Hannah Murray details her psychotic episode after she was drawn into a cult

‘I made terrible choices’

The incident happened after she spent time in a wellness cult, the former actress revealed.

As she looked back at the time she was drawn into a cult, Murray, 36, opened up in a new interview with the Guardian.

Her upcoming book, “The Make-Believe: A Memoir of Magic and Madness”, charts her experience with “the deceptive structure of organisations that promise us ‘wellness’”.

As she spoke of her experience, Murray said: “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”.

“I had no idea I was going to go 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. I thought, ‘I’m smart. I make good choices.’ Well, I made terrible choices.”

“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 added.

The cult and the experiences that left a mark on her life

The former Skins and Game of Thrones star explained that she was originally drawn to an “energy healer” referred to in the article as Grace.

According to Murray, she said that she helped her process the turbulent period spent shooting 2017’s Detroit though a $150 “healing” session.

She then began to take more classes with other members of the organization, after walking away from the session feeling positive.

“I wanted to go further and further, as far as you could go”, Murray said.

Eventually she met the man at the top of the group, whom the article refers to as Steve, who Murray said “exuded power in a way I had never known anyone to exude it”.

She points out in the forthcoming book that she felt predisposed to believe in magic because of her love for the Harry Potter series as a child.

“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,” she said.

“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.”

She found she was existing on very little sleep and talking at “a million miles a second”, a symptom of bipolar disorder, as she became more enmeshed in the cult.

The hallucinations that terrified the actress

In her interview with the Guardian, she revealed that while attending a five-day course in a London hotel, she had hallucinated signs and symbols everywhere, and could hear Steve’s voice in her head.

Murray recalled hallucinating diagrams on people’s necks that showed her how to “heal” them, and thinking: “Steve is my father and I do want to f**k Steve.”

At the height of the psychotic episode, she recalled taking refuge in a locked bathroom, during which she felt like she was “giving birth through my skull.”

Members of the cult then surrounded the stall with bronze tools, chanting: “Be gone, evil spirit in Hannah.”

She was then rushed Gordon hospital in Bloomsbury, London, where she was detained for 28 days under the Mental Health Act.

Later, Murray was diagnosed with bipolar disorder and has now retired from acting.

“I hear so much, ‘We need to talk more about mental health,'” she said in the interview.

“What they mean is, like, anxiety and depression. We’re all happy to talk about that. But there’s such a taboo around the idea of people who are sectioned. They are beyond the pale.”