Moon and Madness

Niall McCrae

Description

Lunacy, the legendary notion of minds unhinged by the moon, continues to captivate the popular imagination. Although it violates the assumptions of modern science and psychiatry, such belief remains common among mental health workers. Furthermore, several studies have found a small, unexplained correlation between behaviour and the lunar cycle. The book is divided into two parts. It begins with a historical account of the lunacy concept, followed by an investigation of hypothetical mechanisms for a lunar effect.

Sujets

• Médecine
• Psychiatry

Informations

• Publié par: Andrews UK
• Date de parution: 19 octobre 2011
• Nombre de lectures: 0
• EAN13: 9781845403300
• Langue: English

Extrait

Title Page
THE MOON AND MADNESS
Niall McCrae



Publisher Information
Copyright © Niall McCrae, 2011
The moral rights of the author have been asserted
No part of this publication may be reproduced in any form without permission, except for the quotation of brief passages in criticism and discussion.
Originally published in the UK by Imprint Academic
PO Box 200, Exeter EX5 5YX, UK
Originally published in the USA by Imprint Academic
Philosophy Documentation Center
PO Box 7147, Charlottesville, VA 22906-7147, USA
Digital version converted and published in 2011 by
Andrews UK Limited
www.andrewsuk.com



Foreword
Dr Paul Crawford
A certain woman, named Leviva, from Wrokestan (a vill[age] near Banbury), suffered continually for three years from a swelling of the womb so that her body became useless with the anxiety and pain. Eventually she became so heavily weighed down with humours that she was unable to work. Her womb was inflated to such an extent that her neighbours said she presented the appearance of someone pregnant. Her clothes scarcely fitted her. The swelling spread to the rest of her body, even her hands and feet, and was worse at full moon. She said that this malady came on through the bitter cold when she went to the toilet, so that sometimes she made canine barking noises. She was judged mad ( vesania ) by everyone and tied up. Because of this she was rejected by her husband. She went to the church of the blessed virgin, and persisted in the most devoted prayer throughout the night. After much pain and trembling, with belching and yawning, she was freed from the noxious humours with which she had been impregnated, and her health returned.
‘Miracula S. Frideswidae’ , Acta Sanctorum Bollandiana , VIII Oct. (Antwerp, 1853), 27: 574
In the Miracles of St Frideswide in the medieval period we find a captivating narrative of Leviva who becomes ‘barking mad’ under the influence of the full moon yet recovers miraculously after praying through the night. This link between the full moon and transformation or transmogrification into a mad, moonstruck or dangerous ‘other’, most notably a werewolf, has featured prominently from the classical the writings of Herodotus, Virgil or Ovid to Kipling’s Mark of the Beast , Beaugrand’s The Werwolves or more recent popular fiction such as Patricia Briggs’ Moon Called or Jim Butcher’s Fool Moon . Lychanthropy (transformation into a wolf) has also made it into many films, not least Werewolf of London , The Howling , Mad at the Moon or as Fenrir Greyback and Remus Lupin in the Harry Potter films. We can even listen to Ozzy Osbourne howling in ‘Bark at the Moon’ or the slightly more lyrical ‘Full Moon’ by The Kinks:
Haven’t you noticed a kind of madness in my eyes?
It’s only me, dear, in my midnight disguise.
Pay no attention if I crawl across the room.
It’s just another full moon.
Don’t be afraid of me when I’m walking in my sleep.
Don’t get alarmed, dear, when I start to crawl and creep.
Try not to listen when I mumble like a loon.
It’s just another full moon.
It’s just another full moon.
In folklore, literature, film and music, the werewolf as cultural product has emerged from the various threats, imagined or real, that humans have faced, mixing the wolf as feared nocturnal predator with other disturbing phenomena or beliefs, be it seizures or unpredictable behaviour, unexplained deaths, serial killings, mutilations, the Devil or other evil spirits. In short, this particular shape-shifter has been associated with being possessed, murderous, odd-looking or mad. Thus strong candidates for being considered werewolves in the past were individuals suffering psychosis, or those with conditions such as Down’s Syndrome, congenital porphyria (comprising psychosis and reddened teeth), rabies, epilepsy or hypertrichosis (excessive or abnormal hair growth). Indeed, individuals suffering delusions about being an animal or able to transform into an animal (clinical lychanthropy) may well have assisted processes of social exclusion and stigmatisation.
Howling at the moon has certainly been an enduring image down the ages and the full moon has long been associated with provoking madness. Yet, in this age of evidence-based everything, it remains to be seen whether the archaic and largely obsolete notion of lunacy (referring to an intermittent insanity under the influence of the full moon) will be seriously revisited as a phenomenon. One wonders if the sheer appetite for fantasy literature that continues to this day, the demand for stories about vampires and werewolves, is part of the problem here. The constant revisiting in the imagination and unending representations in popular culture of the transformation into a werewolf under the light of the moon could well be one of the reasons why lunar influence is not taken seriously.
Niall McCrae’s book offers a fascinating account of the history of claims about the moon’s influence on us and suggests that conflicting evidence on this should not mean an end to the investigation. Importantly, McCrae’s book presents a sober overview of the development of ideas about the relationship between the universe and humankind, and an as yet inconclusive inquiry into the physics that might support the long held belief that our satellite pulls on or otherwise disturbs the balance of our minds and bodies.
Drawing upon theories from Ancient times to the present day, McCrae brings the cosmos to life. We sense its material and trajectory. We get to see our own planet as something fragile and pliable, and empathize with those complex, water-clothed skeletons moving about on its crust. We begin to acknowledge the play of gravity and light in the universe. We consider magnetism and how it makes iron filings stand up like hairs on the neck or guides migrating birds. And we begin to suspect that alongside the magical and puzzling realm of sub-atomic particles or dark matter, clouds giving birth to distant stars and our own sun spitting at us from time to time that we face all kinds of pulls and pushes, all kinds of unfelt caresses beyond the movement of air. Who is to say that we are not worked on by the moon in a similar way to our oceans or prodded by its light into a restless sleep that brings out the wolf in us? As the author notes in his concluding remarks, phenomena appear to correlate with the moon’s cycles: ‘Beans spurt, sea urchins bulge, worms glow, clams open, wolves howl. What theoretical obstacle precludes human sensitivity to the perturbations of our satellite?’
In his concluding remarks, McCrae argues for an alchemy of interpretative and positivist (scientific) research into the influence of the moon on mental state, observing a major fault-line in contemporary psychiatry: its privileging of knowledge that has little to do with richer human experience and narratives. Contemporary psychiatry, he suggests, remains heavily fixated on outcome measurements. McCrae is not alone in identifying this shortfall. A number of critics, most recently Richard Bentall, have seriously questioned the foundations of its practice. In reading this book one is left wondering whether psychiatry and its preferred evidence base, as in the lyrics by the Waterboys, might be seeing ‘the crescent’ rather than the ‘whole of the moon.’ Equally, one might wonder about the kind of rationality on offer in psychiatry and science generally and question the madness in its method, rather as the great eighteenth-century painter Joseph Wright of Derby did. Although not officially a member of the Lunar Society, or ‘lunatick’, Wright was keen to study the play of light and in particular moonlight. In his disturbing work, An Experiment on a Bird in the Air Pump , held at the National Gallery, London, he portrays a ‘mad-scientist’ demonstrating the creation of a vacuum that suffocates a bird. It is no coincidence that through the window to the right of the canvas, we see a full moon emerging from behind a cloud.
Dr Paul Crawford
Professor of Health Humanities
University of Nottingham



Preface
Bleary-eyed in the crisp dawn light of five minutes to seven, I paced along the glazed-brick corridor toward Cedar Ward, in the hinterland of a Victorian mental hospital. My arrival at the nurses’ station drew little response from night staff concentrating on their final task before handover, muttering as they scribbled, each completed patient’s record added to a stack on the desk. Then charge nurse Archie breezed in, punctuating the writing frenzy. ‘That was one hell of a shift’, exclaimed June; ‘They’ve been up all night, going berserk—one after the other’. Details emerged of an early hours verbal joust between Albert and Lizzie, Kristos repeatedly wandering naked from his dormitory and high-pitched expletives from Martha about an alleged nocturnal theft, the rumpus culminating in Terry lashing out at Albert and Lizzie being banished to the quiet room after tearing curtains from the rail. [1] Remarkably to me, these events were collectively blamed on the full moon.
As a psychiatric nurse trainee enthused by the technical discourse around mental illness and its treatment, I found the notion of moon-forged madness difficult to take seriously. Yet these narrators were not Cub Scouts on camp regaling ghost stories, each scarier than the last. In my itinerant career in mental health services I have met numerous colleagues who have observed in patients a susceptibility to lunar provocation. Carmel, for example, who worked for thirty years at Netherne Mental Hospital in Surrey, recalled a consensus amongst nurses that wards were more chaotic at full moon, with sceptical novices soon convinced by experience. Such belief, I discovered, was not confined to psychiatric settings. My s