Moon Phases and Suicide Attempts in Australia

Lunacy the Relation of Lunar Phases to Mental III-Health

“…Thurman failed to replicate Allen's study of deaths at the York Retreat (8). Similarly, studies of suicide have failed to bear out an association with lunar activity (9,(14)(15)(16)22). Attempts to link homicide with lunar phases have yielded conflicting, but for the most part disappointing, results (10,15,21), although one study found significant correlations between lunar phase and criminal offences other than homicide (21).…”

Not carried away by a moonlight shadow: no evidence for associations between suicide occurrence and lunar phase among more than 65,000 suicide cases in Austria, 1970–2006

“…These combined search strategies yielded 15 reports, published between 1964 and 2005 [18][19][20][21][22][23][24][25][26][27][28][29][30][31][32]. For consistency, studies with suicide attempts as the outcome [33][34][35][36][37][38][39] were not considered, nor were investigations analyzing suicide-threat calls or calls to crisis, emergency or poison centers, or emergency room or psychiatric admissions in general.…”

Bad moon on the rise? Lunar cycles and incidents of crime

“…Studies generally failed to find a lunar effect, though researchers found varying associations between lunar phase and some categories of crime (Purpura, 1979), aggression (Lieber, 1978a), violent incidents in correctional settings (Pettigrew, 1985), volume of demand for emergency room services (Blackmon & Catalina, 1973), suicide attempts (Taylor & Diespecker, 1972), hospital admissions (Templer & Veleber, 1980;Weiskott & Tipton, 1975), and calls to telephone counseling services (Templer & Veleber, 1980;Weiskott, 1974). Most studies employed few (if any) controls, used short time frames (i.e., four months, which only measured effects across four lunar cycles), and achieved relatively weak statistical significance, sometimes finding effects on some dependent variables, but not on others.…”

“…Researchers have employed myriad methods of structuring the timing and intensity of full moons relative to other periods of the lunar cycle. For example: contrasting the day of the full moon with all other days in the cycle (Frey et al, 1979); creating seemingly-capricious "windows" of time (i.e., three days) around the full moon for contrast with the rest of the cycle (sometimes separating out windows of time around the new moon) (Walters et al, 1975); breaking cycles into equal (Frey et al, 1979;Quinsey & Varney, 1977;Taylor & Diespecker, 1972) and unequal (Frey et al, 1979;Lester et al, 1969) periods of times; and, allowing lunar phase to vary from day to day throughout the lunar cycle (Simon, 1998). The lunar lore is ambiguous regarding whether the influence of the moon is truly restricted to full-moon periods and whether a heightened full moon influence might be offset by a converse effect during the new moon.…”