Mental Health & Witchcraft
10
Orion Hall-Turner gets real about her mental health and the solace she ’ s found in her craft .
For a large portion of my life , my mental health has been central to my wellbeing and I .
It ’ s been a struggle growing up while also dealing with mental illness , but as an adult , I can look back on it with an odd sense of pride . I ’ ve come so far since my teenage years . It wasn ’ t easy – in fact , it ’ ll likely be the most difficult thing I ’ ll ever have to do – but living with mental health problems has shaped who I am . And it ’ s also shaped and inspired my craft .
In the UK , mental illness is more common than we might want to admit . Mental health problems are the most common cause of disability , and cause over half of all lost working days due to illness , according to MHFA . Funding for mental health is also incredibly low , and NHS waiting times can be long .
In the past I ’ ve tried everything to help improve my mental health . Let me tell you , there ’ s only so much yoga , meditation , and mindfulness you can try before you realise that it ’ s not a mindset , it ’ s a problem with the pathways in your brain . And yet , I still understand the desire to pick up a habit or a hobby : it might not cure me , but it will give me a sense of purpose and a distraction when I need it .
“ It ’ s not a mindset , it ’ s a problem with the pathways in your brain .”
At times , all I ’ ve needed is someone to distract me or to give me a kind word . Living with mental illness longterm to me means accepting that you might always be “ like this ”, and moving on to doing all that you can to keep yourself happy and motivated .
Although I won ’ t claim that witchcraft has fixed my problems or cured my ailments , it ’ s been a brilliant way to get out of my head – and into it , too .
It was about five years ago when a friend at school told me they ’ d found out about witchcraft online , and we both thought it was so cool . Back in those days it was even harder to find reliable information about it than it is now . I didn ’ t pursue it but I kept it in the back of my mind .
From the small amount of information I was able to find , I realised that witchcraft was incredibly gatekept and was all about figuring out which type of witch you were . The possibilities were absolutely endless , but there was no way I could find out about every single type of witchcraft . It felt like I needed to push myself into a box , and it was very restrictive .
That was a hard time for me . But as I got older , I kept revisiting the idea of witchcraft . The idea of magick – something wondrous and beyond the mundane – appealed to me .
Even though I still couldn ’ t learn much about it because Tumblr was my only place of research , it stayed with me for years . Knowing that people practiced witchcraft made me feel as though there was something bigger to my life , even if I couldn ’ t get there just yet .
Now , I ’ m in my final year of university , and I ’ m finally able to practice freely with huge amounts of information available online . This magazine was the inspiration for my