by T Stokes, lecturer in paranormal studies
We owe a debt of thanks to the honesty of one of Britain’s top magazine agony aunts, Virginia Ironside, for her recent exposure of the fraudulence that often accompanies psychology practices. Virginia suffered with long term stress and depression, she tells us that not one counselor or psychologist could help her, it is a well known fact that people dealing with others problems often suffer from spasmodic depressive illness’s.
So although we all realise this, for her as an insider in the profession to admit that much of psychology is fake, showed courage and honesty well above the norm. Complaints about psychology, are more than equaled by the large number of complaints in my weekly postbag, about fake psychics, particularly postal and email psychic spammers, who use various ruses such as the; «remove a curse scam» or the «let me bless your purse» thefts. And repetitive general nonsense type readings.
Its not just the old and uneducated either, a guy dressed as a black witch doctor was arrested outside a London College for telling young women students that it would help their studies if he rolled an egg over their naked bodies to «Absorb the bad vibes.» Apparently 11 women admitted to being tricked in this way. We in the west take the various predictive disciplines with a pinch of salt, yet the vast communities here in Britain from the Indo/Pak sub continent, take these things much more seriously, even visiting astrologers and palmists before making choices on marriage partners.
The internet has made household names of several top holistic practitioners, who are contacted for advice from all over the world, in fact I am better known in the east than my own country of Britain, and here is a big dilemma. Many of the Asian women who have been insulated by their culture, in their growing up years when suddenly thrust into the wide world, have no real experience of men and can come unstuck in ways that are rarely seen with British women.
For instance, one intelligent woman in her thirties, with no experience of men, fell victim to a London Medium who tricked her out of her £30,000 dowry money. This is not the only complaint about this man, yet he is still practicing in London churches.
Another common plight is the young woman who decides she does not want to be forced into an unwelcome marriage, now because of my studies in the Hindu and Muslim philosophies and cultures, I am consulted very frequently in these matters, and I have been powerless to stop tragedies seen on the horizon in many Asian families.
These large numbers of young women who feel neither Indian nor British but a mixture of both cultures, are in a dangerous limbo world, where neither psychologists nor paranormal counselors seem able to reach, remedy or rectify their internal needs without treading on cultural toes.
T Stokes