Rape Leads To Insanity / Literature

• Averted in Dragon Bones: No rape victim ever becomes ax-crazy, and the fact that Ward's mother is The Ophelia is not only due to (implied) marital rape, but the overall abusiveness of her husband and her own drug abuse that resulted from it. Some people behave in a seemingly irrational way, like Garranon, who is in a relationship with a man who is responsible for the murder of his father and his own rape, but apart from such isolated coping mechanisms, the characters get to keep their sanity.
• The Chronicles of Thomas Covenant has this as a major theme. Covenant rapes a girl early in his first visit to The Land, and it haunts him throughout the ensuing stories. Part of the consequences is that Lena (the girl) definitely loses it because of the rape.
• Tender Is the Night: Nicole's sexual relationship with her father when she was a teenager (hence statutory rape) leads to her becoming schizophrenic.
• Speak: The book centers around a teenager named Melinda, who's just entered the 9^th grade. She's not exactly the most popular kid in school, due almost entirely to her calling the police at a Wild Teen Party last summer. After the events of said party, Melinda goes from a bright, outgoing, friendly teenager to a bitter, angry, depressed one. Her grades go down the toilet, her parents are alarmed, and Melinda can't find the words to tell anyone what really happened; eventually, she stops speaking almost entirely. She also self harms with a paper clip once and seems to have a form of PTSD due to the event; she sees a frog they are going to dissect being pinned down in science class and has a Freak Out as she remembers her own situation (later revealed) to be similar to the frogs. The plot mostly centers around Melinda's gradual decline, up until The Reveal of how she was raped by the local Jerk Jock Andy Evans, and then her gradual climb out of the hole.
• Clarissa: Clarissa is raped by Lovelace while being held captive by him. She goes into a catatonic state for a long time, after which she can only write a broken, incomprehensible letter. She does get better, but never fully recovers.
• Nimue in The Warlord Chronicles wasn't the most stable person around to begin with, but her rape at the hands of King Gundleus pushed her over the edge. When she got over the worst trauma, she was actually grateful in a way, as a great priestess must pass through three severe trials on their path to true power according to her beliefs, and the rape counted for two of them. But it doesn't prevent her from exacting revenge brutal enough to make battle-hardened warriors cringe when she gets Gundleus in her hands.
• In The Perks of Being a Wallflower, Charlie's aunt was raped as a young girl, which led to her having serious psychological issues, which is why she herself molested Charlie which led to Charlie becoming a shy wallflower and suicidal as well as depressed.
• In '80s postapocalypse series C.A.D.S, Book 4 Tech Strike Force. C.A.D.S members Billy Dixon and Colonel Dean Sturgis lose their Power Armour and are later captured by the Soviets. Taken aboard a submarine, KGB torturer Revin determines Sturgis is too tough to break directly so he's Forced to Watch as Revin breaks Billy's fingers and rapes him. After being rescued by other C.A.D.S operatives, Billy gets progressively worse psychologically claiming not to remember what happened in the sub. It reaches a point where Billy tries to rape a girl from the mountain community that the C.A.D.S are staying at and the rest of the C.A.D.S were going to execute him until Sturgis intervenes.
• Justified in Codex Alera, in which Odiana was driven mad by being raped while wearing a discipline collar just as her powers as The Empath were coming in. Being forced to feel pleasure, both due to the discipline collar and being able to feel what her rapists were feeling broke her mind, and left her the Ax-Crazy Psycho for Hire Ophelia she is today.
• In the second book of The Sword of Truth series, a queen (Kahlan's sister) is left in a prison for a few days with several criminals. She is rescued right before an execution. At first, she's catatonic, then suicidal, then she seems to recover, but ends up incapable of fighting the very enemies who threw her in the prison.
• Zarate Arkham in Daniel Gonzalez’s horror novel Un grito en las tinieblas was raped by her father, causing her several psychological problems and was submitted once in a mental institution. This is a major plot in the novel.
• Nadine Cross become catatonic after being forcibly impregnated by Randall Flagg in The Stand.
• A Series of Unfortunate Events: Throughout the series, Count Olaf hints at having a Villainous Crush on Violet and having inclinations of meaning to rape her which terrifies her and understandably Squicks her out. It's implied in the first book when one of Olaf's mooks has Violet captive and reassures him "I understand boss. She's yours boss." that the hook handed man is reassuring Olaf he won't lay a hand on Violet because Olaf wants to be the first one to sexually assault her and lay claim to her. Olaf also rubs a knife against her thigh in the second book and in the tv series touches Violet while telling Klaus he'll touch whatever he wants. The Hostile Hospital book mentions that Olaf was the one to prep her for surgery (ie. changing her into the hospital gown). Given that, the fact that Violet seems much more prone to having breakdowns after the eighth book (PTSD, much?), and how much more smug Olaf acts around the children, Olaf may have done more than just changed her clothes while he had her in his clutches. He also refers to her good looks more than once and has no concept of personal space as do other male characters all of which traumatized her.
• In the Dear America book One Eye Laughing, The Other Weeping, set in Nazi-occupied Austria, there's a scene where the Jews in the neighborhood, including the protagonist's family, are rounded up by the Nazis. Her father and brother later describe being forced to clean anti-Hitler graffiti and to spit in each other's faces, but her mother returns with torn clothing and refuses to say what happened to her when she was separated from the men; the implication is fairly clear. She falls into a deep depression and ultimately takes her own life.
• Carnival from the Deepgate Codex series. The rape was particularly brutal, and even after three millennia, she's still not over it.
• In Mary Gentle's Ash: A Secret History, Ash, aged eight, is raped in the book's very first pages. She kills her attackers, and this begins a life of violence. It's part of what makes her into someone who's callous and lacking in introspection.
• In Fifty Shades of Grey, Christian Grey was underage when an adult woman had sex with him. He denies that this was rape, and the heroine is jealous instead of disgusted when she meets his rapist, but in any case it was statutory rape. Considering his inability to differentiate between consensual sex and rape in the relationship with Ana, it is highly unlikely that this sexual abuse didn't affect him negatively.
• Part of the reason that Kennit, of the Liveship Traders trilogy, is so messed up is that he was repeatedly raped (among other abuse) as a child. This leads to...repercussions, later.
• Sisterhood Series by Fern Michaels: The first book Weekend Warriors reveals that three bikers raped Kathryn Lucas in front of her disabled husband, and they knew that her husband was disabled and helpless to stop them. Naturally, she was left badly scarred by this. The book has her and her new friends track down the three bikers responsible and give them the John Wayne Bobbit treatment in order for her to obtain closure in this matter. After that book, her attitude remains as combative, confrontational, explosive and fiery as ever, which suggests that her behaviour may simply be part of who she is, and not just the result of her being raped. Or perhaps that the scars were too deep to be healed by one act of vengeance....
• Used to effect in Nick Cave's And the Ass Saw the Angel when toward the end, the narrator reveals that he got raped one time. He's already so completely insane that its lack of effect on him feels wholly in-character.
• In Books of the Raksura, the main character, Moon, a Raksura, never saw another member of his species and didn't even know how they were called or if he was the only one left. Moon was desperately trying to find any signs, anything about his race, until he found a city attacked by the Fell, a race of vicious flying predators who eat intelligent beings. There, a Fell ruler (always male gender) called Liheas tried to brainwash him into thinking he was Fell too, and then raped him, after which Moon realized he was not one of them and broke the ruler's neck while the ruler was sleeping, then set the room on fire and escaped. Because of this traumatic event, he stopped all attempts to ever try to find his race, didn't care anymore about himself for a long time, and became cynical, wary and distrustful of others, especially of the Fell and even more of the Raksura.
• Let the Right One In: In the book Håkan starts off as a pedophile murdering someone for their blood, which is pretty creepy to begin with, and just gets worse as the story goes on. The incident when he pours acid over his face stands out, along with all the subsequent descriptions of what his face looks like afterward. Mindless!Vampire!Håkan is even worse, especially when he tries to rape Eli. Cranked up to eleven with Eli as he escapes nigh rape, unwittingly traping Tommy inside the completely dark bomb shelter together with Disfigured!Mindless!Zombie!Rapist!Vampire!Håkan for several hours. Tommy manages to pull through, but is clearly not all that well adjusted afterwards. Also, Eli's castration scene reads like a sexual assault affecting his sense of self and perhaps sanity worst of all.
• Carrie: Carrie's mother Margaret White turns out to have a pathological fear of sex, coming from equal parts religious fanaticism and the fact that her husband raped her, resulting in Carrie's birth (the fact that she ended up enjoying the act just messes her up even worse, if that's possible). This resulted in some seriously repressive parenting to Evil Matriarch levels, to the point where she didn't even tell Carrie about her body's natural processes as she got older, resulting in her first period in her senior year being traumatic in more ways than one.
• In the backstory of Shadow of the Conqueror, many of the girls that Dayless the Conqueror raped and abused were reduced to empty shells, "their minds snapping like twigs." Dayless shrugged his shoulders, decided that they'd "killed themselves," and executed them.
• Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows implies that this happened to Albus Dumbledore's sister Ariana. Her other brother vaguely mentions an attack by a gang of Muggle boys that left her too traumatized to control her magical abilities.
• In Hawaii by James Michener the leper colony on Molokai is a Wretched Hive of utter depravity because there is no law. As the fullest expression of this depravity, women exiled there whose leprosy has not disfigured them yet are gang-raped for months by the terrifyingly disfigured long-term inhabitants of the leper colony until the women are driven insane and become promiscuous, either out of nihilism or the need to deny that the advance of their leprosy has rendered them undesirable, foreshadowing their deaths.

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