Concept
Insanity
Overview
Insanity, madness, lunacy, and craziness are behaviors caused by certain abnormal mental or behavioral patterns. Insanity can manifest as violations of societal norms, including a person or persons becoming a danger to themselves or to other people. Conceptually, mental insanity also is associated with the biological phenomenon of contagion (that mental illness is infectious) as in the case of copycat suicides. In contemporary usage, the term insanity is an informal, un-scientific term denoting "mental instability"; thus, the term insanity defense is the legal definition of mental instability. In medicine, the general term psychosis is used to include the presence of delusions and/or hallucinations in a patient; and psychiatric illness is "psychopathology", not mental insanity.
In English, the word "sane" derives from the Latin adjective sanus, meaning "healthy". Juvenal's phrase mens sana in corpore sano is often translated to mean a "healthy mind in a healthy body". From this perspective, insanity can be considered as poor health of the mind, not necessarily of the brain as an organ (although that can affect mental health), but rather refers to defective function of mental processes such as reasoning. Another Latin phrase related to our current concept of sanity is compos mentis ("sound of mind"), and a euphemistic term for insanity is non compos mentis. In law, mens rea means having had criminal intent, or a guilty mind, when the act (actus reus) was committed.
A more informal use of the term insanity is to denote something or someone considered highly unique, passionate or extreme, including in a positive sense. The term may also be used as an attempt to discredit or criticize particular ideas, beliefs, principles, desires, personal feelings, attitudes, or their proponents, such as in politics and religion.
Overview adapted from Wikipedia (CC BY-SA 4.0; see the article history for authors).
In the original texts
Passages from public-domain books where Insanity is discussed.
But in older metaphysics mind was treated as a soul, as a thing; and it is only as a thing, i.e. as something natural and existent, that it is liable to insanity—the settled fixture of some finite element in it. Insanity is therefore a psychical disease, i.e. a disease of body and mind alike: the commencement may appear to start from one more than other, and so also may the cure.
Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel, Hegel's Philosophy of Mind
states what it is; names the idea; opens on it
Evidence not of this directly experimental kind, but nevertheless of considerable weight, is furnished by other nervous disorders. There is proof enough that insanity admits of being induced by circumstances which, in one or other way, derange the nervous functions—excesses of this or that kind; and no one questions the accepted belief that insanity is inheritable. Is it alleged that the insanity which is…
Herbert Spencer, The Factors of Organic Evolution
names the idea; states what it is
In its more extreme forms persecution mania is a recognized form of insanity. Some people imagine that others wish to kill them, or imprison them, or to do them some other grave injury.
Bertrand Russell, The conquest of happiness
names the idea; opens on it
Men of earlier ages were far more inclined to believe that, wherever traces of insanity showed themselves, a certain proportion of genius and wisdom was likewise present—something “divine,” as they whispered to one another. More than this, they expressed their opinions on the point with sufficient emphasis. “All the greatest benefits of Greece have sprung from madness,” said Plato, setting on record the opinion of…
Friedrich Wilhelm Nietzsche, The Dawn of Day
names the idea; opens on it
In like manner there are affective qualities and affections of the soul. That temper with which a man is born and which has its origin in certain deep-seated affections is called a quality. I mean such conditions as insanity, irascibility, and so on: for people are said to be mad or irascible in virtue of these. Similarly those abnormal psychic states which are not inborn, but arise from the concomitance of certain…
Aristotle, The Categories
states what it is; names the idea
Philosophers who discussed Insanity
Related ideas
- Simon & Schuster
- Epilepsy
- Geoffrey Chaucer
- Hippocrates
- London
- Middle Ages
- Mental disorder
- Late Middle Ages
- Psychosis
- Schizophrenia
- United States
- McGraw Hill Education
- Wiley-Blackwell
- Behavior
- Oxford University Press
- Hallucination
- Ancient Rome
- Common law
- Ancient Greece
- Juvenal
- Psychopathology
- Williamsburg, Virginia
- Guilford Press
Opposing perspectives
Place in the tradition
Part of Philosophy of science.