Skip to main contentBrian Scibetta's business card says, "I am not a stereotype. I will not read your mind. I will tell you things that only God knows."
He says he talks to God and dead people, and he conveys their messages to the living.
He receives $80 an hour for his services—from more than 30 paying clients.
And this month, he turned 16.
On a recent afternoon at a Starbucks on Southwest Boones Ferry Road, Brian, who is just learning to drive, was wearing a striped button-down shirt and khaki shorts. He has soft green eyes, a boyish round face, a chinstrap beard and brown hair that he fluffs into a partial fauxhawk. He acknowledges that some people probably think he is crazy. But he claims not to be concerned about what others think.
He has always been different.
At the age of 7, Brian was diagnosed with attention deficit disorder, or ADD. For the next several years, he struggled with school and a haunting depression.
Then, at age 13, Brian realized he could see and hear things other people could not: tree fairies, for example, and the low, powerful voice of God. He believes they're real. "Sometimes I hear the voice, sometimes I feel it," Brian says. "Sometimes I see it—I see his message in block writing or as a video, a scenario being played out."
He now says he never had ADD. "I think as a kid I was being bombarded by demons and angels and other things trying to contact me, and I didn't know how to vent or communicate," Brian says.
Brian and his mother say he is an Indigo Child, one of a large population of children who are often given the diagnosis of ADD when in fact, their parents say, they have intuitive and psychic powers that have been squarely confused with the disorder.
"What symptoms he has have been pigeonholed as ADD, because that's what the psychological community is aware of," Brian's mother, Carley Scibetta, says.
Next month, Brian will enter the 11th grade at the Portland Waldorf School in Milwaukie. In the evenings and on weekends he will talk to God and clients from his bedroom in his mother's house, which sits on a quiet cul-de-sac in placid Lake Oswego. And when he's not working or studying, he'll play Mario Party 8 on his Nintendo Wii.
Bryan Knew, a 31-year-old telephone technician from Las Vegas, is one of Brian's clients. The teenager is "one of the most gifted people I know," says Knew, who adds that Brian has helped him over the phone with his love life, money problems and improving the health of his family and friends.
"I'm just a kid," Brian tells me. "But I was given these gifts to help more people and also to share the gifts. I'm not Jesus Christ. I'm not a reincarnated Jesus. I'm just someone who was put on the earth to try to help and bring light to everybody."
Mint green is the color of hospital scrubs and SAT scrap paper.
It's a calming color, and it bathes the living room walls of the Scibetta family's home, where Ethan Allen furniture mixes with New Age spiritual relics and two Jack Russell terriers scamper across hardwood floors and a carpet meant to evoke the look and feel of sea pebbles.
Earlier this month when school was out and the sun was not, Brian sat in a mint-green armchair in the mint-green living room next to his mother, who wears her blond, shoulder-length hair swept into a ponytail and has an angular face that softens into a smile as she speaks. Wearing a short-sleeve T-shirt of the same green shade, Brian explained the transformation that puts him in opposition with the mainstream.
For close to five years, Brian took Ritalin in an attempt to succeed in public school. But the medication gave him headaches and made him withdrawn, he says. And his diagnosis left him feeling stigmatized in the eyes of his teachers and other students. To make matters worse, he still wasn't getting good grades.
"Being the kid in class who slows everything down made me deeply depressed," Brian wrote in an essay in the ninth grade when his mom decided to homeschool him. "It turned out that the diagnosis was only a label and the medication I was given didn't only help me focus, but it took my personality away. I was a shell of a child, and that was awful for anyone to see."
His mother, who is separated from her husband and has raised both Brian and his older brother, David, alone for much of their lives, says of the Ritalin: "At first there was a positive effect. But the positive effect was moderate at best. Once they labeled him, teachers gave up on him. It took my kid away. And to what? To make him normal? Who defines normal?"
In the seventh grade, Brian met Gary Spivey, a spiritual guru who wears a giant white Afro shaped like a motorcycle helmet. Spivey had conducted a seminar in Portland, and after a private meeting with him, Brian decided he wanted to stop taking his medication. "Very plainly he told me that he no longer needed it after seeing Gary," Brian's mother writes in a testimonial that appears in one of Spivey's books.
One year later, when Brian was 13 and about to finish the eighth grade, he was on a retreat with his mother and brother at Spivey's compound in Ojai, Calif. An "inspirational author" and psychic, Spivey charges $1,000 an hour to answer callers' questions on his hotline. Spivey is also a friend of the Scibettas, who acknowledge he has an "over-the-top" personality. His website is dotted with photos of celebrities like Shirley MacLaine, Jerry Springer, Jerry Hall, LaToya Jackson and "Downtown" Julie Brown, who are all pictured with Spivey. His photo, in turn, appears on numerous websites debunking his powers.
At the time, Brian was failing all of his classes. In his third trimester of eighth grade at Waluga Junior High School in Lake Oswego, he earned a 0.83 GPA. His cumulative GPA stood at 1.79.
On a lunch break during the retreat, as the 40 other participants enjoyed a barbecue, Brian's gaze wandered toward a stand of trees and he says he saw green fairies. "You see them, too," Brian recalls Spivey saying to him, without prompting.
Moments later, Brian claims that the turning point for him came when he assisted Spivey in helping a young African-American woman named Tonya Carter from Greenville, N.C. Carter said she was having trouble moving forward in her relationship. Brian says he could see shackles on the woman's arms, indicating that she had been a slave in a previous life. In response, Brian says he and Spivey spiritually released the woman from the restraints. Now, Brian's mom points to Spivey's website where Carter has a blurb that states, "When you and the thirteen-year-old young man took off the shackles, I was unaware that it would free me from so many issues."
Brian's life changed dramatically after his family returned from the trip. Instead of advancing to the ninth grade in public school in Lake Oswego, Brian's mother decided to homeschool Brian. He has since enrolled at the Waldorf school, and in February of this year he decided to offer his services to others, beyond family and friends. His mother says he has about 30 clients, some of whom call him regularly in 15-minute increments for advice on everything from sex to career options. His income, she says, is several hundred dollars a month.
"I don't think there's such a thing as ADD," says Brian's mom. "What if it really is a design? What if it's not ADD? What if they're gifted children here to teach us something?"
Nancy Ann Tappe, a New Age author who wrote Understanding Your Life Through Color in 1982, is considered to be among the first to "recognize" the subculture of Indigo Children. (The name "Indigo" comes from the bluish aura these children purportedly possess.)
In the past quarter-century, a growing number of children, parents and professionals have come to believe Indigo Children are indeed blessed with special powers. But, they say, the medical and educational establishment has instead viewed many of these children as misfits and tried to treat them with drugs.
Today, New Age stores are filled with books about the subject, including The Care and Feeding of Indigo Children , whose author, Doreen Virtue, a "spiritual doctor of psychology," says, "They're here to change our political, educational, nutritional, family and other systems." (Some Indigo Children have already grown into Indigo Adults, and an international Yahoo group that exists for them has collected nearly 500 emails so far this month.)
One local professional who believes in the theory of Indigo Children is Linda Kardos, a licensed professional counselor in Portland with a graduate degree from Lewis&Clark Graduate School of Education and Counseling. She has a practice that includes a number of Indigo Children, although she has never met Brian.
From her office in Southwest Portland, Kardos says she has treated a number of teens who have been diagnosed with attention disorders but say they are psychic. Kardos believes them. "One person might have a radio receiver that can take in four stations," she says. "A person whose brain is more developed like this can maybe take in 50 stations that don't come from the earth.… They come from higher levels of consciousness."
Kardos says these children, some of whom are now adults, are a newly evolved breed of human brought to the planet by a higher power to question our conformity. She cites as an example Albert Einstein, who some now think had ADD. "What if Einstein conformed?" she asks.
Brian answers calls to his business from his bedroom, where he is surrounded by the comforts of a suburban adolescence. His mother also runs a business from her home, completing criminal background checks on potential employees of other corporations.
"My mom brought me up in a realistic situation," says Brian, whose parents separated when he was 4. "I'm not your typical, spoiled Lake Oswego kid. Things haven't been given to me on a silver platter. We've struggled a lot in our lives. And luckily, with my mom being a really good businesswoman, we've gotten to the state where we can have a very comfortable life. But that's not to say it's always been like that."
A Chinese meditation chair with dragons for arms sits next to one sunny yellow wall in Brian's bedroom. Two Las Vegas-style slot machines are pushed up against two others.
Shortly before 3 pm on a recent Tuesday, Brian's mom reminded him that he had a telephone appointment with a client. "Meditate first," she said, as if reminding him to eat his vegetables. He then bounded up the stairs from the living room to his bedroom. "I'm still his mom," she told me, smiling.
Forty minutes later, Brian returned to the living room and described, in a rough sketch, the conversation he had had with his client, a woman in California who frequently seeks Brian's guidance.
Brian also performs regular spiritual readings by phone with Bryan Knew, the telephone technician from Las Vegas who met Brian at a $1,000-a-week-plus Gary Spivey retreat in California last year. "Things happen for a reason," Knew told WW . "Brian happened to be there for a reason."
Now Knew says Brian has helped him to "stay focused on my path" and to "clear the negative energies" in his life. Specifically, too, he's been speaking with Brian about his long-distance relationship with a woman he would like eventually to marry. The two also discuss money, Knew's friends' health and Knew's family, topics Brian says are common.
Where would he be without Brian?
"Paying Gary [Spivey] a lot more money," Knew says, seemingly only half-joking. "Pretty lost, actually," he adds.
Skepticism aside, Brian is aware of the criticism leveled at him for charging people to receive messages from God.
"A lot of times people who are against what I do ask me how I can charge for God's word," Brian says. "Really the only response that I can think of is, 'You don't work for free, either.' It's not like it's just coming through on an email. I do have to work. And it does take a toll. I just charge for my time. It's not an outlandish price to me. … And my clients seem to agree. God always tells me what I should charge. It's not like I'm out to make millions of dollars. I'm just a kid, and I want to help people, but I also want to be able to pay my cell phone bill."
For many months after realizing his gifts, Brian hid his spiritual life from outsiders.
"No one wants to be a freak," his mother says. "And he is a teenager."
"Now everyone knows," Brian says.
In fact, according to Brian's teachers, the topic is now a matter of frequent conversation at the Portland Waldorf School, which Brian's friends from public school call Hogwarts. Students, for example, periodically ask Brian how they might perform at the track meet and where they might be in five years' time. Brian says they ask these questions "jokingly," so they don't seem silly, but "seriously," too, because they really do want to know.
Shortly after enrolling at the school, Brian had a psychological evaluation at the suggestion of the Waldorf staff. (Brian and his mother released that evaluation to WW .)
"He presented as an attractive, neatly groomed and appropriately dressed young man, tall and a little heavy for his height," the psychologist's report states. "Brian's attitude was friendly and cooperative. His behavior toward his mother suggested a close loving relationship."
The 13-page report goes on: "The Rorschach findings indicate that Brian is susceptible to episodes of emotional disturbance that are likely to involve features of depression, pessimism, anxiety and reduced motivation to carry on with everyday activities. He may not necessarily complain of feeling depressed or emotionally upset, but he nevertheless gives evidence of being disposed to emotional distress that interferes with his being able to function effectively. He appears to have a sense of physical vulnerability and hopelessness about what the future may bring."
The psychologist wrote that Brian also met the criteria for a diagnosis of ADD.
"Given his very strong ability to apprehend information in immediate memory, it is likely that Brian's problem is not in attention, per se, but in the ability to integrate information from different parts of the brain."
The psychologist was not told that Brian and his mother believe he can talk with God.
To a degree, Brian's mother accepts the diagnosis of ADD, even as she questions the existence of the disorder at other times. She also accepts he has mild dyslexia. "He probably does have ADD, if you're going to label it. But he also talks to God. He has so many abilities that other people don't have."
Brian's humanities teacher, Jeff Levy, says Brian is "really quite serious in a way, although he's also quite jovial."
He notes that Brian can be inattentive and unfocused in class. But he stopped short of questioning Brian's own explanation for the distractions. "I can't really say where he's going when he's inattentive," Levy says.
Another one of his teachers, Buzz Poleson, who teaches science and math, expressed more skepticism about Brian's claims.
"I know him and like him," Poleson says. "Personally, I wouldn't foster those ideas, but I would never come out to a student and say, 'You have a wacky idea there.' I might suggest they diversify their readings."
Brian's two closest friends attend Lakeridge High School in Lake Oswego, the public school Brian would have gone to had he not enrolled at the Waldorf school.
Neither one talks to Brian about his spirituality or the details of his work, they say. And they're willing to believe that it's possible Brian is psychic. "My dad would think it's just baloney," says Alan Baur, 17. "I suppose because I'm his friend I believe it more than if he was just some stranger."
Nearly 4 million children have been diagnosed with ADD or ADHD in the United States, according to federal statistics. It's hardly surprising, then, that some number of those children and their parents have sought additional explanations for the symptoms of the disorder.
But a number of medical professionals see harm in seeking explanations that have no basis in science, which is what doctors and researchers say is the case with the Indigo phenomenon and others like it. Those paranormal fads fall in and out of fashion "like the width of neckties in vogue," according to Mario Mendez Acosta, a journalist in Skeptical Inquirer , a national science magazine. They're just another "exploitation of minors," teaching children to "collaborate in a deliberate deceit," Mendez writes.
Dr. Suzanne Lawton, a naturopathic physician in Tigard who treats children with attention disorders, says it's understandable that parents might want to think of their children as special as opposed to troubled. "It's the other swing of the pendulum," Lawton says of the Indigo concept. "The truth is somewhere in the middle."
Brian Scibetta registered his business, Amore e Luce LLC, which means "love and light" in Italian, in February.
According to the literature on psychic children, Indigo Children are being joined by so-called Crystal Children, who share similar characteristics.
Brian's mother, who was raised an Episcopalian by two graduates of Swarthmore College, also seeks Brian's counsel. Both her parents are deceased. But, she says, "I've had more conversations with my dad since he died."
Brian's older brother, David, is 19 and lives in a Christian-themed house near the University of Oregon. He says he has similar "gifts" as Brian, but doesn't share them with his housemates. He says they would ostracize him.
Brian's mother says her son did not fail Lake Oswego public schools; "Lake Oswego public schools failed him."
Brian does not see his father often. David says their father is an agnostic.
Brian turns 16 the day this story hits the streets. His mom doesn't think Brian can lie about his powers. "If he were ever to mislead anyone, I think God would take his gifts away, she wrote WW in an email.
WWeek 2015