After more than 15 years working as a professional psychic medium and reading for thousands of people, Scott Stonebridge has spent much of his career meeting people at some of the most vulnerable moments of their lives, particularly through grief. Over the years, he has noticed that despite differences in age, culture, or belief, many of the same questions return: whether the person they lost is okay, whether the connection remains, and whether the love they shared has somehow endured. For Stonebridge, grief may look very different from one person to another, but the love beneath it remains deeply universal.
That understanding became deeply personal after his MND diagnosis in 2020, when he began living with uncertainty about the future himself. The experience reshaped the way he thinks about hope, control, and even the responsibility carried by words spoken during a reading. “Hope is not pretending that everything is going to be perfect,” he says. In the interview, Stonebridge also reflects on free will, the ethical boundaries of mediumship, the danger of creating dependency among vulnerable people, and why he believes spiritual guidance should never replace the autonomy of the person seeking it.
You place honesty at the center of your work and make it clear that you do not guarantee predictions or believe life follows a fixed script. After more than 15 years of working with people, where have you learned to draw the line between offering guidance and risking someone handing over decisions that ultimately still need to remain their own?
I think this is incredibly important because I have never believed that somebody should hand their life over to a psychic or medium. My job is to give somebody the information and guidance that I receive, but what they choose to do with that information must always remain their decision.
After more than 15 years of doing this work, I have learnt that there is a very big difference between guiding somebody and telling somebody how they should live their life. I might see a particular situation developing, feel strongly that somebody is moving towards a certain opportunity, or be shown that one direction feels much stronger than another. I will tell them what I am receiving, but I will never tell somebody that they have no choice because I simply do not believe that is how life works.
I believe we have free will. Circumstances change, people change, decisions change, and sometimes one choice can completely alter what happens next. That is why I have always been very open that a prediction is not a guarantee. It is what I am seeing around that person at that particular point in time.
I also think you have to recognise when somebody is starting to rely too heavily on you. If somebody feels they cannot make a decision without asking a psychic first, then for me something has gone wrong. A reading should help somebody feel more empowered in their own life, not less.
Ultimately, I want somebody to leave a reading understanding themselves or their situation a little better, but still knowing that their life belongs to them. I can give guidance, I can tell them what Spirit is showing me and I can help them look at something from a different perspective, but I cannot live their life for them.
For me, that is where the line is. Guidance should open somebody up to their own choices, not take those choices away.
Many people seek out a medium while grieving, when they may be especially vulnerable. What do you believe someone working in that space needs to understand about emotional responsibility so that a reading can offer comfort without creating dependency or false certainty?
I think the first thing you have to understand is that when somebody comes to you through grief, they are often coming to you at one of the most vulnerable points in their life. They may have lost somebody very recently, they may still be trying to understand what has happened, or they may simply be desperate to feel that connection again. That means there is a huge responsibility in how you speak to them and what you say.
For me, a reading should never be about making somebody dependent on you. I do not want somebody to feel that they have to keep coming back to me in order to feel close to the person they have lost. The purpose should be to bring comfort, reassurance and hopefully help them feel that the love and connection they had with that person has not simply disappeared.
I also think you have to be very careful with certainty. I will always say what I am receiving, but I would never want somebody to make a major life decision purely because of something I have said in a reading. Mediumship can be incredibly comforting, but it should sit alongside somebody’s own judgement, their own support system and, when needed, proper professional support.
Over the years I have met people carrying enormous grief, and one of the biggest things I have learnt is that you cannot assume you know how somebody is coping just because they appear okay on the outside. Sometimes people are holding much more pain than they are showing.
That is why compassion is so important in this work. You have to listen properly, be careful with your words and understand that what you say may stay with somebody for a very long time.
For me, the responsibility is to offer comfort without ever taking control away from the person sitting in front of you. A good reading should help somebody feel supported and reassured, but it should never make them feel that they cannot cope, decide or move forward without you.
You experienced heightened spiritual awareness from childhood, but later chose to train formally at Arthur Findlay College. What did that structured training change about the way you understood experiences that had previously felt deeply personal and intuitive?
I think the word structured can sometimes give the wrong impression of what training at Arthur Findlay College is actually like. It is not really a case of sitting at a desk with a teacher standing in front of you telling you exactly how mediumship works.
They offer many different courses and different levels depending on where somebody is within their own development. The course I attended was much more about helping you open up different areas of your awareness, strengthening what was already there, helping you understand how you were receiving information, and also allowing you to experience new things within your mediumship.
For me, I already had a strong spiritual awareness before I went there. What the college did was give me an environment where I could explore that further, strengthen what I already had and also experience different ways of working with Spirit that I had not necessarily opened myself up to before.
But something else was happening at the same time. As I was opening myself up to more awareness and new experiences, I also felt that the Spirit world were giving me more to work with for the future. I was being shown things that I had not already learnt, known or experienced before. The best way I can describe it is that every new experience was like being given another tool in your tool belt. You may not necessarily understand straight away how important that tool will become, but later on you realise why you were given it and how it fits into your work.
I also believe there is only so much another person can teach you. Ultimately, a huge part of spiritual development comes from the Spirit world itself. I believe they open you up gradually depending on what you are ready for. They give you more understanding, more experiences and more awareness when the time is right.
Mediumship is something where there is always more to learn. It changes as time goes on, your understanding changes, and the way you experience Spirit can change as well. You can think you understand one area of your mediumship and then suddenly you are shown something completely new and another door opens.
That is something I have noticed throughout my whole spiritual journey. I am always learning something new. Even now, after more than 15 years, I still do not feel as though I have reached a point where there is nothing more to discover.
Arthur Findlay College helped me strengthen what was already there and gave me new experiences to develop from, but the deeper learning has continued throughout my life through the Spirit world itself and through what they have gradually shown me I am ready to understand next.
After working with more than 10,000 people, is there anything about grief and loss that you have seen repeat itself regardless of a person’s culture, age, or individual story?
Yes, absolutely. The biggest thing I have seen repeat itself is that underneath everything, people want to know that the love they shared with somebody has not simply disappeared because that person has died.
Everybody grieves differently. Some people talk constantly about the person they have lost, while others find it incredibly difficult to even say their name. Some people look for signs, some want a reading, and some do not want anything spiritual at all. But underneath all of those differences, the questions are often very similar.
Are they okay? Do they know I love them? Are they still around me? Did they know how much they meant to me? I have seen those same questions come from people of completely different ages, cultures, beliefs and backgrounds.
Another thing that repeats itself is guilt. People can carry enormous guilt after somebody dies. They think about the last conversation they had, whether they visited enough, whether they could have done something differently, or something they wish they had said. Grief has a way of making somebody focus on one moment and forget the thousands of other moments that made up that relationship.
What I have learnt is that grief is very individual, but love is incredibly universal and eternal. People may express grief differently, but when you strip everything else away, they miss the person. They miss their voice, their laugh, their presence and all of those ordinary things that suddenly become incredibly important once somebody is no longer physically there.
That is probably the biggest thing more than 15 years of this work has taught me. Grief may look different from person to person, but the love underneath it is something I see again and again.
Your MND diagnosis in 2020 placed you personally inside the kind of uncertainty you had spent years helping other people navigate. Has that experience changed the way you speak about hope, control, and the future during your readings?
Yes, massively. Before my diagnosis, I could understand uncertainty from the people I was reading for, but after being diagnosed with MND I suddenly understood what it actually feels like to live inside uncertainty every single day.
When you are told you have a progressive illness, your mind naturally wants to jump ahead. You start thinking about what might happen next, what you may lose, how your life might change and how much control you actually have over any of it. I went through a period where I was frightened of the future because I was mentally living in things that had not even happened yet.
That changed the way I think about hope.
For me, hope is not pretending that everything is going to be perfect. It is not ignoring reality either. Hope is allowing yourself to believe that there can still be something good ahead of you even when you do not know exactly what that future is going to look like.
It also changed the way I think about control. We like to believe we can control everything, but life can change incredibly quickly. What I have learnt is that sometimes you cannot control what is happening around you, but you can still have some control over how you respond to it, where you put your energy and what you choose to do next.
That definitely comes into my readings now. I am much more aware of how powerful words about the future can be, particularly when somebody is already frightened or uncertain. I never want somebody to walk away from a reading feeling that their future has already been decided for them.
I can tell somebody what I am seeing and what Spirit is showing me, but I also remind them that life continues to move. Decisions change things. People change. Circumstances change.
My own life has taught me that the future is not always something we need to fear simply because we cannot see it clearly.
Sometimes all you can do is work with where you are today, keep moving towards what still gives your life meaning, and allow the future to reveal itself as you get there.
You have turned part of your experience with MND into advocacy and fundraising. When did you realize you wanted your visibility to serve not only your spiritual work, but also people and families living with the disease?
I think that realization came when my life had to stop and I was forced to look at everything differently.
After my diagnosis, there was a period where so much of my attention was naturally on what was happening to me physically and what the future might look like. But as time went on, I started to think much more about what I could actually do with the position I was in.
I already had a platform. I already had people following my work, trusting me and supporting what I was doing. And I remember thinking that if I had that visibility, then I wanted it to mean something beyond just my own business.
That was when fundraising for the Motor Neurone Disease Association became such an important part of my work.
I did not want MND to just be something that had happened to me. I wanted to use my experience of it to help other people who were living with the same disease, and also the families around them who are affected by it every single day.
For me, that meant using the business I had already built to support vital research and help raise money towards the one thing everybody living with MND wants, better treatments and ultimately a cure.
It also gave me a different sense of purpose.
I have always felt that my work is about serving Spirit and helping people through readings, but after my diagnosis I realised I could serve in another way as well. I could use the same platform to help people here in a very practical way.
That connection between my spiritual work and my fundraising now feels completely natural to me.
If somebody supports my business, books a reading or follows my work, they are also helping me create more awareness around MND and support a cause that is incredibly personal to me. I think that is when I realised visibility only really means something if you use it for something bigger than yourself.
Your work brings together spirituality, intuition, and personal experiences with practices you have incorporated over the years. How do you make space for belief and meaning without presenting your own spiritual experiences as universal answers for what other people are going through?
I think the most important thing is understanding that my spiritual experiences are mine. I can talk about what I have seen, what I have felt, what I have experienced through Spirit and what I personally believe, but that does not mean everybody else has to experience spirituality in exactly the same way.
Over the years I have had experiences that have completely changed my own understanding of Spirit, consciousness and what I believe happens beyond this physical life. Some of those experiences have been incredibly profound for me, but I would never tell somebody that because I experienced something, they therefore have to believe it as well.
I can only ever speak from my own experience.
I think spirituality becomes very personal because everybody comes to it from a different place. Somebody may have a very strong religious belief, somebody else may believe in Spirit but not religion, and another person may not believe in any of it at all. I respect all of those positions.
Even within mediumship, I am still learning. I have been doing this for more than 15 years and I am still having experiences that make me question what I thought I already understood. The more I learn, the more I actually realise how much there still is that we do not know.
That is why I would never want to present myself as somebody who has all of the answers.
I can share what Spirit shows me. I can share my own experiences and what they have taught me. I can tell somebody what I genuinely feel and believe. But ultimately, they have to decide what resonates with them and what meaning they take from it.
For me, spirituality should open somebody up to asking more questions, not make them feel that somebody else has already decided all of the answers for them.
And I think that is part of my own journey as well. As time goes on, Spirit continue to give me more experiences, more awareness and more to understand. So rather than feeling that I know everything, I actually feel more fascinated by how much more there may still be to discover.
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