'"There's a long tradition in spy craft of making enemy assets appear unreliable. Make a loyal operative look like a traitor, for example, and if you're lucky, your enemies take him out for you. Better than making an enemy look disloyal is making him look insane. It takes some doing, but when you pull it off, it's more devastating than a bullet."
— Michael Westen, Burn Notice, "Shot in the Dark"
Pay no attention. This trope isn't feeling well. It needs care.
For drama, this trope is a form of Gaslighting, meant to play-off a raving or otherwise complaining character as being unwell or mentally unstable, and they need to be medically treated. The problem is, there was nothing wrong with the character from the outset, and the character(s) in-question are telling an absolutely true Cassandra Truth. Something outside of the character's control is very wrong, and they are being held captive against their will, or being silenced for a reason that would expose the diagnoser's evil and/or abuse.
If the protagonist characters are smart enough, and it's the main part of the plot, then they will Pull the Thread and investigate.
In other instances, it can be used as a throwaway joke for extremely dark humor.
Crosses over strongly with Gaslighting and Cassandra Truth. Also crosses over with The Cuckoolander Was Right and the more malicious examples of Medicate the Medium. Usually starts the investigation by the protagonists if they Spot the Thread. Can often involve Medication Tampering or Chemically-Induced Insanity on behalf of the perpetrators. They may have the victim Wrongfully Committed, possibly to a Bedlam House, which in some cases will even be in on it, at which point a Go Among Mad People scenario will likely occur. If the perpetrators are themselves insane and powerful enough, they may believe their own lies that the character(s) in-question HAVE actually gone off the deep end and are raving lunatics.
Compare Mistaken for Insane. Not to be confused with Dumb Struck. Compare and contrast He Knows Too Much, where the solution is more permanent for very similar reasons.
Due to the rather dark depths this trope can get into, No Real Life Examples, Please!
Examples:
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Comic Books
- Preacher: Herr Starr's Establishing Character Moment was his first job for the Grail (silencing a pair of journalists who'd dug up a lot of dirt on the Grail). The Grail had managed to get them locked up in a mental hospital as raving paranoiacs, but Starr's solution was to blow up the entire hospital (justifying himself by saying that the deaths of two people claiming to be marked for death by a conspiracy would cause an investigation that a hundred deaths wouldn't). The Grail made him their top executioner.
- The Tintin story The Blue Lotus has a poison called Rajaijah that induces madness in its targets, that the villains use to drive mad anyone who might reveal their plans.
Films — Animated
- Beauty and the Beast: Belle's father, Maurice, is assumed to be insane and experiencing delusions when he tries to drum up assistance to save Belle from the Beast. Gaston decides to exploit this in order to coerce Belle into marrying him by threatening to have Maurice sent to an asylum if she refuses.
- A Monkey's Tale: The King and people of Laanko think that the Princess is sick, but she's has been kept in a drug-induced coma by Lord Sebastians' minions, so he'll be able to manipulate the King and, eventually, inherit the throne.
Films — Live-Action
- Airplane II: The Sequel: When the film begins, Ted Stryker (the hero of the first film) is shown to have been committed to the Ronald Reagan Hospital For The Mentally Ill ("We Cure People The Old-Fashioned Way") after having tried to warn that the lunar shuttle is nowhere near ready for service.
- The Beverly Hillbillies: In the 1993 film version, Laura and Woodrow have Granny institutionalized to an insane asylum and receiving electrical shocks, so she won't tell her family that Laura is marrying Jed only to help Woodrow steal his money.
- In The Cannonball Run, J.J. and his team use a modified ambulance in the race, but they're unable to get someone to pose as the patient. They later kidnap Pamela to pose as the patient while leaving her companion Mr. Foyt behind. When they get pulled over, she lies on the gurney hooked up to an array of medical equipment including an oxygen mask which is actually dosing her with laughing gas. When she asks the police officers to go back and pick up Mr. Foyt, the doctor dismisses it as a side effect of the medication.
- Changeling: When Christine Collins tries to make public that the LAPD convinced a teenager to pretend to be her missing son Walter when they couldn't find him (it is eventually revealed that Walter had been kidnapped by a Serial Killer and the LAPD not only didn't bother to look, but when another teen victim managed to escape and tried to alert the police, they refused to follow that lead because that would mean finding evidence they really did not found Walter), the LAPD has her tossed into the local sanitarium and bribe a doctor to claim that Christine has gone mad from the stress of Walter's disappearance and can't recognize her "son".
- The central theme to the 2005 film Flightplan. A widow, Kyle Pratt, is bringing her recently-deceased husband's body and her daughter Julia back to the United States. After Kyle falls asleep to take a nap, she awakens to find Julia missing and all evidence of her being on the flight has disappeared. A search is conducted, but no one on the plane has seen her. Word comes in that her daughter died with her husband, and a therapist tries to calm her down. Seemingly, she was so distraught from their deaths, that she imagined bringing Julia on board. It isn't until Kyle exhales in grief on a window, where a heart that Julia had drawn with her finger earlier in the movie is revealed from the condensation from her breath.
- The Glass House: After Ruby and Rhett's failed attempt of escaping their guardians, Terry and Erin sedate her heavily, because she knows that the couple is after the kids' huge trust fund. However, Erin regrets doing that to Ruby and cuts the medication, before committing suicide with an overdose of the painkiller.
- Good Burger: While investigating Mondo Burger, Ed and Dexter find out that they are using illegal chemicals in their burgers. Upon catching them, Kurt has them both sent to a mental hospital to prevent them from exposing Mondo Burger. He later does the same to Otis when said Good Burger employee catches him poisoning Ed's sauce.
- Sabrina (1995): When it looks like David Larrabee might get distracted by Sabrina and call off his engagement to Elizabeth Tyson — with tremendous fallout for the Larrabee Corporation — his older brother Linus arranges for David to suffer a minor injury and then be kept on very strong painkillers so that he won't be coherent enough to talk to Sabrina while Linus gets her out of the way.
David: <slurring> Do the dry cleaners have your car?
Literature
- Millennium Series: After attempting to burn her abusive father, Zalachenko, alive, Lisbeth Salander has been sent by the Section to Teleborian to be drugged into not speaking about her father, since he was a major asset of Swedish intelligence in the Soviet Union during the Cold War.
- The Princess: After their parents get sick of Ellie's obsession with The Princess, they ship her off to a psychiatrist, who in turn doesn't take her claims of a living video game character seriously and just puts her on medication — Ellie's sister Faye notes this decision might have also been influenced by said psychiatrist being in a partnership with a local pharmacy. The medication changes the normally loud and energetic Ellie into a cold, uncaring shell of her former self, and eventually the family finds her corpse in front of the TV, Ellie having turned on the game and letting herself be brutally killed by The Princess after weeks of not touching it.
- Vatta's Peace: In Into the Fire, Ky discovers that most of the rescued survivors of the shuttle crash in the previous book are now missing, having been disappeared and sedated by The Conspiracy that caused the crash. A couple of the survivors manage to escape, giving her enough information to rescue the others and eventually unravel the plot.
- In Why Didn't They Ask Evans?, Bobby and Frankie become suspicious of the psychiatrist Dr. Nicholson, who runs an asylum that the locals call a Bedlam House. Rumours swirl of patients being abused and treated horrifically by Nicholson; it's not helped by the fact that his wife Moira is a Broken Bird who seems terrified of him. Bobby eventually suspects that Nicholson is actually keeping sane patients under lock and key to extract information from them and keep them silent. The trope is ultimately subverted, though—Dr. Nicholson is actually a perfectly normal if hard-nosed psychiatrist, and Moira is one of two Big Bads in the novel; she and her partner exploited this trope to cast suspicion on Dr. Nicholson and make themselves look more innocent.
Live-Action TV
- Battlestar Galactica (2003): After a Cylon ambush on Caprica, Starbuck is wounded and loses consciousness. When she awakens, she's been taken to a hospital. Her doctor, Simon, seems nice enough, but, suspiciously and repeatedly, drugs her, under the guise of a serious injury. She finds out that Simon is actually a Cylon when he calls her "Starbuck", even though she never introduced herself as such. When she fakes her final sedation, she sneaks out and finds Simon speaking with a Number Six clone; when Simon returns, she kills him with a piece of broken mirror glass and makes her way through the hospital, eventually finding a room where Caprican human women are being used by the Cylons as breeding stock, by being attached to machines, since the Cylons and Cylon-Clones cannot reproduce on their own.
- Burn Notice:
- Subverted in "Signals and Codes". Michael and Sam are approached by Spencer, a defense contractor employee who claims a manager at the company is selling secrets. Spencer starts babbling about aliens and gets carted off to a psychiatric hospital by the paramedics, who tell Mike and Sam that he has a history of schizophrenia and is probably off his meds. After quickly escaping the hospital, he contacts Mike and Sam again and shows them a full-blown Room Full of Crazy that seems like alien conspiracy theories, but also contains evidence of US State Department codes being compromised, leading to the assassination of one of Sam's old friends. Spencer was telling the truth, but he also really is an unmedicated schizophrenic and looked unreliable purely through his own behavior.
- "Shot in the Dark": Team Westen attempts to frighten an abusive father into leaving town by making it look like his brother's business fencing stolen cars has antagonized someone it shouldn't, and then faking their own deaths in a shoot-out with nonexistent mooks when they go to deal with the fake problem. The man's brother insists on seeing it for himself, so Team Westen clean up the scene and pass Michael off as a priest running a homeless shelter, convincing the brother that the man has gone insane and getting him involuntarily committed. Sam and Mike mention having previously pulled the same scam against a Russian colonel.
- House of Anubis: Harriet is kept in a mental facility by her adoptive sister, Caroline. When she meets Eddie, KT, and Fabian, she's acting very strange, but also proves to know a lot about what's really happening at the school and even hides the kids when her sister comes around. It's then explained that Caroline's scheme involves stealing Harriet's destiny and identity, so to keep herself in power, she made the rest of the world think Harriet was insane with drugs and manipulation.
- Law & Order: SVU:
- In "Coerced", a corrupt group home had cut a schizophrenic man off his medications because he witnessed the death of another resident and they wanted to make sure that no one would take him seriously if he tried to report it. Once the case is uncovered, the detectives inform the group home that they're not only on the hook for that death but also for a murder the schizophrenic man had committed because he wasn't medicated.
- In "Careless", when a boy was murdered by his foster mother, the only witness was his foster sister. The foster mother had the girl committed for supposedly being a danger to herself.
- In "Conned" the team discovers that a doctor intentionally faked a teenager's schizophrenia diagnosis, including using medication to induce symptoms, because she was taking advantage of him sexually.
- In "Internal Affairs" a crew of corrupt cops had a whistle-blower committed to a mental hospital to discredit him before he could expose them.
- Malcolm in the Middle: Lois' evil mother announces that she is engaged to an elderly man with a lot of money, but is later revealed that she has been drugging his daily tea with opiates, making him as happy and high as a kite, and unable to really fight back against her scheme. Lois later switches out the tea, making the elderly man eventually come out of the effects, and he dumps Lois' mother right then and there at the altar.
- Nip/Tuck: One episode features an elderly man named Dr. Joshua Lee who comes to Sean and Christian to have a device removed from his body, claiming that it's a leftover from a time he was abducted by aliens. Before they can begin the procedure, a young blonde woman and some men in white coats arrive; the woman explains that the man is her mentally-addled father and the device is simply a medical scanner. Lee screams that she's a fake ("My daughter is dark-haired and fat!") accompanied by government agents disguised as doctors, but they lead him away before anything can be done, with him protesting all the while. At the end of the episode, Sean and Christian comment on the man and how sad it is that someone can become so delusional with age—and then a heavyset brunette woman walks into the room, asking if her father is out of surgery yet.
- Nowhere Man: Subverted in that the character has seen enough instances of evidence to keep him from dropping his guard and believing that he is insane, but still relevant to the trope. A global conspiracy has Unpersoned photographer Thomas Veil after he showcases an incriminating photo at a gallery exhibition, and this conspiracy seems to have infiltrated the deepest parts of global governments. The plot centers around this conspiracy chasing him down to capture and destroy the film negatives that can support his story. Every so often, Veil's trust is tested, when he comes across individuals claiming that he is mentally ill and has been imagining the whole affair, or that an enforcement group has found him as a witness to bring testimony to bring down this conspiracy. Of course, Veil is one step ahead, and his fears and hesitancy to trust anyone are perfectly rational.
- Psych: In "Shawn, Interrupted" Shawn goes undercover as a patient at a psychiatric facility to investigate Bernie Bethel, who Lassiter believes is pretending to be insane to escape being prosecuted for his ex-mistress's murder. Shawn soon realizes that Bernie is slipping between lucidity and genuine insanity, and during one of his lucid moments Bernie tells Shawn that his arthritis is too severe for him to have strangled his mistress, but he was too ill during his trial to tell anyone. Shawn tries to get out to tell the SBPD what's happening but gets restrained by orderlies who don't realize he's undercover and telling the truth. Eventually Shawn is able to escape and prove that Bernie's younger brother Daniel has conspired to have Bernie institutionalized so he can get access to his inheritance, with the help of a nurse who's been manipulating Bernie's prescriptions so that he becomes psychotic and can't defend himself coherently.
- Ripper Street, "The Good of This City": A Corrupt Politician tries to prevent his mistress from reporting a murder she'd witnessed by having her lobotomized in the guise of an epilepsy treatment. He's found out and she's rescued in the nick of time.
- Star Trek
- Star Trek: The Original Series:
- "Dagger of the Mind": On the Tantalus Penal Colony, a maniacal man, Simon Van Gelder, found in a shipping box, is later revealed to be one of the doctors, who had been treated with a mind-altering device called the "Neural Neutralizer", and just happened to almost lose his credibility when he also lost his mind from the device. The trope is played straight when it's revealed who forced the treatment on him, Dr. Tristan Adams, who tries to also silence Kirk with the device when he gets too involved in investigating the conspiracy.
- "Patterns of Force": A Federation cultural scientist, John Gill, breaks the Prime Directive by introducing a pre-warp urbanized planet to Nazism, and takes over as a Führer. The original intent was to bring the planet out of their dark age, without the sadism and racism, but one of the members of the Nazi party, Melakon, found the idea of absolute power too enticing, so he became The Starscream and had Gill heavily drugged, but kept as a figurehead to allay any suspicion. When Kirk and the away team are able to meet up with a resistance cell, they discover that Gill has set up a "Final Solution" attack against another planet. Later, when they find and meet with Gill at the Chancellery'snote television broadcasting center, they realize that his pre-attack speech makes no real sense; it's a bunch of tyrannical platitudes strung together, cluing them into the drugging. They then sneak into the broadcasting booth and desperately try to get him to call off the attack. When Gill finally fights through and starts to speak on his own and off-schedule, Melakon tries to play Gill's odd timing as being tired and ill. Unfortunately for Melakon, Gill has just enough strength to call off the attack and reveal Melakon as the traitor, who then takes one of the soldiers' automatic weapons and fires into the broadcasting booth to silence him. In retaliation, one of the rebels shoots Melakon.
- "Turnabout Intruder": The series finale has Captain Kirk body-swapped by a former lover, Dr. Janice Lester. She, in Kirk's body, takes command of the Enterprise but starts to make several command errors and emotional outbursts that alert Spock to the irregularity. One of the errors she makes is mistreating Kirk-in-Lester in full view of Spock and McCoy, attacking him in "self-defense", because at this point, everyone thinks the person who is Lester is still slightly mentally unstable (but improving). Lester-in-Kirk puts her former body on trial for attempting to escape, as well as Spock, for attempting to free Kirk-in-Lester; furthermore, her plan eventually expands to the intention of executing all of the individuals (on grounds of treason and mutiny) who have discovered or deduced that "Kirk" is not who "he" claims to be, which is slowly growing in number.
- Star Trek: The Next Generation:
- Subverted once, then played straight in "Frame of Mind", once as a story for an in-universe play, the second time as the actual episode plot: In the first instance, in a ship-board play, Cmdr. Riker is playing a frazzled asylum patient who is seemingly being abused. Riker's character thinks that he has made enough progress to finally go home and leave the asylum. The doctors there (one being played by Lt. Cmdr Data) drug him (also seemingly) whenever he shows a glimmer of independent thought. Later in the episode, Riker starts to seemingly have hallucinations that suggest that he is not actually a commander aboard a starship and that he has been delusional in a similar mental asylum this whole time, with an equally-abusive staff.
- A variation in "Man of the People": An ambassador, Ves Alkar, and his mother come aboard the Enterprise to be ferried to a mediation between warring factions on a planet-of-the-week. His mother is extremely bitter and bellicose towards other women, and continuously claims that Alkar is not who he appears to be. Alkar tries to brush it off as her being ill. When she later dies of ostensibly old age, Dr. Crusher does an analysis on her, and discovers that she was actually in her thirties when she died and was actually not his mother at all! Unfortunately, Alkar has already performed a ceremony that links his mind with Troi's, allowing him to use her as a receptacle for all of his negative emotions and thoughts, accelerating her aging. As the episode progresses, Troi becomes much like Alkar's "mother", proving that his "mother" was completely right.
- Star Trek: Voyager: Played completely straight in "Workforce". At the start of the episode, the crew of Voyager is working at an alien power plant, seemingly not realizing or knowing who they actually are, or having any complaints about where they work. Tuvok regains his memories for a short while, and tries to convince the rest of the crew working there who they are, but is taken away to be reprogrammed under the guise of being affected by a mental condition known as Dysphoria Syndrome. The governmental doctor running the whole operation, Kadan, has abducted the crew, as well as other planetary passers-by, to use as what amounts to slave labor during a worker shortage. When one of the medical workers, Ravoc, realizes that there is too much of a coincidence of a large number of people being affected by Dysphoria Syndrome and that they just happened to find enough workers to fulfill the quota of the shortage, they try to confront Kadan of their findings. Unfortunately, Dr. Kadan is too deeply entrenched in political power to be exposed. Even worse, Ravoc is also Wrongfully Committed as well. Thankfully, only when the remaining crew of Voyager and several deprogrammed crew members hatch a plot to overload the system and beam themselves away is the plot revealed, Kadan deposed, and the conspiracy unraveled.
- Star Trek: The Original Series:
- Stargate SG-1:
- "Foothold": A variation; the SG-1 team returns from a planet and finds that there seems to have been a chemical leak on one floor of the SGC base that requires a temporary quarantine. In the infirmary for post-mission checkup, but breaking from routine, the team is sedated. Teal'c awakens due to his resilience from his Goa'uld symbiote and discovers a horrifying revelation: the SGC base has been compromised by an army of aliens. When he is taken to be processed, Teal'c fakes being unconscious, then knocks out the guard who takes him to the holding cell. He frees Samantha Carter, and when their escape is detected, Teal'c lets Sam go, so he can buy time for her to make it. Later, Teal'c awakens in the infirmary, restrained seemingly because the chemical leak caused him to hallucinate and go berserk. When Sam tries to notify Col. Maybourne about the infiltration and meet in Washington, D.C., he breaks security protocol by checking the SGC behind her back. Daniel and Jack arrive, convincing her that she has seemingly been affected by the chemical leak as well. During their flight back to Colorado, it's revealed that there has legitimately been an infiltration when "O'Neill"'s image fritzes out of alignment.
- "Point of No Return": Martin Lloyd, a later-recurring character, calls the SGC with detailed accurate information about the entire Stargate Project operation, when no classified information has ever been leaked about it, and also claims that he is not from Earth. It's discovered that he's also a rather meek and unstable conspiracy theorist, and has also been prescribed antipsychotic and antidepressant medications, lending credence to the theory that he's only imagining that he's an alien. He is later vindicated when he realizes that he had taken a wrong turn in looking for his spaceship, and indeed, with O'Neill and Teal'c, finds a buried escape pod not of Earth design in a field. It's also revealed that Lloyd's doctors are actually of the same race that he is, and were prescribing him the medicines to silence him.
- "Beneath The Surface": A group of new workers at a power and heating plant are revealed to be SG-1, but their memories have been erased and replaced with new ones. The plant is subterranean, providing heat and power for the alien city above. However, neither knows of the other's existence. The city assumes their power is generated by willing workers or machines, and the workers themselves have been convinced that the arctic conditions outside the city's dome have overwhelmed civilization, leaving them the only survivors to prevent themselves from succumbing to the elements. When any of the workers start to regain their memories, they are taken to the infirmary and diagnosed with "night sickness", and their memories are erased once again. The only ones who know of the facade are the Administrator of the city and the office workers under him, who are being intimidated into silence and compliance.
- "Absolute Power": SG-1 finds the Harsesis childnote , named "Shifu", that Daniel has been searching for, to protect him and and use his genetically-passed knowledge to build defenses against the Goa'uld. Shifu passes his knowledge on to Daniel, who begins to devise defenses, but also acts erratic and demanding. As time goes on, he begins to alienate himself from his friends. In one instance, he sends Teal'c on a suicide mission. The trope is invoked when one year later, Carter gets wind of what Daniel is actually planning, and the now-high-living scientist, out of wrongful paranoia, commits Carter to a government psychiatric ward, to keep her out of his hair, and abuse the power and technology of the Goa'uld memory to take over the Earth. Of course, these events were All Just a Dream and never happened. Shifu implanted them to teach Daniel that the urge to use the Goa'uld technology for his own ends, rather than for the good of all Earth, was too great a temptation.
- Stranger Things: When Eleven's mother Terry Ives attempted to claim her daughter back from Hawkins Lab, they subjected her to brutal electroshock therapy. This, combined with the trauma of losing her daughter, is what fried her brain and made her the Empty Shell we see in The Present Day.
- The X-Files: In "Anasazi", Mulder's water supply is laced with LSD to discredit his ongoing investigation.
Tabletop Games
- Traveller supplement Supplement 6 76 Patrons. One of the adventure seeds is a noblewoman who approaches the Player Characters and claims that her brother has been kidnapped by a criminal organization. She is grabbed by three men who claim to be police officers and a doctor, who say that she is mentally ill. The doctor sedates her with an injection and they take her away. One possibility is that she's telling the truth and the men who grabbed her are members of the criminal organization who are trying to shut her up.
Theatre
- Suddenly, Last Summer: Catherine Holly's cousin Sebastian uses her as bait for young men for him to seduce. After she witnesses him getting slaughtered, she's put in an awful sanitarium. Sebastian's mother is determined to protect her son's memory and reputation and tries to get Catherine lobotomized so that if she ever speaks the truth, she'll be dismissed as a lunatic.
Video Games
- Beyond: Two Souls: After Jodie's birth, the CIA wanted to silence her mother Norah Gray so she would not claim her daughter back. So they injected her with drugs to put her into a permanent catatonic state for decades.
- Chippy: The blue-eyed Quartet boss claims it was put into the asylum so no one would believe it's being silenced. The stages' narratives are too minimalist to show whether it's telling the truth, though.
- Freddy Fazbear's Pizzeria Simulator: In the Insanity ending, the player character is fired from the pizzeria after finding some hidden files that reveal dark secrets about the pizzeria, and about Cassette Guy. In the ending cutscene, the narrator says that there is a truck waiting for the protagonist outside. We see an image of a cartoon bear (used to represent people in these cutscenes) in the back of a truck, wearing a straitjacket, and saying "Lobotomy? You barely know me!"
- Outlast: The Murkoff Corporation uses this against Weylon Park, having him committed to Mount Massive Asylum under false pretences when he tries to blow the whistle about the abuses and illegal experimentation he witnessed while working there.
- Persona 5: After Shido is defeated by the Phantom Thieves and he confesses to being behind The Conspiracy and its multiple murders on live TV, its remaining members, afraid of being arrested for their involvement, have him transferred to a psychiatric hospital.
- Riven: Gehn, tyrannical ruler of the decaying world of Riven, is holding bookwriter artisan Atrus' wife, Catherine, hostage. One of the reasons he is doing this is not only to keep Catherine from forming an active rebellion (which is only dormant/intermittent at the moment) to overthrow him, but he has also started to believe that Catherine has gone insane, regarding herself as a religious savior/deity. (He is believing this either out of blatant denial or out of the ironically-actually-delusional effects of the amphibian extract that he smokes in his pipe.)
Web Original
- Played for Laughs as extremely Dark Humor in RedLetterMedia's Mr. Plinkett review series: In his Titanic (1997) review, the titular Mr. Plinkett is keeping a young woman dressed in a Na'vi costume from another James Cameron movie, Avatar, in his house as if she was a real character. When she starts to protest, Plinkett grabs a mask attached to a gas tank and drugs her with it, falsely claiming that she's hallucinating, and she needs to inhale the atmosphere that the Na'vi breathe on Pandora to get better.
Western Animation
- American Dad!: In "Stan-Dan Deliver", Stan decides to stay at a retirement home to prepare himself for when he grows old. However, it turns out that he, along with all the other residents, are secretly being slipped drugs to make them hopelessly lethargic and dependent on the nurses.
