The wellness industry doesn’t advertise what it can take from you. It advertises the opposite: clarity, healing, a version of yourself that finally makes sense. Every smoothie, every breathwork class, every energy session promises to give something back. That’s the pitch. And for millions of people it’s harmless enough, the midday walk, the magnesium supplements, the journaling habit that actually helps. But every now and then, at the softer, more expensive end of the wellness world, something else is happening. Something that looks identical to healing until the moment it doesn’t.
Hannah Murray knows this better than most. The British actress spent years in the public eye playing characters worn down by the world – Cassie Ainsworth, the fragile, luminous teenager on Skins, and Gilly on Game of Thrones, a character defined by survival against impossible circumstances. Off screen, Murray was going through something that would take her far longer to survive, and that she has only recently felt ready to describe in full. Her debut memoir, The Make-Believe: A Memoir of Magic and Madness, due out June 23, 2026, is the account of how she walked into a wellness cult and came out the other side of a psychiatric hospitalization, a diagnosis, and a life she had to rebuild from almost nothing.
What makes Murray’s story so hard to dismiss is precisely what makes it so uncomfortable to sit with. She was educated, self-aware, professionally successful. She was not, as she points out herself, someone who could easily be written off as naive or desperate. And yet. The rabbit hole opened up, and she went down it, and the story of how that happened is a story that the wellness industry, with its billion-dollar self-certainty, would very much prefer you didn’t read too carefully.
How a $150 Session Changed Everything
Murray first encountered the organization through an energy healer she met on the set of the 2017 film Detroit, in which she played a teenager who was sexually assaulted by police. Because the “violent and dark” subject matter of the film took a toll on her, she sought guidance from a woman she calls Grace. Fox News reports that Grace first offered her a $150 session of “healing,” soon also speaking of activating Murray’s “spiritual DNA” using what she described as “powerful and ancient tools.”
One session became several. Several became a course. Murray ended up paying thousands of dollars to attend classes with names like “Ritual Master Novice,” “Ritual Master Apprentice,” and “Ritual Master Magus Hermeticus,” with an organization she has chosen not to name. After completing enough courses, she was allowed to attend a five-day event at a London hotel, led by the charismatic man at the top of the group.
Murray described the leader, whom she calls Steve, as someone who “exuded power in a way I had never known anyone to exude it.” In the memoir, she points out that she felt predisposed to believe in magic because of her love for the Harry Potter series as a child. “The most appealing thing,” she said, “was the idea that you might discover this whole magical world just under the surface of our world.”
This is the part of the story that tends to make people uncomfortable, not because it’s strange, but because it isn’t. The gap between an intelligent person seeking meaning and an intelligent person inside a cult is smaller than anyone wants to believe. A common assumption is that only weak or unintelligent people join cults. In reality, cults often target precisely the opposite, and they are effective not because their members lack intelligence, but because they exploit human needs. Murray knew this herself. “It’s easy to go, ‘Well, that would never happen to me,'” she has said in interviews, “but we do ourselves a disservice when we start saying that, because you don’t know.”
The Pyramid Nobody Told Her About
The more time Murray spent inside the organization, the clearer its structure became. As she got closer to the top, she realized the pyramid was structured to exploit everyone who tried to climb it – except for one man at the very top. Just Jared’s coverage of the memoir notes that Murray has been out of the spotlight for several years while building toward this account.
As she became more involved alongside other female teachers and devotees, Murray said she began to notice signs of sexual exploitation. “My own experience felt highly eroticized, without anything explicitly physical happening,” she told interviewers. “There was just this charge to the energy in the room. I think there often is in these hierarchical spiritual organisations. 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.”
When she raised her concerns that the organization might be a “sex cult” with one of the female teachers, she was told that the leader was simply “really good at breaking down your ego.” This is the kind of answer that sounds reasonable in the room and absurd in retrospect. It’s also, as anyone who has spent time studying high-control groups will recognize, a classic move: reframe the red flag as a feature. Reframe doubt as ego. Make the person questioning feel like the problem is their own insufficient openness.
The wellness industry creates particularly fertile ground for this kind of reframing because so much of its language is already structured around the idea of the self as the obstacle. You are the thing in your own way. Your resistance is what needs dissolving. Once that framework is in place, it becomes almost impossible to trust your own alarm bells, because the alarm bells have been pre-labeled as blockages.
The Five-Day Course and the Bathroom Floor
During a five-day course in London, Murray began a psychotic episode. NME reports that running on very little sleep, she was talking “a million miles a second,” her brain making random connections, seeing signs and symbols everywhere. At one point, she began hallucinating diagrams on people’s necks, believing they showed her how to “heal” them.
She recalled taking refuge in a locked bathroom at the height of the episode, in 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.”
When someone finally called for help, Murray was rushed to the hospital, where she was held for 28 days under the Mental Health Act. She was detained at Gordon Hospital in Bloomsbury, London. At some point during or after that hospitalization, she contacted the leader for answers. His response, as she has described it, was that “a bad guy got inside her” and that she was possessed. He told her this while she was in a psychiatric ward.
She stayed for 28 days and received a diagnosis of bipolar disorder. “Diagnoses can be complicated for different people,” she has said, “but for me, it was a big relief to understand my emotional landscape through that lens.”
Wellness Cult Recovery and the Taboo Nobody Wants to Touch
Murray has since left the entertainment industry entirely and no longer participates in activities like meditation, yoga, or buying crystals. She has described the wellness industry as now being “everywhere,” and has raised the possibility that it “might be causing some of the problems it claims to be able to cure.” These are not the words of someone performing outrage for a book tour. They are the words of someone who lost years of her life to an organization that pitched itself as healing.
What Murray is describing, in her own careful way, is the problem of wellness culture’s unexamined promises and what happens when those promises are made by people with something other than your wellbeing in mind. The word “wellness” has become so large, so culturally legitimate, that it provides near-perfect cover for structures that are anything but well-intentioned. A cult that called itself a cult would struggle to recruit. A cult that calls itself a healing community, staffed by energetically gifted teachers, offering courses with impressive Latin names and a charismatic leader who “exudes magical power,” is another matter entirely.
Murray has also made the point that her story sits in a part of mental health conversation that polite society still doesn’t want to enter. “I hear so much, ‘We need to talk more about mental health,'” she has said. “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.” The person who has been detained under the Mental Health Act is still, in 2026, a figure we treat as fundamentally different from the person who has been treated for depression. Murray’s insistence on naming this directly, in a book and in interviews, is one of the more genuinely brave things anyone has done in this particular conversation.
What makes the memoir remarkable, according to Penguin Random House, is what Murray resists: she does not cast herself as a victim or offer easy lessons. Instead, she reveals, moment by moment, how a person in search of healing can gradually lose herself.
Something True That Nobody Is Saying
Murray grew up reading fantasy. She loved Harry Potter. She wanted to believe in a world with more magic in it than the one she could see. “When I was going through psychosis,” she has said, “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 adds, gently, that she isn’t saying those stories are bad. She’s saying we are raised on a diet that makes us want something more, and that desire, in itself, is not a pathology. It’s human. The cult didn’t create it. It just knew exactly where to find it.
That’s what doesn’t get said enough when stories like this circulate online, usually framed as cautionary tales about gullible celebrities and obvious con artists. The desire that led Murray into the room in the first place was legitimate. She was in pain. She had just spent months embodying a character who was assaulted on film, repeatedly, until she lost count of the takes. She needed help, and the wellness industry told her it had help to offer. The very first $150 session probably did help, in some real and measurable way, because the early stages of these organizations are designed to help. That’s what makes them work. And that’s what makes them so hard to warn anyone about, because by the time the warning is legible, you are already inside.
The wellness cult recovery story, told at full length and with no tidy resolution, is Murray’s contribution to anyone who has ever felt the pull of an answer that seemed too good to be true and followed it anyway. Not because it shows you how to avoid that pull, but because it demonstrates, in unflinching detail, that the pull itself is not stupidity. It’s just being a person who still hopes.
Disclaimer: This information is not intended to be a substitute for professional medical advice, diagnosis, or treatment and is for information only. Always seek the advice of your physician or another qualified health provider with any questions about your medical condition and/or current medication. Do not disregard professional medical advice or delay seeking advice or treatment because of something you have read here.
AI Disclaimer: This article was created with the assistance of AI tools and reviewed by a human editor.