Mind Rape/Live-Action TV

Psychic Assaults
""It's gone it's gone it's gone...""
 * Star Trek: The Next Generation dealt with this trope two times and actually stressed the physical sexual elements. It happened in both times (the latter in a movie) to the half-Betazoid Counselor (and telepath) Troi, first time using corrupting a memory of her having sex with her then-boyfriend Riker, into a bizarre rape scene with Riker substituted with the rapist telepath. Captain Picard was also subjected to the mental rape.
 * T'Pol is subjected to this in an early episode of Star Trek: Enterprise by mind-meld with a Vulcan renegade. And it gave her Vulcan AIDS. - when the episode aired on Sky 1, it was followed by an "If any of the issues in this episode have affected you..." message with the number for an AIDS helpline.
 * Star Trek: Voyager did this a number of times, without the Anvilicious rape analogy. "Persistence of Vision" was "Violations" on a shipwide scale, and the culprit responsible had nearly put the entire crew into a catatonic stupor by the time the last one or two members standing were able to stop him. Then there was the time a Maquis fanatic back home sent subliminal messages to . Then there were the dream aliens, then there were the aliens who Brainwashed the crew into working in their factory, then there was the Lotus Eater Machine, then there was the beacon that made people hallucinate participating in genocide then there were the Hirogen making the crew think they were part of the simulated World War II they'd created as they 'hunted' them, and on and on and on. Honorable mention for the friendly Negative Space Wedgie inhabitants whose means of communication nearly drove Chakotay nuts. This crew's brains got baked so many times it's surprising that they knew up from down by the time the series ended.
 * Mirror Spock's forced Mind Probe on McCoy in the original series episode "Mirror, Mirror" came across this way for some viewers. It didn't help that McCoy appeared almost catatonic afterwards, although of course he was fine by the end of the episode.
 * The fact that mated Vulcan couples create a permanent mind-meld makes this, and all other instances of forced bondage, literally mind rape.
 * Spock himself got mind-raped by Klingon apparatus in the episode "Errand of Mercy". Again it was made worse by just how passive he was in the scene following. And considering that Vulcans value their minds above their bodies...
 * The Klingon commander's dialogue in the scene beforehand was even stuffed full of Double Entendre...
 * Picard was forced to live out someone else's life in "The Inner Light." He ended up cherishing the memory, though, so maybe this was just unexpected mental contact he really wanted.
 * As in, surprise sex he didn't know he wanted?
 * That example fits the non-consensual aspect, but lacks the element of violation that really defines the trope. To be clear, the aliens pulled a sort of Matrix on him, creating an illusionary world in which he lived a life-time and raised a family, while in reality he was knocked out for less than an hour. They certainly were doing SOMETHING to his brain, but they didn't really enter his mind or memories and their intention was anything but cruel. YMMV on the cruelty of it in the end though (consider "waking" back into a world you had come to believe was only a dream, to discover the wife and children and friends you had spent DECADES with were gone, the citizens of a long dead civilization). And then he pulls out that flute...
 * Of course, we all know why he didn't go insane from finding himself back on the Enterprise. Nobody who's seen "The Best Of Both Worlds" can doubt that Picard can fart in mindrape by any single person's general direction. We will always remember the emotions felt at the Battle at Wolf 359. Being mind-raped by over a trillion entities at the same time may just make one capable of surviving any mental torment.
 * On the other hand, over at DS9 Chief O'Brian had a similar experience in "Hard Time" except with the violation component fully in force. In that episode, O'Brian was implanted with the memories of a 20 year prison term, in the course of which . Needless to say, this was an "O'Brian Must Suffer" episode.
 * In "The Mind's Eye" (or: The Manchurian Candidate  IN SPACE ), Romulans feed La Forge horrific images through his neural implants (which normally would connect to his VISOR) in order to brainwash him into becoming their tool.
 * At the end of the original series episode "Requiem for Methuselah,"
 * In one Next Generation episode, a Ferengi gives Picard back the repaired Stargazer (Picard's first command) and then uses his Mind Rape device to force Picard to relive his victory over a Ferengi ship, causing him to use a risky but nearly unstoppable battle strategy
 * Said strategy was only unstoppable to the Ferengi in the past who had no defense against it at the time. The Enterprise D could easily have stopped it. Riker's problem was finding a way to disable the Stargazer without being forced to destroy it or suffer damage from Picard's attack.
 * An episode of The Twilight Zone featured this trope. A former Nazi commander who had escaped to Argentina came back to Germany to visit the concentration camp he was in charge of during World War II. He encounters a ghost of a man he killed who terrorizes the German with Mind Rape of what it was like to get shot, burned, hanged, etc. When the police find the German he is delirious beyond help.
 * Power Rangers Mystic Force: An emerging Sealed Evil in a Can causes Daggeron to experience his own death.
 * This is quite a big one to miss. In Power Rangers Dino Thunder Mesogog always does it to Zeltrax and Elsa so they don't betray him.
 * And at one point to his own son.
 * As far as we know, though, it causes "only" causes tremendous pain... no sign of altering/prying into emotions, memories, etc. Compare hitting someone in the head with a baseball bat. Then again, that's more likely to affect things mental than it does in Hollywood...
 * Tegan's encounter with the Mara in "Kinda" has been compared to a rape scene. Remember that Doctor Who is a family programme.
 * "Resurrection of the Daleks" has the Fifth Doctor being mind raped with his . It doesn't help that his painful screams sound disturbingly sexual, if you read too much into it.
 * Much of the episode "Midnight" fits this trope, although the episode never shows what the alien does to its victim's head. One character's physical reactions after the whole thing is over don't exactly do much to dispel the idea.

"Sheppard: What did they do to you? McKay: Torture, in ways too hideous and... intimate... to recount."
 * Yeah, that whole thing has some pretty disturbing metaphors. I mean talk about violation... it doesn't get much worse than that.
 * The Doctor performs what is startlingly similar to a Mind Rape on as she wants to go out as herself. A rare case of the hero doing it, a rarer case where it might be justified, as  The reason it's such a Tear Jerker and had fans so angry at the Doctor even though it was clearly necessary to save her life is that  . This was actually the death referred to by Dalek Caan earlier.
 * Contrast with the Tenth Doctor episode "The Girl in the Fireplace", where he basically does a consensual version with, for which there is some other subtext.
 * Technically that makes it Mind Sex.
 * Another example of Mind Rape: In this same scene, while the Doctor has consent, she doesn't have his when she invades his mind. Though it's not treated as such in the episode itself, the subtext is somewhat disturbing, though in her defence she probably didn't entirely know what she was doing.
 * Also, in the episode "The Shakespeare Code", where he gives an Elizabethan mental patient a nice soothing Mind Hug.
 * While it's more subtle than some of the other examples from the show,
 * It's also revealed that
 * And let's not forget the infamous "No, not the Mind Probe!"
 * And the 'psychic headbutt' in The Lodger. OW. This means compared to past incarnations, the Matt Smith Doctor likes it rough.
 * "Amy's Choice" has to be the Mind Rape episode of the first Matt Smith season.
 * Roswell. Half the plots after Tess entered had her mindwarping some person or other, to the extent that.
 * The Stargate SG-1 episode "Unnatural Selection". Also, a slightly milder version of it occurs when human-form Replicators interrogate prisoners.
 * Done more directly by Fifth to Samantha Carter, after escaping the incarceration she tricked him into. His insertion of his hand into her brain is shown as particularly akin to forced penetration, and we are shown glimpses of the horrific imagery she is subjected to. By the end, she is in tears, begging him to stop.
 * This happens to the major characters on Stargate Atlantis, too. We only get to see what Sheppard is forced to experience (a scenario that ends with his suicide by Heroic Sacrifice). But it's heavily implied that what the others went through was even worse.
 * This happens to the major characters on Stargate Atlantis, too. We only get to see what Sheppard is forced to experience (a scenario that ends with his suicide by Heroic Sacrifice). But it's heavily implied that what the others went through was even worse.

"Noah: "It will be like she never existed.""
 * Pretty much the background for Firefly's River Tam; she was tricked into going to a government-run facility known as "the Academy" where she spent three years having her brain cut apart and transformed into a psychic killing machine. Once she was rescued, she was reduced to a babbling, incoherent and at-times violent little girl who spends plenty of time crying or shaking helplessly in corners... until she's triggered, at which point she unleashes the Waif Fu to end all Waif Fu.
 * River also undergoes this whenever she makes contact with the mind of a Reaver. In "Bushwhacked," a man tortured by the Reavers simply wakes up and she starts screaming at the mental contact. Later on in The Movie, while Serenity is passing through the Reaver fleet, her face is locked in absolute horror as she is surrounded by the Reavers, and at the end of the movie, she is rendered catatonic and helpless by their presence as they assault the crew.
 * River also gets mindraped by an entire planet when she is on Miranda, and the vast numbers of people who should have been alive but aren't sends her into a screaming mental breakdown. Being The Empath sucks sometimes.
 * Maury and Matt Parkman of Heroes are actually capable of Mind Rape and, even stranger, Matt is a good guy - both father and son have the power to force some poor SOB into a living nightmare which puts their body in a coma and their mind in...well, their worst nightmare.
 * Matt's "good guy" status is questionable... he'll lie, cheat, and steal just to make his own life a bit easier, not just when under severe duress. But as he's very affable and not all that bright, people tend to remember him as "such a nice guy..."
 * Considering what he could do with his power (pretty much everything), I'd say he has shown so far a rather admirable restraint, with the exception of his evil alternate future version in 5YG.
 * There is also Sylar who just thrives on the physical imagery of this when he forcibly violates people brains to steal their powers. His attack on the regenerating teen girl Claire Bennett particularly stands out.
 * Made even worse by the fact that he seems to have a twisted sort of respect for her because of her ability - she's "extra special" or something.
 * Noah Bennett and The Haitian interrogate an old company man by threatening to delete all of his happy memories. Including those of his dead daughter.

"Noah: "Hollow him out. Take everything.""
 * Noah Bennett had a Crowning Moment of Revenge (really, someone needs to make this) when he confronted the injured boy that had tried to rape Claire earlier in the season. The Haitian did the actual mind raping, but Bennett's line was chilling.


 * Of course, all of this seems like a tumble in the hay when compared to the season 3 finale. It makes you wonder why they didn't just ...
 * Them having different blood types could explain that.
 * Sylar being Sylar, of course, his real personality seems to have lodged inside Matt's psyche, and now Sylar is mind raping Matt right back, turning his own power against him and taking over his body at the worst possible times.
 * And, in a nasty Take That, Matt Nice touch, Mr Nice Guy.
 * The episode "Dust to Dust" of Babylon 5. G'Kar takes a drug called "dust" which allows the user to gain telepathic powers for a few hours. He uses it to invade Londo's mind and go through his memories, tormenting him about them in the process. He physically beats him up beforehand in order to subdue him, which emphasizes the similarity to actual rape.
 * Also Inverted Trope in the same episode. One Dust user is found huddled on the floor screaming that the mountain was falling on him - his Mind Rape victim evidently had some very vivid memories of being caught in an avalanche while skiing.
 * Also, somewhere on Beta Colony there is a man in an institution who spends his days and nights screaming at things only he can see, things planted in his mind by the Psi Corps as punishment for murdering telepaths. He has to be restrained lest he tear out his eyes.
 * The Shadows routinely created servants by irrecoverably altering their personalities. For example, Morden.
 * On the same token, Bester shows no qualms about mentally manipulating people to his ends. He plays Garibaldi for a puppet. After extracting him from Shadow control, he proceeds to subtly alter his personality without his knowledge. That's not the Mind Rape, though. That comes later, after he releases all the hidden memories of the incident, leaving Garibaldi to realize that he'd just betrayed his own captain and was probably going to get hell for it. On top of it, a couple of mental suggestions keep him from just shooting Bester in the head. To a guy like Garibaldi, it is mental torture of a subtle but excruciating degree. Just rectifying recent events took a lot of convincing, and it would be nearly 20 years before Garibaldi finally got payback by personally busting Bester.
 * In Atonement, Delenn was rather brutally forced to relive some of her memories of the Earth-Minbari war. She had already been living with them for a long time, however, and was thus not broken.
 * In "Passing Through Gethsemane", a mindwiped former Serial Killer is forced to relive some of his old memories of what he'd done via the interference of a Centauri telepath. Significantly, this interference is supplemented with more mundane techniques, including what looks like bloody writing on the wall (later revealed to be a 23rd-century form of disappearing ink) and recordings of voices (ostensibly of his victims).
 * In the Torchwood episode "Adam", said Adam implants fake memories into the team by touching them. Using this to make Tosh believe they're a couple and sleep with her was bad enough, but when Ianto is onto him, Adam gleefully implants him with memories of brutally murdering women for pleasure, all the while saying he "forgot how good it feels feeding in the bad stuff". Ianto is, understandably, horribly traumatized by this (thank goodness for hypnosis and amnesia pills).
 * As if the rape analogy isn't obvious enough here, Adam holds Ianto down and kisses him while he does all of this.
 * In Farscape, the Aurora Chair is designed to segment the layers of prisoners' minds in order to extract their memories, and judging from the all the screams of agony, the process is anything but pleasant.
 * Scarran interrogations, which involve liberal use of both mind rape and Mind Screw to drive its victims completely insane.
 * In the episode "Prayer," Scorpius actually refers to Scarran interrogations as "Mind Rape."
 * Stark, capable of transmitting memories when unmasked, attempts to pull a Mind Rape on Jool when her whining grows too much for his already frayed nerves; he's interrupted before he can get his mask off, but the statement "I will show you something that will make you cry forever!" confirms enough.
 * Done to Stark in "The Peacekeeper Wars" when John, Aeryn, and Sikozu forcibly remove his mask and make him absorb an alien's knowledge while he screams and tries to refuse. Stark, who has never been exactly sane, goes even crazier than usual for a while after this.
 * Zhaan finds herself on the receiving end of this when Tahleen decides she isn't interested in being taught how to control her violent impulses and simply rips the information out of Zhaan's mind- during the telepathic equivalent of sex, no less.
 * Glory, the Big Bad of Buffy the Vampire Slayer season 5, pulls people's sanity straight out of their skull and feeds on it, leaving them as gibbering messes..
 * Later, Willow while they're in a relationship. Repeatedly. Tara is especially upset because she remembers Glory's prior violation of her mind.
 * Not to mention, Rack from the episode "Wrecked", who basically uses Willow (and others) as some sort of telepathic crack whore. Both Rack and Willow make orgasm faces when he transfers power into her, and then tells her that she "tastes like strawberries."
 * Another Buffy Verse example: In the first season finale of Angel, Cordelia has all the human suffering going on across the entire planet shoved into her mind. She winds up in a non-responsive helplessly-in-pain state in the hospital for most of the episode. When she gets better, it's caused her personality to change for the better. Cordelia had been self-absorbed and shallow, though not nearly as much as she used to be, having already undergone positive Character Development before this point.
 * Hell, Justin Crowe's main power in Carnivale indeed seems to be mind rape... At first he just uses it to make people face their past sins, induce a terrible guilt upon them and make them aware that he saw it too. But in the second season he really takes it to a whole other level; please don't force me to actually spit it out. Well, at least he shows an interesting variety of mind rape subtropes.
 * I'll spit it out, in case anyone's confused. He.
 * The Attic. Trust me, there's a reason you don't want to get sent there.
 * Heck, the entire freakin' Dollhouse. It's just that they can make you like it.
 * On The Listener, Charlie thinks Toby's telepathy is this, until he
 * Season three of Fringe has
 * Similar to the Ghost Rider example, a Fury in Charmed can cause any evil doer to hear the screams of his past victims.
 * On The Prisoner, Number Six is subjected to this form of torture in almost half of all the series' episodes. Perhaps the most notable examples are "The Schizoid Man," in which he is brainwashed into believing that he is actually a Village operative assigned to impersonate Number Six, and "Once Upon a Time," in which he is mentally regressed to childhood.
 * During the Goosebumps Chillogy. During "Part 3: Escape From Karlsville", Todd enters Karlsville and is later Karl begins taunting Todd with the thought of  by doing such things as  or  A small while before  Karl begins to chuckle as he  Todd than begins to scream for Karl to stop and yell for someone to help.
 * In the Are You Afraid of the Dark? episode "Tale Of The Renegade Virus" the virus attempts to take over Simon's brain via plugging himself into his hand. The scene is disturbingly reminiscent of rape.

"Mundane" Torture
"John Smith: "Once hope is gone... dying is just a formality.""
 * During the occupation of New Caprica at the beginning of season three of Battlestar Galactica, Leoben Conoy puts an interesting twist on this trope. He gives Starbuck a perfectly normal, stable, well-ordered life - inside a jail cell. He also uses the opportunity to bring up as many images of Starbuck's abusive mother as he can manage. Oh yeah, and there's also the fact that he can resurrect himself every time Starbuck kills him.
 * Being Human (UK) had a Sylar-worthy example with Owen, Annie's ex-boyfriend . First, he does this as he's comforting his current girlfriend, who's freaked-out because a ghost was talking to her, trying to warn her about him. Second, he denies the very existence of Annie whilst he's looking her straight in the eye with a shit-eating grin: "I don't see... anything". Then he twists the knife by admitting . Evil. She ends up in a Heroic BSOD till her roommate George pulls her out of it.
 * Annie later uses a more supernatural example to turn the tables,.
 * Firefly: This is basically what the Alliance scientists did to River Tam before Simon rescued her. And what happened?
 * The Reavers will often convert their victims into second-hand Reavers by forcing them to watch the horrific tortures they inflict on other captives. This pushes them to a point where the only way they can survive facing that kind of madness is to become part of it.
 * What puts  through in an episode of Law and Order Special Victims Unit.
 * Following the "Real Life" section, more than one interrogation session feels a lot like this. A good example is . Another is
 * Angelus on Buffy the Vampire Slayer. In the past he drove Drusilla completely insane by torturing and killing her entire family before siring her. He had other victims as well, many others, in the old days, and it's implied he did physical rape as well. When he is reawakened in the 21st century, he uses major psychological war on Buffy, Giles, and generally anybody who happens to be around. The Master aptly describes him as "the most vicious animal I have ever known" Even Spike is afraid of him, for all the mocking he gives Angel's ensouled persona.
 * In Becomming pt2 Angelus was on the verge of killing Giles, who has withstood extensive torture without revealing his knowledge of the ritual on how to destroy the world. Spike suggested that Dru play a game; she agrees, and reads Giles' mind to discover his weakness. She finally cajoles the information she wants out of Giles by hypnotizing him, so that she appears as Jenny, his dead girlfriend, in his eyes.
 * Angelus borders on Trope Codifier for "mundane" mind rape:
 * Alongside Darla, lures Vampire Hunter Daniel Holtz to an empty cabin, while Holtz is away, Angelus rapes Holtz's wife, kills his baby son, and turns his daughter into a vampire.
 * Stalks and harasses Waif Prophet Drusilla, making her believe her powers are "evil", kills her entire family and then massacres the convent she seeks refuge on.
 * Stalks Buffy and her friends, sires a friend as a "token of his love", murders Giles' love and leaves her on his bed, after setting up his apartment for a romantic night.
 * Just to mess with Angel Investigations, pulls a Iago to Gunn's Othello, with Fred as Desdemona and Wesley as Cassio.
 * The First's taunting and manipulation of Angel in "Amends". He winds up so bad-off he tries to kill himself.
 * Hell, this is pretty much all the First does itself. And It does it well. Another example: what it did to Spike in the early part of season 7. Eep.
 * It succeeded with Chloe, the potential Slayer, and tried to do so as well with Willow.
 * The MO of the serial killer "John Smith" from the Cold Case episode "The Road". He'd imprison women in an underground chamber, where months of isolation and psychological torture would essentially kill them on the inside, leaving them catatonic. Before sealing them in completely, he'd offer them a no strings attached chance to escape, but none of his victims ever took it.


 * In those episodes of The Prisoner where Number Six is not subjected to the other sort of mind rape, he will often be subjected to this sort instead. In "Hammer Into Anvil," however, he turns the tables, putting the new Number Two through it instead.
 * In Mahou Sentai Magiranger, the Hades God Cyclops, a Cold Sniper extraordinare, engages in a surprisingly mundane version of this trope; he targets the rangers one by one, stringing them along into thinking they've evaded him only to take one down, eventually causing one of two remaining rangers to experience a nervous breakdown. Cyclops exults in this, declaring that there's nothing greater than the sight of a broken mind.
 * Implied in The Sarah Connor Chronicles, when Derek was captured in the future and taken to the basement of an old house. We're not shown what happened while he was in that room, but when he came out he was visibly shaking, exhausted, and horrified. Whatever it was it was apparently related to Cameron; when he sees her later in the resistance base he immediately draws his weapon and tries to destroy her, and after travelling back in time he immediately recognized her on sight and drew a weapon on her.
 * "Chuck vs the Bullet Train" ends with It causes agonizing emotional and physical pain, and the montage is extremely disturbing, especially for such a lighthearted show.