 2017 film Detroit, which she told The Guardian, left her throwing up in the middle of the night due to the high-stress she was feeling and its subject matter.
She revealed that now, she errs on the side of being wary about the wellness industry, claiming that ‘there's not enough critical thought about wellness.’
Having begun with meditation, yoga, and holistic remedies, Murray says that her bid to sorting her ‘s*** out’, left her forking out thousands to a cult she only refers to as ‘the organization’, with a man named Steve at the helm.
In essence, Murray says she is part of The Harry Potter generation. A generation of kids who grew up on stories where outcasts were secretly meant for something greater.
Sadly, the cult she joined made it seem like this was her destiny after all.
“Like, that can’t be overstated,” she said of the JK Rowling books. “This book that was so popular for so many people my age, and the most appealing thing was the idea that you might discover this whole magical world, just under the surface of our world. As a kid, I desperately wanted that to be true.”
“I was well educated, from a middle-class family; everything should have been fine,” she said. “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?' ”
She explained that her time set in the US led her, at first, to a holistic healer named Grace, who was personally referred to her by her trainer.
Once back in the UK, she was then referred by Grace to another woman, who then took her on a journey of numerous training courses, each one increasingly leading her down a path to believing she was bigger than herself. Magical, even.
She explained: “When I was going through psychosis, my brain was a cocktail of those stories, this idea that I had discovered the truth, which was that I had this incredible destiny. I was going to save the world. I could fly. Not to say that those stories are bad or anything. I just think we are fed on a diet that makes us want this.”
Sadly, her story ended in a ward under the Mental Health Act, and now nine years later, she can’t bring herself to be around something as simple as a crystal shop for fear that it would be a little too ‘woo woo’ for her liking.
Wellness culture, she said, ‘might be causing some of the problems it claims to be able to cure.’