We suppose Greg Hendrix is too minor, and the stories of his antics too old (though one wonders what he’s up to these days), even for us. Tyler Henry, however, is not a minor figure. Tyler Henry is a major celebrity and heir-apparent to charlatans and delusional dingbats like Sylvia Browne and John Edward. Henry is a self-declared ‘clairvoyant’ and ‘medical intuitive’ (“Tyler can often physically sense the prior medical conditions of the spirits he is attempting to communicate with”), and a reality show personality who has appeared in in reality show series like Hollywood Medium with Tyler Henry and Life After Death with Tyler Henry, after getting his breakthrough following a 2015 appearance on Keeping Up with the Kardashians, where he gave a reading to one of the Kardashian sisters. He has subsequently gone on to give multiple readings to a variety of celebrities, including Megan Fox and Kristin Cavallari – of course, to make his show work, Henry usually has to claim that he doesn’t know who the celebrity he is talking to is so that they can be impressed when he relates information about them that is readily available via Google (yes, that’s the level of silly we’re talking about) – the most famous one being perhaps his reading with La Toya Jackson, in which he claimed to contact Michael Jackson (he didn’t), and the Alan Thicke affair, on which Henry largely bases his claims of being a ‘medical intuitive’. He has also published some books (Between Two Worlds: Lessons from the Other Side and Here & Hereafter: How Wisdom from the Departed Can Transform Your Life Now; yes, he mixes his psychic bullshit with bullshit selfhelp bullshit – what did you think?).
Henry, who needless to say has no more psychic powers than a bathtub, uses a mix of deceptive cold reading and hot reading techniques to get his results, which tends to produce the usual responses among the silly-of-mind partially in virtue of the Forer effect and partially because mundane predictions that an average 10-year-old could have made or providing information that’s readily available through Google (or, usually, nothing of substance whatsoever) sound impressive to idiots (like Jeryl Lippe of lifeandstylemag) when it is coming from a celebrity.
But although Tyler Henry and his antics may immediately strike you as light and laughable entertainment, there is a serious and tragic side to it. Tyler Henry is a grief vampire, a self-proclaimed psychic medium (one of many) who ‘prey upon the loved ones of those who have recently died [to] exploit the grieving for their own monetary gain’; and such actions are not only exploitative but risk causing significant harm to people in already difficult situations. And Henry isn’t only claiming to contact long-ago grandmothers but to put grieving relatives in touch with victims of suicide. This is, needless to say, not a good idea. Henry’s efforts has of course been promoted by Dr. Phil, but then Dr. Phil is himself a dangerous loon. Fortunately, good people are paying attention as well.
There is decent coverage of Henry and his ilk here.
Diagnosis: No, it’s not really funny even though it’s hard not to laugh. Henry himself can laugh, too, of course – all the way to the bank – for Henry is, regardless of whether he himself genuinely believes he has the abilities he claims to have or not (he probably does believe so), a fraud and a dipshit.
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