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"How do you know I'm mad?" said Alice.
"You must be," said the Cat, "or you would not have come here."
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, 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.
The name of the trope comes from a line spoken by the title character from Alice In Wonderland.
Examples:
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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: Hell on Earth, a Smug Snake who is guilty and made the mistake of pleading insanity becomes a typical Gotham Mad Hatter under the name "Great White Shark".
- 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, her husband's brother, he reveals that he knew she'd been feigning insanity the whole time and thus intends to keep her there indefinitely.
- 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.
- 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.
- The wonderfully quirky French film The King of Hearts.
- In Twelve 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 the movie 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 regresion 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.
- One Flew Over The Cuckoos Nest is practically the Trope Maker.
- If you're looking at Mc Murphy's side; on Chief Bromden's side it's almost a subversion.
- 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 titual 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 Cuckoos Nest is practically the Trope Maker.
- If you're looking at Mc Murphy'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.
- The novel Shutter Island is based on this premise. Or is it?
- 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.
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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.
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 commited 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.
- Since this was an adaption of a genuine Colditz escape, this makes this Truth In Television (Honestly, is there anything on this wiki that isn't?) 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 Cassandra Truth.
- 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 .. but her reports were true and he has to stop Russian spies from interrogating a scientist who is a patient there.
- 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 straightjacket 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.
Real Life
- 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.
- Reporter Nellie Bly was known for, among many other things, spending time in hospitals including mental hospitals, to investigate the conditions there.
- Ken Kesey, author of One Flew Over The Cuckoos Nest, spent some time in mental institutions and taking psychotropic drugs as research for his novel.
- In Sweeney Todd, 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 Lucy Barker, after she was raped by Judge Turpin and drank the arsenic to try to kill herself, was sent to Bedlam House (the actual one) instead of the hospital, which, along with the effects of the arsenic, drove the woman quite insane, leaving her as the crazed Beggar Woman. And Mrs. Lovett knew about this all along, and didn't tell Sweeney about it until after he had killed her and recognized her just now. Needless to say, Sweeney does not take it well.
- 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?
Video Games
- In the game 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 is not quite insane. Or is he?
- 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 nonexistance of my tentacle!"
- When Helen breaks up with Dave, in "Narbonic", She actually remarks "You don't want to go among mad people." This refers of course to herself and her colleauges. Ironically, after reading the quote in context, specifically the page quote, Dave himself goes mad, exactly what Helen was trying to prevent by breaking up with him.
- More accurately, she was revealing to him that he wasn't the one sane person in the crazy house that he thought he was - he was an emerging Mad Scientist who Helen had been studying for years to try and nail down what made Mad Scientists mad. When the original context for the quote is revealed, everything suddenly falls into place for him, and he hyper-calmly embraces his madness and almost supernatural technical skills. Although he cracks and goes a bit Destroy The World shortly afterwards, when he's been shot in the head and killed.
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. 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.
- 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 Cuckoos 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 commited. 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."
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