According to Black's Law Dictionary:
Insane means that a person is mentally deranged; suffering from one or more delusions or false beliefs that (1) have no foundation in reason or reality, (2) are not credible to any reasonable person of sound mind, and (3) cannot be overcome in a sufferer's mind by any amount of evidence or argument.
Insanity is a mental disorder severe enough that it prevents a person from having legal or civil responsibility. Insanity is a legal standard that is determined in a court setting.
Insanity is a legal term that describes a person’s mental incompetence and moral responsibility. It is a legal concept that helps the court distinguish guilt from innocence. It has no specific medical meaning and there is no “insane” diagnosis in the DSM. It was used in the past to denote severe mental illness.
Legal insanity is informed by psychiatrists who evaluate defendants and then submit written reports to the court. It answers such questions as whether the defendant can: distinguish reality from fantasy, distinguish right from wrong, form intent, conduct his/her affairs, or is subject to uncontrollable impulsive behavior.
The legal insanity will look at if the person was aware of what they were doing in the crime. Mental illness can encompass many other issues outside of committing a crime.
Insanity is a legal term and concept, not a medical one. It means a person was unable to tell right from wrong when they did a crime. It means he is admitting to doing the crime as charged, but is not guilty because at that moment he did not know doing it was wrong. Mental disorder is a medical term and concept, not a legal one.
sanity and insanity are definitions used in the legal system
It is a legal definition.
Legal insanity in California is determined using the McNaghten rule.
It's a legal term
Insanity is a general term for a semi-permanent, severe mental disorder. The concept has been used in a number of ways historically. Today it is most commonly encountered as a generic informal term, or in the narrower legal context of criminal insanity. In the medical profession, it is nowadays avoided in favor of specific diagnoses of mental illness.
A demon-possessed person is a fictional concept, while "insanity" is a legal term denoting a person's inability to distinguish between right and wrong. People with mental illnesses, on the other hand, generally have some sort of physiological malfunction in their brain.
OCD cannot be classified as insanity. It IS a mental problem but not as severe as schizophrenia for example.
in court when someone was not aware of right and wrong at the time he or she committed a crime -Apex
the M'Naghten Rule
The noun 'insanity' is an abstract noun as a word for severe mental illness, a deranged state of mind; a word for something that is foolish or unreasonable; a word for a concept.