Full moons won’t make your crazy or more likely to visit an emergency room

Despite numerous studies showing that the lunar cycle has no effect on mental health, a new study reveals that members of the medical community persist in the belief that emergency rooms fill up on nights of the full moon and concludes that this belief is clouding their clinical judgment.

Psychologist Genevieve Belleville, who is a professor of psychology at Université Laval and lead author of the study, was conducting an unrelated research project involving panic attacks in patients admitted to emergency rooms with chest pains, and in addition to the data for her study, she found that each night of the full moon the doctors and nurses would anticipate a boost in patients for her study.

There have been studies that supported this belief, which is called the 'lunar effect', however these studies have been highly inconsistent, often times contradicting each other, and several were found to use improper experimental methods or have significant statistical errors that invalidate their findings.

Curious about this, she examined the data she had collected already, from 771 participants, over 34 to 37 lunar cycles, and found no correlation between phases of the moon and hospital admissions due to mental illness.

[ More Geekquinox: Mystery of Nova Scotia river toxicity solved: Environment Canada report ]

"No significant impacts of lunar cycles were observed on panic, anxiety and mood disorders, or [thoughts of] suicide," the study reports. One exception noted in the research, though, was that reports of some anxiety disorders — those unrelated to panic disorders — were down by about one third during the 'waning gibbous' or last quarter moon.

According to the study, "These findings encourage [emergency department] professionals and physicians to abandon their beliefs about the influence of lunar cycles on the mental health of their patients."

Furthermore, the study states: "Such unfounded beliefs are likely to be maintained by self-fulfilling prophecies," as medical professionals who hold this belief, when presented with the same patient with the same symptoms on a full moon night and any other night, would be more inclined to assign a diagnosis of mental illness on the night of the full moon.

Despite the fact that this study joins a host of others that have performed credible and significant research into this myth, and have all shown it to be exactly that — a myth — according to The National Post, Belleville and her colleague, Guillaume Foldes-Busque, from the Université du Québec à Montréal, have already been challenged by members of the medical community who still believe it is real.

One major reason for the persistence of the belief is 'selective memory'. If something weird happens and there's nothing else remarkable going on, it's just an isolated thing and you'd likely forget about it. If something weird happens and something else interesting is going on at the same time, such as a full moon, those two events are tied together in our memories and that memory becomes more prominent. This means that, overall, more people will remember strange events that happen on nights of the full moon compared to other nights, even though a careful record of strange events would find them spread out far more evenly through the month.

[ More Geekquinox: Central Canada braces for cold and snow as Old Man Winter tightens its grasp ]

So, the next full moon is on Tuesday night, and anecdotal evidence doesn't count for much in science, but it still might be interesting to take a look around for yourself on that night. Are the people around you acting strange? Are you? Then think back to last Tuesday, and the Tuesday before that. Was it any less strange then? More? About the same? Just think about it.