Go Mad from the Apocalypse

"ADS, that was my enemy: Asymptomatic Demise Syndrome, or, Apocalyptic Despair Syndrome, depending on who you were talking to. Whatever the label, it killed as many people in those early stalemate months as hunger, disease, interhuman violence, or the living dead."

— Roy Elliot Interview, World War Z

It's the apocalypse, baby! Some take comfort knowing that every awful thing they hated about society is gone, while others vent their stress onto their surroundings, knowing that they won't have to face any consequences for it. But not everyone takes the sudden shift in how the world works so well and it drives them mad.

In examples of the apocalypse where the threat is non-sapient, like a Zombie Apocalypse or a Flooded Future World, this is done as a means of showing that mankind is His Own Worst Enemy. Most zombies are slow and stupid and if a person survives enough encounters with one, then they just become another thing one can get used to. It's a lot harder to handle a loved one or a trusted ally who, after one too many close calls, has a mental health crisis.

A character often snaps when their Despair Event Horizon is reached. Heroic characters, upon seeing their loved ones die gruesomely or the last bastion of hope be overrun might go into a Heroic BSoD and just stay there, unable to adapt to their new horrifying reality and becoming a danger to themselves and others. More villainous examples might have already been unbalanced and the collapse of what little structure they had was that one final push, exacerbating their less attractive qualities — like their Greed or their need to be in control of everything — into truly twisted extremes.

At best they go completely catatonic, becoming a liability when the group is suddenly faced with something that requires action. At worst, they'll start frothing at the mouth and point their guns at fellow survivors under the paranoid delusion that they aren't telling them something important, hoarding resources, or some other blatantly false assumption. Just another reason why people must Beware the Living.

When they go mad after everyone else is wiped out, then it's Go Mad from the Isolation.

Sub-Trope of Sanity Slippage. Contrast The Apocalypse Brings Out the Best in People. Related to Crazy Survivalist, Fear-Induced Idiocy, Go Mad from the Revelation, Humans Are the Real Monsters, Post-Historical Trauma, Ocean Madness, Screw the Rules, It's the Apocalypse!, and Space Madness.

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Examples

Anime & Manga

• Barefoot Gen: After the atom bomb dropped, a lot of people in Hiroshima lose their sanity, often from the loss of their loved ones. At one point, Gen witnesses a woman talking to a swarm of maggots and flies from the rotting body of her son, because she thinks he has reincarnated into them.
• Doraemon: Nobita and the Green Giant Legend does this in the ending where Doraemon, Nobita, and gang escaped Planet Green and made it back to Earth, intending to warn Earth of Planet Green's terraforming nuke only to find out they're too late, the Apocalypse How has started and Tokyo is covered in plants with the population subjected to transflormation. The entire gang had a massive Heroic BSoD, with Doraemon nearly throwing himself off the top of the plant-infested Tokyo Tower if Nobita, Suneo, and Gian didn't restrain him. But luckily the nuke's effects turn out to be reversible.
• Happens to one of the school teachers in the first episode of Highschool of the Dead who can't get past the Dreaming Stage of Grief and attempts to "wake up" from the zombie apocalypse by jumping out the window to his death.
• Transformers: Cybertron: The Autobots bring the Omega Lock to the core of Cybertron in their attempt to stop the black hole. After placing it on an altar, it causes the entire planet to shift and break apart. Most of the Autobots are in disarray at the events, notably Leobreaker, who breaks down at the possibility that everything they've done up to this point was All for Nothing, as well as Optimus himself, who goes into a silent Heroic BSoD before being verbally shaken out of it to lead everyone off the planet, where they find that the planet isn't breaking apart, but instead transforming into Primus, the creator of Cybertronians himself.
• While most characters in Zom 100: Bucket List of the Dead take advantage of society's collapse in the Zombie Apocalypse to live out their dreams, the human antagonists are people who try to do the same in ways that harm their fellow survivors for selfish reasons, many of them driven to it either out of desperation or nihilism.
  • Kanta Higurashi and his gang were all losers who, disillusioned with their lives, found freedom and camaraderie when the zombie apocalypse destroyed society. Being Shadow Archetypes of the main characters, they all take the opportunity to live out their wildest fantasies, but all of their desires are innately selfish and destructive; Higurashi wants to destroy and vandalize everything around him, Kurasugi wants to slap his "bitch of a wife" (even though it's his own fault his marriage fell apart), Kanbayashi is a Control Freak who wants revenge for things not going her way and Atenbou is a Gonk who wants to force himself on a woman. They even formulate a plan to overrun Gunma with zombies because they can't stand to see its people being so content while they themselves are miserable.
  • Dr. Shoichiro Edogawa was the world's foremost expert in Artificial Intelligence to the point where he staffed a luxury hotel entirely with robots. When the apocalypse happened and his late assistant Rui died, he snapped and attempted to upload a copy of her consciousness into Shizuka's body. Thankfully, the rest of the cast are able to talk him out of it.

Comic Books

• Batman: Batman: No Man's Land has a regional case. Gotham City being hit by an earthquake and then sealed off from the rest of the country has caused many ordinary citizens to become cannibals or delusional bandits and killers (including one man who sees himself as a mercy killer due to the Crapsack World). On a more benign note, a former building inspector still wanders the streets, making notes about the code violations of devastated buildings and talking to a hallucination of his assistant.
• Transformers: Unfortunately for the Transformers, the appearance of Unicron too often causes even otherwise level-headed individuals to lose their grip on sanity.
  • In The Transformers (Marvel), the Autobots rally around Brainstorm when Unicron appears. Unfortunately for the Autobots, even a genius-level intellect doesn't have an answer to everything, and when presented with the idea of "Satan is the size of a planet and is here to kill us all," Brainstorm snaps and begins firing wildly at Unicron with a blaster pistol. This loss of composure doesn't get him very far, and Brainstorm is the first to die when Unicron spears him through the chest and eats him.
    Cloudburst: "Do something! Brainstorm, you're the clever one. Tell us what to do!"
    Brainstorm: "I... no no no no no no no no—!"
  • The Transformers: Armada comic by the now-defunct Dreamwave Comics had Armada's Optimus Prime end up jumping between realities, one Alternate Universe has Cybertron all but destroyed by Unicron. The only survivor Prime finds is this universe's Spinister (who prior to this point had been presented as a rational and pragmatic sniper) who has been reduced to a terrified, rambling wreck. Even Prime quickly realizes that this isn't normal and that the hapless Decepticon is completely deranged with fear.
    Optimus Prime: (surveying the barren ruins of Cybertron) Who is responsible...?
    Spinister: The lord of eternal light, the prince of nothingness! Every dark deed, the sum of all fears. Our sins remembered, final judgment pronounced, the heavens opened...and we reaped, I say reaped the whirlwind.
    Prime: Madness!
• The Walking Dead: Pretty much all the characters who survive any length of time suffer from this to some extent, even Rick Grimes, but most of them manage to retain some semblance of their pre-apocalypse selves. However, a few survivors go completely off the rails in the wake of the Zombie Apocalypse.
  • Carol, Sophia's mother, feeds herself to a tied-up zombie during the Prison arc after being rejected by Lori, having already attempted suicide some time before after Tyreese left her. It's implied to be a result of Hates Being Alone, and the apocalypse took away the only coping mechanism she had.
  • Ben, who kills his twin brother Billy under some bizarre delusion that people don't die for real anymore, having already lost both their parents to the zombies by this point.
  • The Hunters, a small group of survivors who stalk and prey on other humans, having resorted to cannibalism after running out of food and couldn't get a grasp on hunting animals. Their first victims were their children. Killing and eating strangers became a lot easier after that.
  • Alpha, Beta and The Whisperers, survivors who have completely rejected the concept of humanity, living like migrating animals who move along the zombie herds by wearing masks made from zombie skin, and no longer acknowledge their previous identities at all.

Films — Live-Action

• In Five, Oliver P. Barnstaple is an elderly bank clerk who has fallen into denial since the end of the world; he believes that he is simply on vacation, and his mind refuses to acknowledge anything that does not fit his delusion, such as the complete absence of any other people.
• Deconstructed and reconstructed in 28 Days Later. Major West tells Jim that both before and after the Zombie Apocalypse, all he ever saw was "people killing people" (i.e. nothing has changed). However, he then reveals that he's been forced to take in Hannah and Selena for his men to rape them. The soldiers had lost all and any faith in humanity, so West "had to" give them the hope of repopulating the UK.
  • Alice Harris in the sequel 28 Weeks Later is a much less violent case. In the distant prologue set in the midst of the original 28-day outbreak, Alice is a sane and stable survivor before she loses all her comrades in the countryside during an Infected attack. Twenty-eight weeks after Jim in the first film woke from his coma, when a solitary Alice is found by her son, she's near-catatonic and has been living in squalid conditions in a den that she's made in her family's old London house, barely able to string words or sentences together, and apparently oblivious to the giant U.S. military presence that has swooped in and has been constructing a huge safe zone next door to her den for weeks.
• Anna and the Apocalypse:
  • Nick goes from a Jerk Jock to a serious Blood Knight after he realizes how good he is at killing zombies.
  • Within two days of the zombies showing up, Dean Bitterman Mr. Savage is feeding people to hordes of zombies while dancing around and singing Villain Songs about how awful humanity is.
• The Colony (2013):
  • In the absence of food caused by the Glacial Apocalypse, people devolving into cannibalism is a horrific problem. Laurence Fishburne and Bill Paxton's characters were part of the military before it fully collapsed, and they abandoned a stadium-based refugee center when it devolved into a military dictatorship where the ones in charge started "taking undesirables upstairs" to combat their food shortages. The main antagonists of the movie are revealed to be a roaming post-apocalyptic bandit tribe whom have turned to cannibalizing any other survivors they find — these cannibals don't even act human anymore; never saying more than one word between all of them for the entire movie, shrieking and snarling like animals, having filed their teeth to points, and making a Cannibal Larder that would impress the Sawyers.
  • Furthermore, Paxton's aforementioned character, Mason, has clearly started to lose his mind at the movie's start decades into the apocalypse. He breaks an important colony rule of giving two quarantined cold patients who have to be cast out the choice between dying or taking their chances in the snow so that he can shoot them himself, he does it again in his leader's absence after being explicitly told not to, and he wastes no time taking charge after his leader's death and making it clear he'll be ruling with an even more iron fist before the cannibals' arrival renders his rule extremely short-lived.
• Daylight's End: The police station survivors encounter a woman who had spent a while surviving the zombie/vampire creatures alone and talking to a doll as if it were her child.
• I Am Legend: The protagonist Robert Neville, isolated in a desolate New York for three years with only his dog, the game he hunts, and the hostile, man-eating infected Darkseekers for company, is trying to defy this trope, but it's made clear that his sanity is only holding on by a few threads. He's converted shop-window mannequins into neighbors whom he addresses by individual names and chats to as if they're real people on his daily routine when the Darkseekers are dormant, and he gets a bit too into the illusion of chatting up a lady mannequin who he "meets" in the abandoned video store. When the Darkseekers move the "Fred" mannequin offscreen and Robert sees it's moved, Robert (and the camera) hallucinate Fred moving his head, and Robert absolutely freaks out, fearing that he's officially lost track of the line between reality and illusion, and never once considering that the Darkseekers have moved Fred to bait him. The degradation of Robert's social skills in his three-year isolation becomes more apparent when he finally meets other uninfected survivors in the last third of the movie, struggling to socialize with them and not lash out in explosions of passionate rage and grief.
• Living Dead Series:
  • Barbera from Night of the Living Dead (1968) is considered by many to be the Trope Codifier; having been driven to a near-catatonic state after just barely escaping a zombie while her brother Johnny wasn't so lucky.
  • Day of the Dead (1985) is set some undetermined time after the apocalypse had hit and while many of the characters in the film are reaching their breaking points, it's Pvt. Miguel Salazar who goes over the edge. The film opens with Sarah being forced to amputate his arm to save him from a zombie bite, and in his recovery he slowly goes mad, ending the film by letting all the zombies into the base.
• Mad Max: The Nightrider starts off very hammily hyping up himself as an invincible scourge of the roads during his wild chase with the cops. But when he loses the Game of Chicken with Max, he starts sobbing and lamenting that "It's all gone, it's all gone! There ain't going to be nothing left!", indicating that the Post-Peak Oil collapse of civilization drove him out of his mind.
• Miracle Mile: As nuclear missiles head toward L.A., skeptical yuppie Gerstead devolves into a raving, corpse-molesting fatalist.
• Planet of the Apes (1968) has the iconic ending when George Taylor realizes that the eponymous planet is Earth All Along, specifically Earth after a nuclear war reduced humanity to a Formerly Sapient Species and led to other simians becoming the dominant species:
  Oh my god, I'm back. I'm home. All the time, it was … We finally really did it. [He screams.] You maniacs! You blew it up! Ah, damn you! God damn you all to hell!
• War of the Worlds (2005): Harlan Oglivy, the film's version of the Artilleryman, has become a Crazy Survivalist (emphasis on the "crazy") after seeing the Martians' march, and becomes a whole lot worse when he discovers that the Martians harvest human blood for their plants, turning his statement that he won't be caught alive into a very loud Madness Mantra. It's the fact that he is making so much noise and will draw the aliens' attention that leads to Ray deciding to kill Oglivy to keep his daughter Rachel safe.
• Zardoz: The Eternals are immortal human beings who live in isolation from the post-apocalyptic Crapsack World. Because they cannot die and are completely isolated, ennui started to overwhelm many of them, particularly one subset called "Apathetics", who are so bored by immortality that they literally cannot do anything anymore.

Literature

• Several of the first survivors Ishmael meets after the pandemic in Earth Abides have erratic hints to their personalities (trying to provoke a fight, running away from him on sight, and purposelessly hoarding things, respectively) and can barely interact with him.
• In I Am Legend, Robert notices that several uninfected people behave in a way to fit in with the hordes of vampires (the book predates the Zombie Apocalypse trope by ten years). One man climbs up a lamp post and jumps off like he expects to turn into a bat, and breaks his neck, for example.
• The Killing Star: After the alien genocide of the solar system, not all of the survivors take things well.
  • One of the two survivors on Earth itself (both of whom were exploring the wreck of the Titanic in a submarine) ends up losing himself in the virtual reality simulations of the ship and its people.
  • The commander of a surviving mining spaceship on Neptune takes his ship on a suicidal plummet into the world's ocean after failing to cope with the situation.
• The Mist: When a spreading extradimensional fog filled with vicious, man-eating monsters rolls over town (implied to be the result of a military experiment gone awry), reducing outdoor visibility to near-zero and rendering it lethally dangerous to go outside; the large group of townsfolk who are holed up in a sealed grocery store and have no idea how far the disaster has spread devolve at an alarmingly rapid rate. By the second day of the disaster, the local religious fanatic Mrs. Carmody (who was recognized by the other townsfolk as such and was therefore mostly harmless before the disaster) is accruing followers out of the townsfolk who were once smart enough to dismiss her, as she rants that the disaster is God's punishment and that only Human Sacrifice can appease the monsters. Even one of the reason-headed protagonist's supporters eventually defects to her side. By the dawn of Day 3, roughly half the store's residents are ready to sacrifice an innocent woman and a child to the monsters in the mist at Mrs. Carmody's call.
• Night Shift: "Night Surf", a precursor to The Stand mentioned below, revolves around a group of teenagers and 20-somethings hanging around a beach resort in New England after a superflu virus wipes out most of humanity. One of the few radio stations they can still tune in is just some guy playing conservative pop music in between fire-and-brimstone religious mania and hysterical crying.
• The Stand:
  • Society breaks down as 99.6% of the population is killed by Captain Tripps, an extremely deadly and contagious version of influenza that escaped containment at a government lab. The U.S government goes to increasing extremes at quarantine, and when that fails, just starts outright massacring protestors or anyone trying to reveal the truth, with increasingly violent pushback from deserters and angry civilians. As the last of organized society breaks, smaller groups start randomly using the weaponry left over to just enforce their own brand of justice or morality, before succumbing themselves. Eventually, those left behind rally around two camps, the Big Good Mother Abagail and the Big Bad Randall Flagg. One of the most memorable moments involves a rogue army unit (most of them already visibly sick with Captain Tripps) hijacking one of the few remaining functioning TV stations and begin executing the audience and staff in a depraved makeshift game show.
  • General William Starkey, the commanding officer of the military base where Captain Tripps was developed, finds himself bizarrely fascinated with a member of the staff who died from the virus in the cafeteria with his face down in a bowl of soup, and spends much of his spare time staring at the corpse from the security room. One of his last acts before comitting suicide is pulling the man's head out of the soup and cleaning his face.
• Station Eleven: The Prophet Used to Be a Sweet Kid but, twenty years after the virus that killed so much of humanity, leads a pseudo-religious cult that believes in repopulating the Earth through child brides and making tombstones for still living people who desert their cause.
• The War of the Worlds (1898):
  • The Artilleryman has gone completely deranged after seeing the relentless slaughter of the Martians' march, and when the narrator finds him he is digging a tunnel and boasting about how when he makes it to the city he is going to lead people into creating underground cities and wage guerrilla warfare against the Martians. The narrator is even less impressed when he notices that the Artilleryman's tunnel is only five to ten feet deep even after what may be days of him digging. The Jeff Wayne musical further highlights it by giving the Artilleryman a song of his own as he is digging — the latter half (after the reveal about the tunnel) is deliberately sung in a more deranged tone of voice.
  • The Curate acts quite insane and irrational (eating all the food, screaming to attract Martians), possibly Hearing Voices, and proclaiming that God has sent the Martians down to punish mankind "mad apocalypse preacher"-style.
• World War Z:
  • There are several accounts of people being so broken by the horrors of the Zombie Apocalypse that they start acting like zombies themselves (to the point of actually trying to bite other people). These individuals became collectively known as Quislings, as their insanity made them try to "join" the zombies in a pathetic, last-ditch effort of survival, which just served to get them killed even faster, as the zombies instinctively knew the difference between the living and the dead. The few Quislings that managed to survive the war are implied to be almost impossible to rehabilitate.
  • On the other side of the coin, there are the Ferals - children who were abandoned, lost or orphaned during the Zombie Apocalypse, and regressed into a feral state to survive. While they had a slightly higher survival rate than the Quislings, most of the survivors are mentally and emotionally stunted, permanently stuck in the same mental age they were as children.
  • Jessika Hendrix implies that this happened to most people (if not everybody) who fled to the Canadian wilderness as part of the Reidecker plan. They were abandoned to a freezing winter, where a complete lack of survival skills, food, and hope caused them to fall into violent tribalism (even killing and eating each other) as well as sickness and starvation.
  • Discussed by Roy Elliot, a film director, though he makes the despair sound much more corrosive and less dramatic than other examples. He explains that many zombie war survivors simply died of no apparent cause because they had lost all hope and felt they couldn't go on living. He explains that this is why he and other film directors (one heavily implied to be Martin Scorsese) made inaccurate "propaganda" films — because they knew that people needed to believe in human goodness in order to go on living.
• Worm: Jack Slash is an inversion of this trope. Having grown up alone in a bunker, with only a one-way radio connecting him to his father, Jack was taught to fear the outside world, which he believed to have undergone an apocalypse. Though this isolation was certainly awful, what finally caused Jack to break was escaping the bunker to find that the outside world was completely fine.
• In Zombies and Shit, Gunther von Hagens (as in that Gunther von Hagens) was a controversial anatomist who perfected plastination who, after seeing his creations come to life and killing people on Z-Day, locked himself within the museum and went insane. With the living dead roaming everywhere and nothing but free time on his hands, began crafting more artwork out of the zombies around him before he was found by a band of soldiers and brought back to Neo New York where he started a family.

Live-Action TV

• Jeremiah: Given how The Virus in the Back Story spared everyone who hadn't reached puberty and (seemingly) no one who had, plenty of seemingly normal kids grew up with their share of eccentricities stemming from the trauma. Extreme cases include John (who is convinced he is his old favorite superhero, Captain Iron), Godhood Seeker Michael, Bunny-Ears Lawyer Conspiracy Theorist Wylie, self-flagellating Mysterious Protector Ezekiel (who has the added trauma of knowing that his father created the virus), and a Cargo Cult obsessed with telephones. Subverted with Mr. Smith, as, while he believes that God is talking to him, it's strongly implied that God actually is.
• The Last Man on Earth: Even among a cast of survivors from a virus that wiped out nearly all higher forms of life, Pamela embodies this trope - she spent three years entirerly alone in a bunker with the exception of her dog, who she spent god knows how much time trying to teach how to talk out of sheer, crippling isolation. Unsurprisingly, this fails, and she ends up degenerating into alcoholism to numb herself.
• Supernatural:
  • A variation seems to have happened among some of the surviving angels of Heaven in Season 7 after the season's premiere saw a power-maddened Castiel end Heaven's civil war by exterminating every single angel on the opposing side (at least half of Heaven's total angel population) before his temporary death by Leviathans caused him to disappear. In "Reading is Fundamental", the angel Hester, in stark contrast to her species' cold and ruthless norm, is shown to be very emotion-driven and volatile, and it's heavily implied that witnessing Castiel's massacre of Heaven after she sided with him in the civil war played a hand in her breakdown.
  • Likewise, in Apocalypse World (an Alternate Universe where the angels' original plans to complete the Apocalypse were never stopped), the angels of this universe appear to have completely snapped and turned into the most monstrous versions of themselves, after they succeeded in killing Lucifer per the Book of Revelation's prophecy but God never returned as expected. As bad as the ruthless, callous, racist, and Terminator-like angels of the main universe are in general, the angels of Apocalypse World manage to be worse, as all of them actively prioritize wiping out all the human survivors instead of trying to rebuild their Earth as Paradise, and all of the ones we meet are a little too sadistic and torture-happy about it, especially Castiel and Michael's evil doppelgangers.
• Whoniverse:
  • Doctor Who:
    • A dark case occurs in the three-part Season 3 finale, with the future descendants of humanity who are living during the heat death of the universe in the year 100 trillion A.D.. After the Utopia project aimed towards surviving the universe's heat death apparently failed, the future humans resorted to experimenting on themselves, regressing their minds to those of children and converting themselves into cyborgs that consist of a severed, mutated, once-human head locked inside a flying, cybernetic spherical shell forever. The end result is the Toclafane, a swarm of hive minded psychopathic manchildren whom sadistically slaughter and oppress their 21st-century ancestors solely "because it's fun".
    • In "Turn Left", as disaster after disaster hits Earth in an Alternate Timeline where the Doctor dies instead of meeting Donna, Donna's mother Sylvia, already saddened by the death of her husband, slowly becomes more and more depressed to the point of near-catatonia as it becomes clear things will never get better.
    • "The End of Time" reveals that this happened to the Time Lords in a sense, during the Last Great Time War; where "the whole of creation convulsed" and "at [the War's] heart [beyond Gallifrey's position at the far reaches of the War], millions die every second, lost in bloodlust and insanity, with time itself resurrecting them, to find new ways of dying, over and over again", with Word of God stating that the sheer reality-warping horrors of the War were incomprehensible. In the pre-Time War old series, the inter-galactic governors of space-time were a passive and decayed but largely benign civilization, and the Doctor still recalls them as such after the War in the new series... except that's just the Doctor choosing to remember his people as the better versions of themselves that they were rather than as what they became in the War. In the final days of the Time War, the War had changed the Time Lords "right to the core": all but a couple of the Time Lords' large council are so insane and hellbent on escaping their imminent extinction that they're completely happy to violently sacrifice the whole of space-time and reduce themselves to timeless disembodied consciousnesses.
  • The Sarah Jane Adventures: "The Temptation of Sarah Jane Smith": In the post-apocalyptic Alternate Timeline where the Trickster killed the entire Earth except for a couple dozen humans in 1951 and the survivors are being kept alive as slave labor; Clyde and Rani, having escaped being erased with their original present, come across the enslaved alternate counterpart of Rani's mom, and she's a jittery shell of a woman who often speaks in stilted speech patterns and physically panics at any unexpected physical contact.

Music

• GWAR: The title song of their album Ragnarok is all about how everyone's going to go batshit insane when the world ends...and all the "fun" that comes with it.
• The music video for Soundgarden's "Black Hole Sun" has the whole cast being driven mad as the end of the world approaches.

Theatre

• You're a Good Man, Charlie Brown: Discussed and Played for Laughs at the end of "My New Philosophy" (added post-revival), though the apocalypse here was only hypothetical.
  Sally: You know, someone has said that we should live every day as if it were the last day of our life.
  Lucy: This is it? Help me! Help me! I've only got twenty-four hours left to live! AAAAAAAAAA!!! [runs offstage]
  Sally: [beat] Clearly, some philosophies aren't for all people...

Video Games

• 60 Seconds! has a sanity mechanic, where the family members may go insane in the fallout shelter due to lack of mental stimulation, hardship, and stress brought on by the loss of loved ones. Effects of insanity include characters talking to sock puppets, hearing voices, smashing supplies out of rage or paranoia, and eventually wandering off into the wasteland on delusional (and suicidal) quests.
• Darkest Dungeon II: All the enemy factions in the game are deliberately based on different reactions one could have to the world ending: The Fanatics represent anarchic destruction and iconoclastry, the Lost Battalion represent having a Despair Event Horizon, the Plague Eaters represent self-serving gluttony and hedonism, the Fisherfolk represent desperately seeking any form of self-preservation at any cost, and the cultists represent nihilistic religious fervor.
• A recurring element of the Dead Rising game series are the Psychopaths; game bosses who are humans that become a threat to the protagonist. Some of the psychopaths were always bad guys and took advantage of the societal collapse, while others were normal people who snapped at seeing other people getting eaten by zombies and becoming a threat to themselves and those around them. Examples include a clown who snapped after zombies killed his audience, a gun store owner who shoots anyone who comes near his store, a Vietnam veteran who is stuck in a flashback after seeing his granddaughter killed, and so on.
• During Hunk's level in Resident Evil: The Umbrella Chronicles, his radio starts picking up outside broadcasts as he makes his way through the station, with one of them being a radio station DJ having gone Laughing Mad as his booth is surrounded by zombies.

Western Animation

• American Dad!: Played for Laughs in "The 200", after the world was reduced to a post-apocalyptic wasteland where "the 200" roam. Many of the Smiths' former neighbors in Langley Falls have devolved into cannibals who file their teeth down to points, but Lewis at least is still quite affable with the Smiths while planning to eat them.
• Amphibia: After King Andrias plunges Amphibia into war in the third season, one of the problems the resistance must deal with is roving bands of marauders. In “Sasha’s Angels” we meet one such group, who were just ordinary people who were driven mad by the chaos around them.
  Brian: I used to be a tax accountant. Now I drink the blood of my enemies and eat dessert for breakfast!
• Castlevania (2017): A regional case happened to Zamfir after the city of Targoviste was destroyed by Dracula's forces^note Given the standards of the time, the destruction of a country or even a city alone could be equated in the people's minds to a modern day idea of an apocalypse. It's revealed that the King and Queen whom Zamfir has been redirecting the survivors' much-needed resources towards have been Dead All Along: Zamfir, having tried and failed to save them during the city's destruction, has since propped up their corpses in their secluded chamber and convinced herself that they're only sleeping and will magically wake eventually.
• Final Space: Kevin Van Newton, the survivor of Earth's destruction introduced in Season 3, having been living underground on the planet's devastated shell ever since it was dragged into Final Space. Being all alone for months on a dying Earth dragged into another dimension, with only a horde of KVN units for company, Van Newton unsurprisingly has a few screws loose when he's first introduced; chiding himself to remember that his regular hallucinations aren't real, having apparently passed his time making a "turd museum" offscreen, and loudly ordering Gary and Quinn to "REST!" in his own bed (and even climbing in next to them, to their discomfort) when he first meets them.
• The Powerpuff Girls (1998): In "Speed Demon" after the girls accidentally time travel into the future, it is revealed most of Townsville went insane following their sudden disappearance and the city being conquered by Him; Professor Utonium has become a senile, delusional recluse, desperatly trying to recreate the Girls (and attack the real ones when they find him, thinking they're just hallucinations), Miss Bellum is a shrieking madwoman living in the ruins of City Hall, driven insane by the death of the Mayor, and Miss Keene has been standing in the same spot of the school where she last saw the Girls before they disappeared - 50 years ago.
  Keene: I just stood there waving goodbye... I just stood there waving goodbye... I just stood there waving goodbye...
• This happen to Polaris in Wolverine and the X-Men (2009) when the Phoenix destroys the entire world. Polaris stays in the ruins of Genosha and is reduced to an emotional wreck.

Real Life

• Though by no means an apocalypse in the usual term, the COVID-19 pandemic has had provably negative effects on people's general mental well-being due to general paranoia, extensive online misinformation, and quarantine processes that have forced people to stay inside and not be in contact with other human beings; all of these effects and more caused a spike in suicidality, depression, anxiety disorders and so on, especially for children and teenagers.

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