Multimodal Hallucinations in Muslim Patients with Severe Psychotic Disorders: The Entity Experience Revisited

Multimodal hallucinations may involve full-blown entity experiences, which in Muslim patients typically take the form of jinn encounters. The way in which these entity experiences are mediated is as yet uncertain. However, since visual, auditory, and tactile hallucinations in our sample were described substantially more frequently than somatic, olfactory, and gustatory ones, we hypothesise that the processes underlying the hallucinations may be driven by a stochastic mechanism in that the first three sensory modalities need to have been engaged before the latter three can be recruited. We highlight several biological models of potential underlying mechanisms as well as two overarching models that may help place the mechanisms in the wider context of personal, social, cultural, religious, philosophical, and evolutionary factors that, conceivably, all play a role in their mediation.