When does being 'delulu' turn into psychosis?
Are you putting a positive spin on reality or straight up lying to yourself?
Though being 'delulu' (or delusional) is raved about on TikTok for the creation of your dream life, there could be more darkness around what it means to be delusional.
It's worth finding out more about the people advising you on how to live your life...
Have you ever wanted to manifest a million pound lottery win and live your dream life?
Do you believe your ex is your twin flame and you can get them back with the power of your mind?
The less control we have in our lives, the more mental health conditions seem to be spiralling.
It’s one thing to be ‘woo woo’ enough to believe that everything will work out for you, but it enters dangerous territory when you start being ‘delulu’.
Tapping into a higher power to gain some autonomy over the feeling of perpetual doom is quite a popular phenomenon, reflected in the multi million pound industry of the ‘mind, body and spirit’- and the breakout of spiritual influencers on social media.
Online psychics are a rapidly growing market. The market is valued at 0.8 billion USD in 2022 but is expected to increase by 1.8 billion by 2030. This is an annual growth rate of 5.50% from 2023.
What happens when people take it so far they go bankrupt and hover the verge of stalking in an attempt to achieve their dream life?
Tarot cards, using the law of attraction to manifest and the concept of twin flames… is it real? When does being woo woo go to being delulu? And when does 'delulu' turn into psychosis?
In 2019 Laura Bird was raking in £40k a month reading tarot for clients on zoom, but after realising her clients were racking up thousands of debt and becoming dangerously obsessed with imaginary relationships, she came out to her large YouTube following and threw it all away.
Laura, 33, from Australia specialised in a tarot spread known as a ‘twin flame’ reading.
Twin flames are a concept similar to soulmates, however they are described as more intense- with two people ‘sharing the same soul’. A twin flame reading is like a love reading, trying to make sense of what the other person is thinking and feeling within the romantic connection.
The concept has recently gained attention in the Netflix documentary, ‘escaping twin flames’, exposing the dynamic as being a sales hook for cults on YouTube.
She said, “I was reading tarot for clients online for 4 years. I started off writing ‘spiritual’ blogs for other people but eventually built my own YouTube channel and attracted my own clients. At the time, I genuinely thought I was doing the right thing for them. I was in delusion myself.
“A lot of the twin flame stuff is just a cover up for narcissistic abuse. At the time it was a way for me to romanticise that.”
The illusion started to break for Laura once she realised she wasn’t seeing any progress in her clients lives, despite the constant tarot readings and self help practices.
“I had thousands of clients. One woman was 63 and loved this guy since she was 14. She had relationships but ultimately put her life on reserve for him. She wanted to be a mum and never got to be. Wanted to be a wife, never got to be. She literally gave her whole life to a fantasy by waiting for this guy to fall in love with her.
“I’ve seen people’s lives get ruined. A client came to me desperate saying she spent £22,000 on a couple to do some love spell on her… which didn’t work. This made me think about how this industry was affecting people.
“A reader can easily get someone like that to pay them £5,000 on the promise that they will do some energy work and unite them in a couple. If it doesn’t work, it’s easy to say ‘well it must have been something you did’.”
Is this because people are desperately looking for comfort in a time of such overstimulation, uncertainty, and cuts to public wellbeing services?
Melissa Sabine, 30 from Hanworth was intrigued by the law of attraction when she was experiencing a lot of insecurity and anxiety in her relationship.
The law of attraction is a spiritual concept that suggests you can attract material experiences (such as money or relationships) into your life through the power of thought.
Eventually, she became so caught up in the concept that your thoughts create your reality that she ended up hallucinating that she was ‘manifesting herself out of existence’.
“I came across a YouTuber called ‘Subconscious Loz’ and this is probably where it began. Her teaching was that your dominant thoughts attract. So if you're thinking positive thoughts, you have a positive experience. Any kind of negative thought that pops into your head at all must immediately be combated and contrasted with a positive.
“I became part of this group who followed her. I made some friends in the group and we would write each other Love Letters from our partners how we would actually want them to be speaking to us… and pretend it was them.
“In about six months I racked up over £18,000 debt because I stopped paying bills. If there was a bill that came through I thought acknowledging it was negative. I thought that if it was meant to be paid the universe would find a way for it to be paid... not necessarily with my input”.
"In the day, I would monitor my thoughts so closely to make sure they were positive. It was like I was coding. So when I came home and saw my partner, the way he was treating me was like a product of what I had been coding that day."
Roughly six months into this way of thinking, Melissa came across a video which claimed the CIA had released a document about astral projection, known as the ‘gateway experience’. Melissa interpreted this as information to say that you could manifest yourself out of existence.
“This made me panic because I realised that I was manifesting all the time, and if I've read this, does it mean I'll manifest myself out of existence?
"I rang my friend so she would look into it for me and see if it was real. She said it was, and confirmed it’s a legitimate document. That made everything worse, I needed someone to tell me it was fake.
“I start to feel really really dizzy and I look down at my hand and there's a hole in it. There were little flakes coming off it, and I thought, I'm fully manifesting myself out of existence because I thought about it too hard.”
After a visit from the crisis team and a course of Diazepam, Melissa recovered. But she uses her TikTok account to raise awareness of the risks of getting involved with spiritual communities.
Psychosis is diagnosed in people when they experience hallucinations, delusions and disordered thinking and speech.
Studies have shown that spirituality can have a positive effect on a person's health, but at a certain point, intense spirituality could result in someone experiencing psychotic symptoms such as confused or disturbed thoughts and strong delusions.
Cindy, who chooses to go by her first name or SimplyCindi / YourIndigoPath on YouTube, is a highly followed hypnotherapist, astrologer and tarot reader who claims to have been psychic since birth.
Despite having a background in science and medicine, she provides holistic therapies to professional clients around the globe. After seeing other tarot readers emerge online scamming clients, she decided to pull back from socials and re-evaluate how she could better communicate with her audience.
“I once worked with a cardiologist who was very integrated into eastern and western medicine, and she used to say ‘Cindy that person is not in their body’. That is what I would presume is ‘spiritual psychosis’.
“For manifesting you need to be a little bit delusional - but you need to come back into reality.
“I had a client who saw me for about a year and she was telling me about her relationship. It wasn't until 6 months into seeing them where I realised it didn’t exist. The person was real- but the relationship wasn’t.
“It took a further 6 months to ground her into reality. I couldn’t just tell her it didn't exist straight away, she would have left and not got the help she needed.”
Cindy implemented a lot of ‘grounding tools including hypnosis, chakra work, journaling, a change in diet and hobbies to get the client back to reality.
“When she said something that could be perceived as not real, I would ask multiple questions about it- almost like a therapist- to try and get her to understand that her perception was coming from very far out there. I recognised the importance in being a lot more grounded with the approach I was taking.
“I saw it in her one day when she was like ‘oh my God im so stupid this isn’t even real’. A whole year later.
“I’ve always made it my mission to bring the spiritual and scientific parts of my understanding together. For me I don’t want to just meditate with you, I want to explain to you what your chakras signify. That’s how my spirituality differs.”
The boom in spiritual influencers popularity could correlate to increased anxiety and decreased satisfaction in life since pre-2020.
Data suggests that adults in the UK have reported a 2% increase in high anxiety levels since 2018 (rising to 21.5% reporting high anxiety), and a 1% decrease in satisfaction in life- with 5.3% UK adults rating their life as unsatisfying in 2023.
The current leading treatment for anxiety and depression in the UK is talking therapies, which has an average of a 6 week waiting list, however a recent analysis suggested that only one in five treatments have a good outcome.
Justin Ciorciari, 23, New York claims to have experienced psychosis multiple times, with heavy themes of spirituality. He has since made a full recovery, but explains that it’s the brain's way of coping in hard times.
“Spiritual psychosis is essentially when there's no really clear discernment between belief in reality. For me, I thought everything I saw was a sign. If a person entered a room, somehow was a sign for me or that somehow was a reflection of me. I had some strong hallucinations and delusions. I remember in one of them I walked into a room and saw big black dogs everywhere, which I thought symbolised something about me at the time.
“It's really a survival mechanism. The body and the brain are trying to help in that time of stress. The actual science of psychosis is very interesting because the left and right side of the brain does a seesaw like a dance.
“There’s a surge of energy in the right side of the brain, which is associated with creativity, and this lack of energy in the left side which is more logical. What happens is that in psychosis the left side can’t seem to order the chaos, so it creates a lot of ungrounded beliefs.”
In a survey of 258 participants, I discovered that over 26% participants would consider going to a tarot for a major life decision.
Nearly 40% (39.9%) get tarot readings show up on their social media pages, and 18% engage with them.
As a consumer, readers may seem successful and put together. Laura’s experience as a twin flame reader reveals the truth behind a lot of tarot readers' lifestyles.
“There was one reader I was friends with. She still has thousands of followers watching her readings on YouTube. We met online through the twin flame reader community and I stayed with her in America for a couple of weeks. The way we were living cracked the illusion for me.
“She would wake up in the morning and the first thing she did was stalk her ex on Instagram. She was blocked, so she started new accounts to see him. She would look at the comments, look down the following list- wonder ‘who’s that a girl? Have they hooked up?’
“Then we would have coffee and she would show me what she found. We would sit in bed together, I would give her a reading. We would get up and go to the gym and she’d insist we do a reading at lunch time, so we would do one for YouTube.
“Then she would have a client that wants a reading in the evening, and then we could read for each other, and I’d hope she might give me something that gives me relief.
“I was absolutely hooked on relief."
“I recognised that this is dangerous and draining and pathetic. I was 30, she was like 42 and this is what 16-year-olds do when they have a crush, not grown women.”
There’s no way of regulating this content, and there’s no framework to ensure that people remain mentally stable and well while engaging.
To illustrate how little we know about the people we are getting guidance from, I went undercover as a tarot reader for Livelines, the largest phone psychic organisation.
Here is what I found;
Here's how I became a 'professional' tarot reader and employee with LiveLines in 2 minutes 30 seconds. The employees voice has been distorted to protect their identity.
After recording my welcome message I was accepted to work for Livelines under the name Sandra.
I was granted access to some training material, which consisted of some examples of readings rated five star by the caller.
Though lacking in accuracy, the reader managed to secure a good review by keeping the client on the phone for nearly twenty minutes and telling them what they want to hear.
Welcome chat with Livelines, cut from 30 minutes. The callers voice has been distorted to protect their identity.
This is an example of a five star reading, as rated by the caller. This audio has been cut from nearly 20 minutes of raw audio, the callers voice has been distorted to protect their identity.
Livelines has been contacted for a response, but has refused to comment.
