Hannah Murray recently reflected on her harrowing experience in a welfare cult that landed her in hospital.
The Game of Thrones star said The Guardian in a recent interview, she said she became part of an exploitative cult to get fit and ignored things like crystals or yoga, eventually triggering an intense psychotic episode that landed her in a psychiatric ward.
Murray shared, “There isn’t enough critical thinking about wellness. It’s easy to say, ‘Well, that would never happen to me,’ but we’re doing ourselves a disservice if we start saying that, because you don’t know.”
“I’m well educated, I come from a middle-class family; everything should have turned out fine. 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 saying, “Oh, they must be idiots.” Or, ‘How stupid can you be?’” she explained.
The 36-year-old retired English actress said she joined the organization after meeting an ‘energy healer’, Grace, on the set of the historical crime drama film Detroit because the ‘violent and dark’ themes made her ‘tremble with adrenaline’ and gave her nightmares. Such incidents made her quickly confide in Grace.
She joked: “I hear so much: ‘We need to talk more about mental health.’ What they mean is anxiety and depression. We all like to talk about that. But there is such a taboo on the idea of people being divided. They are beyond the pale.”
“It felt really important to say, ‘I went through this.’ Many people experience this. That doesn’t mean they are bad or in trouble forever,” Hannah Murray noted.
