"Lunatic" is an informal term referring to people who are considered mentally ill, dangerous, foolish or unpredictable; conditions once called lunacy. The term may be considered insulting in serious contexts, though is sometimes used in friendly jest. The word derives from lunaticus meaning "of the moon" or "moonstruck".
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Philosophers such as Aristotle and Pliny the Elder argued that the full Moon induced insanity in susceptible individuals, believing that the brain, which is mostly water, must be affected by the Moon and its power over the tides, but the Moon's gravity is too slight to affect any single person.[1] Even today, people insist that admissions to psychiatric hospitals, traffic accidents, homicides or suicides increase during a full Moon, although there is no scientific evidence to support such claims.[1]
In a 1999 Journal of Affective Disorders article, a hypothesis was suggested that the phase of the moon may in the past have had an effect on individuals with bipolar disorder by providing light during nights which would otherwise have been dark, and affecting susceptible individuals through the well-known route of sleep deprivation.[2] With the introduction of electric light, this effect would have gone away, as light would be available every night, explaining the negative results of modern studies. The authors suggested ways in which this hypothesis might be tested.
In England and Wales the Lunacy Acts 1890 - 1922 referred to lunatics, but the Mental Treatment Act 1930 changed the legal term to "Person of Unsound Mind", an expression which was replaced under the Mental Health Act 1959 by mental illness. "Person of unsound mind" was the term used in 1950 in the English version of the European Convention on Human Rights as one of the types of person who could be deprived of liberty by a judicial process. The 1930 act also replaced Asylum with Mental Hospital. Criminal Lunatics became Broadmoor Patients in 1948 under the National Health Service Act
The term lunatic was also used by supporters of John Harrison and his marine chronometer method of determining longitude to refer to proponents of the Method of Lunar Distances, advanced by Astronomer Royal Nevil Maskelyne.
Later, members of the Lunar Society of Birmingham called themselves lunaticks. In an age with little street lighting, the society met on or about the night of the full moon.