Does Sanity Exist? Or Is Sanity Merely the Absence of Insanity?

                                                     

Modern psychology does not define the term "sanity." check it up in any psychology book and you will not find a single attempt to actually define what sanity is or what it means to be sane. Different countries have legal systems that define sanity, in the same way that individuals define what sanity is and what it is not to be sane for themselves.

However, it is unusual that the field most concerned with mental health and insanity has made no attempts to form a single, concrete definition for it. Some people have even theorized the situation to the end that it makes it similar to the common argument about the existence of heat and cold.

There is a relationship between heat and cold that cold is the absence of heat, and nothing more. Can we then believe that sanity doesn't actually exist and that it is merely the absence of insanity?  
 
Mental health and Legal institutions round the world have volumes of guidelines and criteria used to determine if someone is insane, but not even a single line to mark a person as being sane. If you take the time to analyze this, it almost appears as if mental health experts believe that wen they mark someone sane it means a diagnosis of exclusion. 

There are hundreds of potential problems in psychology and psychiatry, with the list including anxiety disorders, insomnia, psychosis, depression, and dissociative personality disorder. All of these examples are considered to be signs of insanity, albeit the intensity varies from person to person and from problem to problem. 

However, most psychologists seem satisfied to single away all possible problems until they run out of options before declaring you sane.  It is also interesting to note just how much effort psychology puts into finding and defining various forms of insanity. 

For example, there are currently six different forms of paedophilia. Out of the 300 major psychological disorders: 

• A surprising large amount is considered to be connected to sex and sexual health. 

• There are also a few disorders that are used to describe mood and changes in mentality brought about by the weather and other factors in nature that affect us. 

• Social and familial relations are also taken in as an avenue of study, typically with disorders that are inevitably linked to disorders in other fields. 

• Literally, there are thousands of ways for a person to be insane to some degree, but no way to tell if a person is sane. 

•  For some, this actually poses a most intriguing conundrum: Does sanity even exist?

That question, may probably not be taken seriously by majority of people, put an old adage in a new light. There are some people that often joke that everyone's insane, that the appearance of sanity is just a matter of how much insanity is present. 

Given that sanity is not defined by psychology, the field that ought to be the most concerned with understanding it, the joke may not be completely untrue.There are ways you can determine sanity, that are mainly based on the legal definition, and are normally used to see whether someone was legally liable for a crime or not.  

However, not being criminally insane does not automatically make a person "sane" in the psychological sense.

 After all, only a small percentage of the various mental illnesses out there can actually lead to criminal behaviour. All this could just mean that dividing line between sane and insane is left to the individual observers to determine. This will bring a number of risks, because both the observations and definitions are surely going to be highly subjective. 

The issue of sanity in the legal sane is very subjective, as different jurisdictions would define it differently. This absence of a credible definition for what makes an individual sane may be psychology's way of telling the world that sanity doesn't exist.