Artificial Intelligence at the Boundary of Spiritual Experience and Psychopathology: A Scoping Review of Evidence from Turkiye, the USA, the UK, Poland, South Korea, and Israel

Key Findings

• — Nine studies from Turkiye, the USA, the UK, Poland, South Korea and Israel were included, spanning clinical case reports, retrospective electronic health record analyses, qualitative studies, machine-learning investigations and conceptual modelling.
• — Conversational AI is reported as a catalyst, amplifier, co-author or object of spiritually framed delusions.
• — The risk concentrates where psychosis, mania, sleep disruption, substance exposure or impaired reality testing is already present.
• — Separately, natural-language-processing and machine-learning models showed preliminary potential for identifying documented psychotic episodes and predicting relapse.
• — The authors conclude AI may reinforce psychopathological experience while also offering preliminary support for detection, and that the evidence base is small and design-heterogeneous.

Methodology Notes

Scoping review to 30 June 2026 across PubMed, Web of Science, Embase, the Cochrane Library and Scopus following PRISMA-ScR; only nine included studies, of highly mixed design, so the synthesis is a map of a thin literature rather than a pooled result. Published online ahead of print 2026-09-13, DOI 10.1007/s10943-026-02777-1; Springer supplies no Crossref abstract, so the record was verified from Crossref metadata and the full PubMed abstract (PMID 42732530).

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