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She’d had urinary infections in the past, but this was different: a bodily unease had possessed her, spreading up through her torso and out into her limbs. Her urine felt hot, and was painful to pass.

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It didn’t work: she became weaker, had abdominal pains, and her skin felt as if it was burning. The medical history came from her flatmate: she’d been suffering with a head cold for a few days, feeling weak and under the weather, and had gone to the pharmacy to buy medicine. J oanne Frederick was brought in by ambulance ‘agitated delirium’ was written across the top of her triage sheet.

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‘The insane are more agitated at the full of the moon, as they are also at early dawn,’ the French psychiatrist Jean-Etienne Esquirol wrote: ‘Does not this brightness produce, in their habitations, an effect of light, which frightens one, rejoices another, and agitates all?’ But moonlight was also shadowy enough to give a prompt to the fearful imagination.

The Lunar Society of industrialists and intellectuals in 18th-century England named itself not for its object of study but because its members found it easier to meet on evenings when the moon was full. The light was powerful enough for them to be out and about. They cited evidence that resting in the dark for 14 hours a day can bring to an end or prevent episodes of manic psychosis, and that even a mild reduction in sleep duration can aggravate mental health problems or cause epileptic seizures – something patients of mine with bipolar illness and epilepsy have confirmed.īefore artificial lighting, people took advantage of the nights around a full moon. In a study from 1999 entitled ‘The Moon and Madness Reconsidered’, three Californian psychiatrists suggested that before the advent of effective artificial lighting in the 19th century, the full moon probably did affect those whose mental health was precarious, by depriving them of the sleep they needed. My colleagues in emergency medicine, and those 74 per cent of American mental health professionals, are all wrong. But statisticians haven’t been able to substantiate the claim: the number of admissions for trauma, or for mania or psychosis (‘lunacy’), are unaffected by the phase of the moon, and there is no connection between a full moon and the frequency of suicide attempts, road accidents or calls to crisis support telephone services. A 1995 study in the US found that 40 per cent of the general public were convinced the moon had an influence on the mind an earlier survey put the rate for mental health professionals at 74 per cent. It’s an ancient and widespread belief that the moon has a transformative effect on the mind. ‘I t must be a full moon,’ colleagues remark when a night in the emergency department is particularly blood-soaked or there are an unusual number of psychiatric admissions.

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