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The difference between mental illness and insanity is in the terminology. Mental illness describes an enormous amount of illnesses that renders a person somewhat ineffectual in some type of communicable skills or capacity; insanity is a legal term used by courtrooms and judges and is never used by medical scientists. Mental illness as identified by Microsoft's Encarta means "any psychiatric disorder that causes untypical behavior". Insanity is given two definitions: It is one a "lack of reason or good sense; extreme foolishness, or an act that demonstrates such foolishness and two, a "psychiatric condition affecting legal circumstances: legal incompetence or irresponsibility that results from a psychiatric disorder.

There you have it. Now let's see how we can distinguish further between the two by assuming one or the other of the two stances. From the medical scientist's point of view and from the court room setting. Mental illness, far from being a cut and dried condition is a random group of afflictions most of all human being in some time in their life. While most will not like to hear that there have been times when their thinking processes or their mental states of mind have been at least bordering on mental illness, it is true. Were we as a nation or a world mentally healthy we would not have the chaos that confronts us now. It was not sane minds that lead us down the paths toward economical ruin, but collective minds that were certainly not thinking clearly. Their priorities were not reality driven. Their priorities were driven by mental aberrations that allowed them to play games with other people's lives. Whatever we want to call it, it is not mental health.

Shall we allow the court to decide? They will of course have no problem in calling the whole debacle insanity. Were we to try the whole world or a great part of it in a court of law to determine who was mentally ill or who was insane, the court room judge would probably bring in expert psychiatrists to help answer some of their legally entanglements. Mere foolishness would be put up against the knowledge of right or wrong. Did the accused have sufficient knowledge of his crime? What were his intentions? Did he know what he was doing was wrong and he did it anyway never expecting to be brought to trial over his wrong doings? The court will then set out to prove one way or the other.

The general public uses mental illness and insanity interchangeably. A person's action may be said to be insane while the individual may not be thought to be so. That attitude says a lot about how each person, even a normal person is allowed a certain amount of insane actions without having to deal with a psychiatrist. It is when these insane actions become so numerous that they interfere with an otherwise normal or near normal way of thinking and acting that they become pathological. Either way, when one behaves in ways that are too far out of very large boundaries of accepted behavior, or then either a psychiatrist or a judge is called in.

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