Is it jinn, or is it illnessStep 1 of 8

Before you read on

Some of what people attribute to affliction is also what a treatable and sometimes urgent illness looks like. Get seen today, not next week, for any of these. Hearing or seeing what others do not, especially if it is new or in more than one sense at once. Not sleeping for several nights with energy that feels raised rather than drained. Not eating or drinking. Confusion that comes and goes, or a sudden change in someone who was well yesterday. Fits, collapse or loss of consciousness. Any new symptom after a head injury, a fever, a new medicine, or in pregnancy or after birth. Any thought of ending your life or of harming someone else, which is an emergency now. And if you have been told to stop a medicine so that the treatment can work, please speak to your doctor before you stop, because stopping suddenly is dangerous by itself whatever the cause turns out to be.

Lesson 2 of 6

The question everybody asks first

What is causing this. It is the honest first question and it is the human one. If you know the cause you know what to do, and you also get something else that matters, which is a reason. Things that have reasons are less frightening than things that do not.

The trouble is that this question has no method attached to it that any of us can run. There is no test that reads off a cause from the outside. Not a clinical one and not a religious one.

So the question stays open. That is uncomfortable and it is also true.