Go Among Mad People

""How do you know I'm mad?" said Alice. "You must be," said the Cat, "or you would not have come here.""

- Lewis Carroll, Alice in Wonderland

It may be some quirky ideas, the meddling of a Corrupt Corporate Executive or other villain, having noticed something Invisible to Normals, an attempt to dodge jail by getting a jury to call Insanity Defense, or just a good old fashioned screw-up, but somehow a reasonably sane character undergoes severe therapy, often in an asylum.

Despite their relative normality, they struggle to convince the therapists of the fact. And the more they struggle, the closer they get to lunacy itself, sometimes becoming indistinguishable from the others around them.

This can be a one-off, or a background for a villain (and in some cases may cause Motive Decay), or a normal who's cut through the Masquerade. If it's a main character, it's a good reason for writers to examine their motives through the critical psychiatrist's eyes, and see what makes them tick.

If a character undergoes this long enough, they may be "cured" of their "delusions" rendering them useless or troublesome until their friends can bring them back, or they may revel in their madness while doing what they did before, possibly with psychobabble. Or they may just end up Ax Crazy.

Different from a Cuckoo Nest plot, as the asylum reality is emphatically real, and not in conflict with anything else that happens. Can be combined with Through the Eyes of Madness.

See also Had to Come to Prison to Be a Crook.

Comic Books

 * Professor Milo from the DCU is supposed to have been committed to Arkham Asylum while under the influence of madness gas, and then failed to convince the wardens he was sane.
 * At least two other Batman stories have used the same idea; in Batman Villains: Secret Files And Origins a man accused of murdering his family is locked in Arkham as an excuse for the story to give us a tour of the place, and Dr. Arkham gets the news that he was innocent just as he goes Ax Crazy. In Arkham Asylum: Living Hell Warren White, a Corrupt Corporate Executive guilty of stock fraud, makes the mistake of pleading insanity and is sentenced to Arkham Asylum, where the abuse of his fellow inmates drives him over the edge.
 * Actually, it's a fairly accepted fact that if you aren't crazy going into Arkham, you're sure as hell crazy coming out.
 * Todd Casil, from the Johnny the Homicidal Maniac Spinoff Squee! was sent to an insane asylum by the end of his series, despite being one of the few sane characters ever presented in the comic. It is implied he quickly escaped somehow, however.
 * In "Out of My Mind," from the EC Comics title Crime Suspense Stories, a woman feigns episodes of violent insanity so that when she finally kills her husband she's committed to a hospital, where she plans to gradually "get better," and inherit her husband's fortune upon discharge. However, the constant ice-water baths and ravings of her fellow patients soon drive her to the brink of madness for real. When she finally confesses her ruse to her supervising physician,.
 * In the Tintin book "The Black Island", Dr. J.W. Müller plots to send him to an insane asylum he works at, and inflict him a "special treatment" that will make him genuinely insane. And he implies it's not the first time.
 * In the earlier book "The Cigars of the Pharaoh", Tintin actually is committed (he really wanted to commit two other guys who were under the permanent influence of a drug, but the Big Bad had a letter faked which claimed that Tintin was the mad one, and dangerous too. Oh, and that he would insist that it wasn't him but his friends who were really crazy.)

Film

 * Sarah Connor in T2 was definitely more insane after spending years in a mental asylum (attacking the psychiatrist) than she was before (merely believing in the Terminators). Although it is possible that her experience in the first Terminator set her a path which leads her to violence, including trying to blow up a computer factory. Based on what we see, it's clear that she was subjected to sexual abuse by the staff and other mistreatment by her therapist.
 * The wonderfully quirky French film The King of Hearts.
 * In 12 Monkeys, the protagonist (a man from the post-apocalyptic future sent back in time to try to prevent an unprecedented disaster) can't function in modern society and is quickly institutionalised, where his claims of being a time traveler from the future don't really help. He spends much of the rest of the movie more than half convinced that his memories of time travel are just a fantasy.
 * This is part of the premise of Quills, based on the real-life incarceration of the Marquis de Sade in Charenton Asylum. The Marquis' substantial wealth had allowed him to be committed rather than executed and to enjoy a substantial level of material comfort. But once the new administrator takes over and starts depriving the Marquis of his possessions and basically begins torturing him as a form of "therapy", the Marquis' mental state rapidly deteriorates.
 * In the 1963 film Shock Corridor, written and directed by Samuel Fuller, a reporter gets himself committed to an asylum to solve the death of an inmate and (he hopes) win the Pulitzer Prize. It doesn't end well.
 * In K-PAX, the main character Prot claims to be an alien who is able to travel through light rays. Believing him insane, he is handed over New York hospital psychiatric ward. During the film he is revealed to have uncanny skills and knowledge, and also while under hypnotic regression he seems to remember traumatic events that happened to a man named Robert Porter. By the end of the film, Prot announces it's time for him to depart from the planet, leaving behind his catatonic body. The film leaves the viewer wondering whether Prot really was an alien who took over Robert's human host or whether Robert really is an insane man whose catatonia is a result of being forced to confront his delusions.
 * The novel that the movie is based on has two sequels that confirm his alien origins.
 * Mob Boss Carmine Falcone does this in Batman Begins. After getting beaten up by Batman and found at the scene of a crime by police, he's facing serious jail time for the first time, despite usually being untouchable by the law. So while in jail he cuts his wrists in a fake suicide attempt, so that he will be taken to Arkham and can go for the insanity defense. He believes he can blackmail the head shrink, Dr. Crane, into backing him up. Unfortunately, Crane has concocted literal Nightmare Fuel, and a dose of it leaves Falcone insane for real.
 * In the recent The Wolf Man remake, the hero gets locked in an asylum for ranting that he's a werewolf. He'd previously been committed as a boy, to help him suppress the trauma of his mother's death,

Literature

 * Gabriel García Marquez once wrote a short story titled "I Only Came to Use the Phone", about an actress who, after a car accident, ends in a nearby mental institution to ask for a phone to call her husband but is confused for a patient and is interned. She tries to convince the doctors of her sanity, but she is systematically ignored and treated as another crazy. When her husband and her agent finally find her, she has been rendered totally insane by the mistreatment and must remain in the institution, this time for real.
 * There is an interesting example in H.G. Wells' short story, "The Country of the Blind". The eponymous society believes that the protagonist, the Only Sane Man, is insane with his talk of sight, and thus propose to cure him by gouging out his eyes.
 * One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest (and its film adaptation) is practically the Trope Maker.
 * If you're looking at McMurphy's side; on Chief Bromden's side it's almost a subversion.
 * Fredric Brown's "Come and Go Mad" involves a character who had once believed he was Napoleon being returned to an asylum to uncover a conspiracy. In fact, he really was Napoleon, having been body-swapped by the real conspirators--red and black ants who have secretly manipulated all of human history. He goes mad from the revelation, is given electroshock therapy, and is sent home from the hospital "cured"--though in fact he now has the delusion that he is not Napoleon, but a salesman.
 * Possibly a subtle case of Unreliable Narrator, given the premise as described.
 * Shutter Island (and its film adaptation) is based on this premise.
 * In Philippa Gregory's The Boleyn Inheritance, Jane Boleyn pretends to be mad to escape being executed for treason. Later chapters suggest that she, already self-deluded, has finally gone over the edge. To no avail, sadly, as the King has changed the law to accommodate her death.
 * The Angelina Jolie film Susanna Kaysen's auto-biographical book Girl, Interrupted is an interesting exploration of this trope. It's debatable how mad we'd consider her today, but she was certainly adversely affected by her experience in the asylum, as were other inmates. On the other hand, it helped her get over her borderline disorder.
 * The protagonist of The Serial Killers Club insists this isn't the case. After all, unlike the other club members, he hasn't killed anyone who wasn't trying to kill him. Of course, if any of them realize this, he has to bump them off, so his body count grows higher and higher as the club membership dwindles--and his thought processes grow more and more skew.

Live Action TV

 * In the Star Trek: The Next Generation episode "Frame of Mind", Riker has a role in a play as a character whom this happens to, but then it turns into a Cuckoo Nest as play and reality start mixing, and Riker has to convince himself he's not insane. Ultimately it involves aliens, of course.
 * As part of a scheme JR Ewing had himself committed in Dallas; it didn't work out so well.
 * An episode of Colditz involved one of the POWs pretending to be mad in order to be invalided out. Perhaps not surprisingly, after keeping up the pretense for months he really does go mad. This was an adaptation of a genuine Colditz escape. Unlike the fictional version, the officer that tried it both succeeded in getting sent home and was still relatively sane when he was.
 * In Due South, Fraser goes undercover in a mental hospital in order to investigate a string of suspicious suicides there. He gains admittance via Sarcastic Confession.
 * Monk episode "Mr Monk goes to the Asylum"
 * Psych episode "Shawn, Interrupted"
 * An episode of Stingray is featuring Ray on an undercover mission in a mental hospital after one of the doctors working there recruits him. As soon as he arrives he has to find out the she is actually a patient ..
 * On Smallville, in the appropriately titled episode Asylum, Lionel Luthor came up with a plan to have his own troublesome son, Lex Luthor, committed to a mental hospital and Lex's memory of the past few weeks erased via electroshock therapy, so that Lex would stop investigating his father's shady dealings. To that end, Lionel had Lex's drinking water laced with psychotropic drugs to make him appear insane. It didn't help that Clark Kent, while investigating his friend Lex's sudden strange behaviour, was forced to reveal his Superman powers right in front of Lex to save Lex's life. Of course there were no other witnesses, and when the Men in White arrived with the straitjacket and Lex kept insisting that he had seen Clark stop a car with his own hands, Clark had already fled, for fear that his secret cover would be blown and his powers made public, leaving Lex and the wrecked car. Clark later did his best to free Lex from the mental hospital, but not before Lex had been drugged with tranquilizers, had made an unsuccessful attempt to flee, was restrained, was nearly freed by Clark only to see Clark beaten up by several superpowered inmates with a fistful of Kryptonite, and was finally dragged off to undergo electroshock therapy. After which he was released, all his memories of what he had witnessed gone forever.
 * Which kind of bit Lionel in the butt. He had, by this point, already spent some time investigating Clark to try and figure out the mystery surrounding him. He then sees a security recording of Clark visiting Lex in the asylum, where Lex admits to knowing Clark's secret - but he only sees this after he's had Lex given the electroshock.
 * In Supernatural, Dean and Sam check themselves into an asylum (to hunt a murderous monster). Subverted by the fact that they actually begin to lose their minds..

Music

 * Supertramp's Asylum. The singer's protests against being called insane do nothing for him, as he is sent to an asylum, and by the end of the song he believes he's dying.

Tabletop Games

 * In the uncompleted, web-released Ravenloft supplement Van Richten's Guide To The Mists, the chapter on outlanders (= people from other game-settings) has a scene in which a cleric from an outlander adventuring party pleads for his former comrade-at-arms to help free him from a mental asylum. Unfortunately, her therapy to rid her of her "delusion" that she'd come from another world has apparently worked: she refuses to help him escape, and expresses the hope that he'll soon be "cured", like she was.

Theater

 * In Sweeney Todd: The Demon Barber of Fleet Street, Johanna is sent to Fogg's Asylum by Judge Turpin when her plan to elope with Anthony to get away from the Dirty Old Man is discovered. The movie doesn't dwell much on Johanna's mental or emotional state, but the stage play has her playing up her rather Ophelia-like state during the asylum sequence.
 * It's also revealed in the climax by Mrs. Lovett that.
 * In The Duchess of Malfi, the Duchess's brothers attempt to drive her insane with the help of half-a-dozen genuine madmen. Done right, it's a seriously disturbing scene. But then, what do you expect from John Webster?
 * Twelfth Night: Poor, poor Malvolio. Because he's a dark-clad, self-possessed puritan who frowns upon drinking and music, the woman he works for naturally thinks he's gone insane when he shows up wearing bright yellow stockings and obnoxiously flirting with her. Actually, he received a fake love letter that told him she'd love him better if he did these things. The servants who were in on the plot promptly chain him up in a dark room (the standard treatment for madmen back in the day) and mess with his mind by sending "the curate" (actually The Jester in disguise) to talk nonsense to him in the hopes of making him "sane." By the end of most productions, he's pretty much gone off the deep end.

Video Games

 * In Second Sight, the protagonist (and the Love Interest) is drugged to make them appear insane and loocked away to keep them from revealing a conspiracy (as they have Psychic Powers). Luckily they get better after the drugs have worn off. Unlike many uses of this trope at least one psychiatrist seems angry with the way the protagonist is treated (albeit because the drug used is experimental having been tested on monkeys, rather than actually believing that they're really sane) and can be heard complaining to the orderlies about it.
 * In Sanitarium the Player Character starts in the titular asylum, even though he may not be quite insane.

Web Comics

 * In College Roomies from Hell, Marsha is committed to a psychiatric hospital for being Ax Crazy (she is). While there, the doctors also convince her that her boyfriend Mike is in love with April (he isn't), and that he doesn't have a tentacle in place of his left arm (he does). Upon finding out this last fact, Mike issues the ultimatum "All right, whoever's in charge here, I wanna have a little chat about the nonexistence of my tentacle!"
 * When Helen, in Narbonic, she actually remarks "You don't want to go among mad people." This refers of course to herself and her colleagues.
 * More accurately, she was revealing Although
 * The Perry Bible Fellowship has "Return of the Ghost".
 * Last Res0rt has the players attacking a ship that they later discover is an asylum to Deprogram members of the Church of the Endless. The Doctor in charge, Gabriel, is perfectly willing to accept that the players are "sane",
 * This doesn't stop him from enforcing a 72-hour hold on the players, though -- the only exception is Daisy, who has an advance directive that gives her a bit more leeway. Of course, given the show...

Western Animation

 * This happens to Batman in Batman: The Animated Series, which lets him solve the Scarecrow's plot, but for a time messes up his mind.
 * In the Futurama episode "Insane in the Mainframe", after a security camera catches him involved with a bank-robbing robot, Fry is committed to "The HAL Institute for Criminally Insane Robots", which as the name suggests is a mental asylum for defective robots, where he has a surprisingly difficult time convincing the psychiatrists that he's sane or even human. The robot therapist tells Fry that because it's an institution for robots, and he's a patient there, then Fry must logically be a robot. He is allowed to leave after he gets cured of his "delusion" of being human. Played for rather dark laughs.
 * The asylum even has a robotic mad hatter.
 * The same asylum pops up in Bender's Game.
 * One of the inmates is a robot who believes he's working in the lunch room, so they had him help out by working in the lunch room. Obviously, this does nothing to cure his "delusions".
 * In The Simpsons Homer gets committed after letting Bart fill out his psychiatric tests (which he was taking in the first place because he wore a pink shirt thanks to Bart putting his red hat in the wash). Shout Outs to One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest ensue.
 * One episode of the would-be-a-cult-show-if-people-remembered-it series God, the Devil and Bob, Bob is arrested while painting over a billboard; at first the arresting officer ignores Bob's claim of "God told me to," but then the Devil starts an argument with Bob in the back of the squad car and gets Bob committed. One of the most touching moments on the show was when God came to visit Bob and all the other inmates could see him too: "The innocents of the world usually can."

Real Life
"Warden: What are you doing? Panciera: I'm making smoke. Warden: And why are you doing that? Panciera: Because the director wants so. Warden: Which director? Panciera: Well, him of course! (Gets out of the ditch, to see that everyone's gone.) Wardens: (take him): So, which director? Panciera: Of the movie! Warden: Of which movie? Panciera: The 32nd of December!"
 * Something of a Truth in Television: a well known psychology experiment is to send people to present themselves to psychiatric hospitals with minor complaints, drop the complaints after they've been committed and see how long it takes to get out. In 1973, the average was 19 days, and most were diagnosed with Schizophrenia. Snopes has more at http://www.snopes.com/medical/asylum/crazybus.asp Of course, there's no way of knowing how many people get put away and are never revealed to be sane, and it's a very common legend...
 * The participants in one of these experiments reported that they were only released after admitting they were crazy. Insisting they were sane made the staff insist on keeping them there.
 * Better yet: after the psychiatrist responsible for the study, David Rosenhan, published his findings, another psychiatrist who worked in a mental hospital indignantly retorted that Rosenhan's findings surely weren't representative of the profession at large, and challenged Rosenhan to send some sane impostors ("pseudopatients" was the term Rosenhan used) to his hospital. Rosenhan agreed, and a month later the psychiatrist wrote to him saying that he was fairly sure that several of his patients were impostors sent by Rosenhan. Of course, Rosenhan hadn't sent any.
 * Reporter Nellie Bly was known for, among many other things, spending time in hospitals including mental hospitals, to investigate the conditions there. The full report is here
 * Ken Kesey, author of One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest, spent some time in mental institutions and taking psychotropic drugs as research for his novel.
 * Italian author Luciano De Crescenzo told this story in his autobiography: He and a team of other guys were working at the film The 32nd of December. The location they were filming at was the park of Rome's biggest mental institution. The director advised one worker named Panciera to burn some leaves to create smoke they needed for a visual effect. Panciera sat in a ditch to avoid showing up on camera. When they had finished the scene, they forgot about Panciera and left. Half an hour later, two wardens found him. Following dialogue ensued:


 * According to De Crescenzo, they "liberated" him later on the evening.
 * There's an ongoing story about a man who faked insanity to get himself committed, and how all his later attempts to secure release have been in vain. In an interview, one of the staff doctors argues just how sane could someone be to try and have himself locked up.