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insanity

Abnormal mental or behavioral patterns

Entitycognitive process mental disorder superseded scientific theoryQ505619

Also known as insano · louco · loucura

Instance of: cognitive process
, mental disorder
, superseded scientific theory
Subclass of: biological process

Overview

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia · Read full article · Text CC BY-SA 4.0

Insanity, madness, lunacy, moon-addled, 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 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 or hallucinations in a patient; and psychiatric illness is "psychopathology", not mental insanity.

Overview

All data

44 statements · 23% with external sources · numbers in brackets are citations

Permanent duplicated item: Q17607608
Opposite of: sanity
Said to be the same as: Q5832238
Different from: Nebun criterion used: descriptive page and disambiguation page have to be in different items · applies to name of subject: nebun

On other databases

34 identifiers linking insanity across the web's reference databases

Data quality

statements

23%

externally sourced

Source last edited September 1, 2026. AIDb refreshes this page daily.

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AIDb. (2026). insanity (Q505619). Retrieved from https://aidb.si/e/insanity-Q505619