Game of Thrones star details psychotic episode and experience with a 'wellness cult'
Nowadays, Hannah Murray has the overpowering feeling of being grateful she no longer acts.
The 36-year-old is well known by us Brits for playing Cassie in Skins as well as internationally as Gilly in Game of Thrones.
But the star has since retired from acting and in 2017, was sectioned following her involvement in a 'wellness cult’.
This was reported in the advance publicity for her upcoming memoir, The Make-Believe: A Memoir of Magic and Madness.
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Murray says she became trapped on a ‘hamster wheel’ of looking for something that makes her ‘feel special’ which she had initially gotten from acting.
The Bristol-born star had tried personal growth books, meditation, gratitude diaries and had two psychoanalysts. She then ended up in what she says was a wellness cult by the age of 27.
Speaking with The Guardian ahead of her memoir’s release, Murray was apparently promised ‘wisdom and specialness while costing her thousands’.
However, her mental health suffered massively, as she experienced a psychotic episode.
After being sectioned in an acute mental health unit, she was diagnosed with bipolar disorder.
“There’s not enough critical thought about wellness,” Murray said, “particularly the way it’s been transformed into an industry.”
She first encountered the alleged cult, not named but referred to as ‘the organisation’ via an ‘energy healer’ she says she was introduced to by her personal trailer on the set of Detroit.
Murray opened up to this woman ‘about her life, her family, her core sadnesses’ and was given a session of ‘healing’.
She admits she became caught up in the healer’s zeal and began handing hundreds of pounds over to people she believed would help her, Murray found herself in classes, being asked to describe how it felt to be 'holding on to pillars of light'.
Also while working on Game of Thrones she says she became hooked on the rituals and spirituality, with more classes promising more answers. She wanted to be a ‘Warrior’, adding: “I wanted to go further and further, as far as you could go.”
Murray was so trusting that she didn’t look up the organisation online, where she would have found crazed testimonials as well as financial swindle stories
“The pyramid was structured to exploit everyone who tried to climb it,” she writes in The Make-Believe. “Except for one person, one man, who sat at the very top.”
Murray was totally swept up in it, believing she had ‘this incredible destiny’ and eventually started hearing the leader’s voice in her head.
The star was hallucinating, having very little sleep, talking at 'a million miles a second', felt 'deliriously happy' and was interpreting the signs and symbols she saw everywhere as an example of how she was special.
Her manic high spiralled and she began to feel an agonising pain in her head which felt like she was ‘giving birth through my skull’.
At this point, she was surrounded by other cult followers and was locked in a toilet cubicle, while the teachers crowded round outside, chanting: "Be gone, evil spirit in Hannah."
She was eventually rushed to hospital and detained for 28 days under the Mental Health Act.
Topics: Game of Thrones, Mental Health, Celebrity
Jess Battison