Sanity Slippage Song / Music

In the art of music, songs about people descending into madness is a lot more common than you'd think.

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• Almost all of the songs on Misery Loves Me's debut album Amnesia, but "Endless Night" is a notable example for being the song which literally showcases the process of the main character slowly falling into insanity, and even fetures a different voice for her dark thoughts. Also, there's a lot of screaming:
  SO LET ME AWAKEN!
• "Billie Jean" by Michael Jackson ends with Jackson repeating again and again and again that he was never involved with Billie Jean and that "the kid is not my son".
• Quite a few Cannibal Corpse songs, the one most well known being "Hammer Smashed Face."
  Something's inside me, it's coming out
  I feel like killing you
  Let loose of the anger, held back too long, my blood runs cold
  Through my anatomy dwells another being
  Rooted in my cortex, a servant to its bidding.
• "I'm Only Joking" by KONGOS sounds like one also. At best, it's about someone talking insane without realizing it.
• Very common in denpa song. Totemotomotachi by Millirobo.beta is one such example.
• "Mama's Broken Heart" by Miranda Lambert may primarily be a breakup song, but it's made quite clear that the singer has descended into insanity, and it's strongly implied that she now wishes to murder her ex.
• The Ramones do this a lot. For example, "Gimme Gimme Shock Treatment" and "I Wanna Be Sedated," among others.
• "Something to Live For" by Shannon Wright and Yann Tiersen. What kind of relationship does this woman actually have?! Arguably Yann Tiersen's "A Secret Place" as well.
• Fireaxe's four hour Rock Opera Food for the Gods has several: "Hatred Revenge and Death," "Tapestry of Pain," and "River of Madness" come to mind.
• "Bodies" by Drowning Pool — as the name suggests. Either this or a Murder Ballad depending on how you interpret the lyrics. Not to mention "Tear Away".
• "The Green Manalishi (With The Two-Prong Crown)" by Fleetwood Mac, written by Peter Green about his Real Life Sanity Slippage. He left the band not long afterwards. Later covered by Judas Priest.
• Pick a Foetus song. Any Foetus song.
• the Mountain Goats' "Wild Sage."
  • 'Lovecraft in Brooklyn' is a good example as well.
• "Psycho Killer" from Talking Heads
  • Arguably "Cities" as well. The music is very frantic, a lot of the lyrics don't make much sense, and at one point the singer actually says "But it all works out — you know, I'm a little freaked out!"
  • "Memories Can't Wait" as well. Creepy music with weird droning and electronic wailing sounds in the background, and the lyrics are like this:
    There's a party in my mind and I hope it never stops / There's a party up there all the time / They'll party 'til they drop / Other people can go home / Other people they can split / I'm stuck here all the time / I can never quit...
  • Y'know, we could probably just classify Fear of Music as a Sanity Slippage Album. The other songs are about things like how air can hurt you, distrust of animals, complete nonsense, and drugs.
• "Don't Let Me Down" by The Chainsmokers feat. Daya tells of the singer slowly losing her grip and desperately reaching out to the one person she feels (or at least hopes) she can count on.
  So, don't let me, don't let me, don't let me down.
  I think I'm losing my mind now.
  It's in my head. Darling, I hope
  That you'll be here when I need you the most.
• "They're Coming to Take Me Away, Ha-Haaa!" by Napoleon XIV. Apparently, his mind broke when his dog ran away. We get her side of the story in another song.
  • Bonus points as the B-side of the single is "!aaaaah-aaH yawA eM ekaT ot gnimoC eryehT"
    • All but one of Napoleon XIV's songs qualify for this trope. Of course, it's quite fitting, given the name.
• A number of of Montreal songs.
• "Something Is Squeezing My Skull" by Morrissey
• Queen:
  • "Stone Cold Crazy" from Sheer Heart Attack is narrated by a guy who believes he's Al Capone, acting out his delusions on the street.
  • "I'm Going Slightly Mad" off of the band's penultimate album, Innuendo, acts as a reflection on frontman Freddie Mercury's own struggle with AIDS-related dementia. This being Queen, the song takes a darkly comedic look at the issue by portraying it in a number of witty and cartoonish ways, up to and including the line "I think I'm a banana tree."
• "Flagpole Sitta" by Harvey Danger is a tongue-in-cheek example riffing on angsty songs that were popular among the youth of The '90s.
• "Unwell" by Matchbox Twenty. It denies being one of these ("I'm not crazy, I'm just a little unwell"), but it's increasingly obvious that the narrator is lying to himself. Unusually, the overall intention seems to be to humanize mental illness and make the listener feel that the narrator is just a normal person who happens to be going through a horrible thing.
  • "Disease" is also a confused admirer's/Obsession Song with some very depressive lyrics..
    "I can't live without you, tell me what I'm supposed to do about it"
    "Keep your distance from me, don't pay no attention to me, I got a disease"
• "Art of Life," "Week End," and "Drain" by X Japan. "Art of Life" is an aversion here, since it's a song that starts out as a Sanity Slippage Song, but is actually the story of recovery from a mental and physical breakdown....
  • "Doubt," "Hurry Go Round," "Genkai Haretsu," "Breeding" (oh god yes "Breeding"), "Lemoned I Scream," "Drink or Die," and "Sold Some Attitude" by hide are ''all' Sanity Slippage Songs.
• Pink Floyd:
  • "Brain Damage".
  • The Wall is a Sanity Slippage Concept Album.
  • "One of My Turns".
  • "Jugband Blues" by Floyd's original front man Syd Barrett. Who actually did have mental issues, likely brought on or at least exacerbated by drug use.
    • Much of Barrett's output provides examples of this trope, both from his tenure in Pink Floyd and as a solo artist. Some of his examples with Floyd, such as "Vegetable Man" and "Scream Thy Last Scream (Old Woman with a Casket)", weren't officially released until 2016 as his bandmates felt they were too voyeuristic, though they were available on bootlegs for quite some time.
• "Angry Chair" by Alice in Chains.
• "The Garden" by Guns N' Roses.
• "Am I Going Insane (Radio)" by Black Sabbath. And while we're on the subject, how can we possibly forget "Paranoid"? There is also the less well-known "Megalomania" which could be viewed as a continuation piece.
  • Heck, most of Ozzy Osbourne's stuff in general might qualify. "Crazy Train" is the best example.
• "All So Nice in the Nuthouse" by Chad Morgan
• "Inmate's Lullaby" - Gentle Giant
• They Might Be Giants
  • "Absolutely Bill's Mood":
    My room is comfortably small
    With rubber lining the walls
    And there's someone always calling my name
    He calls when I'm alone
    And he calls when I'm not home
    And he calls when I'm stuck out in the rain
    I'm insane, I'm insane!
    I'm insane, I'm insane!
  • "Subliminal" is about a man who starts seeing subliminal messages everywhere he goes after a car accident.
    As I got hit by a car, there was a message for me
    As I went through the windshield, I noticed something
    Subliminal, in an unnoticeable way
    Important and hard to see
  • "Apophenia" has a narrator who's not only a bit crazy, but is projecting his delusional paranoia onto his partner, who might not even exist.
    Picture of a hunched old lady holding a dog and
    Telling you what to do
    Seemingly random arrangement of turbid material
    Telling you what to do
    It’s only tea leaves
    Stop being dramatic
    Next thing you’ll be saying that I’ve been
    Hallucinating you all along
  • "Unpronounceable", which is rumored to be based on a now famous Reddit post, where the poster describes living about ten years of life while unconscious for only a few minutes.
    Time stopped, when you said hello
    When you left, the clock began to breathe again
    Now all I do is think about the puzzle that remains
    Your name it is unpronounceable
    Distorted and illegible
    I never figured out what that was
    If I couldn't then I doubt I ever will
    Rewind the tape, review the blur
    Never the same, but still obscure
    Turn up the sound and hear the white noise
    Zoom and enhance if that were even a real thing, which it isn't
    Stare at the static long enough you'll be hypnotized be hypnotized
• "Mr. Psycho" and "Drop Dead" - Space
• Oingo Boingo was built on this trope.
  • "Insanity". If the lyrics aren't any indication, go watch the music video.
  • "What You See" seems to be about a record company executive who growing more and more insane over the course of the song.
• In hip-hop, Eminem's "Stan" and "Kim".
• Most of the back catalogue of Roky Erikson, often fairly explicitly, but also expressed through mildly or entirely raving lyrics about aliens, demons, zombies, mutants, and his time spent working in the Kremlin with a two-headed dog.
• Also used to great effect in Peter Maxwell Davies' Eight Songs for a Mad King, a contemporary musical setting of some of King George the Third's ravings.
• "A Real Indication" by Angelo Badalamenti & The Thought Gang on the Twin Peaks:Fire walk with me Soundtrack. Oh, so very much...
• Rockwell's "Somebody's Watching Me". See the video.
• Disturbed: They're called Disturbed.
  • "Down with the Sickness" tells of child abuse as a metaphor for society punishing the "freaks," but the main point is that the narrator has just... snapped.
  • "Voices".
  • "Perfect Insanity"
• David Bowie's "All the Madmen" is about somebody who's afraid to leave the asylum and go back to drab normality. According to Bowie the world outside the asylum is the one that's insane.
  • Another example is "Breaking Glass," in which the protagonist tells a girl "you're such a wonderful person/but you've got problems"...while psychotically trashing her entire bedroom.
  • There's also "Janine" and "Unwashed And Somewhat Slightly Dazed." And possibly "Space Oddity" (if you interpret the lyrics to mean Space Madness).
  • Also 'Candidate', where the unnamed protagonist propositions a prostitute for what starts out as a drink at a bar, and ends with joint suicide.
• "Le Café" by Oldelaf, Played for Laughs. The protagonist starts out polite and calm, and gradually gets more insane through the song because of a caffeine high. He notably jumps up and down through Paris, kills his secretary for worrying about his whereabouts, a little old old lady for asking him what hour it is, and yells at his son who was just telling him he was first in class.
• Tom Lehrer's "I Hold Your Hand In Mine", from Songs by Tom Lehrer: starts out sounding romantic, quickly goes quite wrong. And more so with each succeeding verse....
• "Girl Anachronism" by the Dresden Dolls. Please excuse her for the day, it's just the way the medication makes her...
  • To continue on the Amanda Palmer track, "Runs In The Family."
  "Me, well I'm well, well I mean I'm in hell, well I still have my health, at least that's what they tell me, if wellness is this what in hell's name is sickness?
• Alice Cooper's From the Inside is a whole album of insanity songs. We're all crazy... Also "Ballad of Dwight Fry" from Love It to Death. Heck, let's just say 80% of Cooper's output...
  • "Steven" seems to be about someone whose episodes are triggered by a baby's crying.
  You've only lived a minute
  of your life
  I must be dreaming
  please stop screaming
  Is someone calling me
  I hear my name!
  STEVEN! (X3)
• "The Doctor's Wife" by The Clockwork Quartet. A Steampunk song about a doctor, trying and failing to cure his wife's deadly illness, over the course of several months. The ending is amazing.
• "Basket Case" by Green Day. This one notably suggests that the singer's turn to madness is completely unjustified; a therapist only tells him You Need to Get Laid and a prostitute then tells him to Quit Your Whining. The singer himself admits he is "melodramatic" and that he has "nothing" to whine about.
• "I Think I Lost My Headache", by Queens of the Stone Age, is about (possibly drug-induced) paranoia and derails into sing-song trumpet noodling at the end.
  It's all my head, I know, or so they tell me so...
• "Welcome Home (Sanitarium)" by Metallica, about the trials and tribulations of a crazyhouse inmate.
  • "Harvester of Sorrow" is about a man snapping out and possibly killing his family.
  • Also, The Frayed Ends of Sanity
  • Metallica ain't the only one with a sanity slippage song called "Welcome Home"- there's also Coheed and Cambria. "Please make up your mind girl, before I hope you die..."
• Throwing Muses' Mania. Who left me alone?! What do you mean, you're alone...
  • Or "Vicky's Box", from the Muses' first LP:
  He won't ride in cars anymore/It reminds him of blowjobs/That he's a queer
  And his hair stuck to the roof/Like a pigeon on a tire
  ...Home is where the heart lies/The heart lies/The hard lies/Welcome home
  WelCOME HOME!
  ...I only love pieces of things that I hate
  ...You may be dreaming/You may be bleeding/You may be in this box
  A kitchen is a place where you prePARE...and clean up.
• Roughly half the songs on Eels' 1998 masterpiece Electro-Shock Blues, such as "My Descent Into Madness", the title track, and "The Medication Is Wearing Off". The rest of the songs are mostly about death and grief. E's sanity really was slipping, but yours would too if you'd just gone through your schizophrenic sister committing suicide, your mother dying of cancer and your father dying of a heart attack in the space of two years.
  • Several of the tracks are from the perspective of E's sister. Also notable on that front is the title track, which is taken from the diary she kept in the hospital.
• Anberlin's "Reclusion"
  • "Hello Alone" doesn't paint a great picture of mental health, either.
• From First to Last's "Note to Self"
• Mötley Crüe has several, notably "Just another Psycho" and the unreleased track "Mood Ring".
• "Rose's Turn" from Gypsy is Rose's climactic nervous breakdown on stage.
  • "Everything's Coming Up Roses" is another one for Rose. She's obviously not a very emotionally healthy person.
• Emilie Autumn's "Opheliac".
  • "God Help Me" with that Madness Mantra too.
  • Pretty much everything from the Opheliac CD. Which makes sense, given certain circumstances.
  • Unlaced is a sanity slippage instrumental album (Clearly about her time in a psych ward.)
• Iron Maiden's "The Clairvoyant".
  I wonder why, I wonder how
  That it seems that my power's getting stronger every day
  I feel a strength, an inner fire
  But I'm scared I won't be able to control it anymore...
  • Said lack of control power ends up causing a catastrophe in the album's storyline and "Only the Good Die Young" detailing how he's lost his sanity completely... sung by Lucifer himself.
• Becoming Insane by Infected Mushroom.
  Wake me up before I change again
  Remind me the story that I won't get insane
  Tell me why it's always the same
  Explain me the reason why I'm so much in pain
• Half the songs on the Otep album House of Secrets, where Otep adds to the distressing lyrics by alternating between Metal Scream and the voice of a terrified little girl.
• Nox Arcana's Blackthorn Asylum is essentially a 21-track trope codifier. As the album's focus is on an insane asylum, loss of sanity and outright insanity are the big focus here. Bonus points for Nox Arcana being almost purely instrumental (there's a touch of narration), and still pulling it off.
  • Also, the thirteenth track is titled Sanity Slipping. No joke.
• Arguably, "Echoplex" by Nine Inch Nails.
  • The album The Downward Spiral.
  • Also "Somewhat Damaged". Apparently it's the song Tom Hiddleston listens to when getting in the mood to play Loki:
  In the back, off the side and far away
  Is a place where I hide, where I stay
  Tried to say, tried to ask, I needed to
  All alone, by myself, where were you?
  How could I ever think it funny how
  Everything they swore it wouldn't change, is different now
  Just like you would always say, we'll make it through
  Then my head fell apart, and where were you?
  How could I ever think it funny how
  Everything you swore would never change, is different now
  Like you said, you and me, make it through
  Didn't quite, fell apart, WHERE THE FUCK WERE YOU?
  • "Slipping Away", appropriately enough.
• Sugar by System of a Down, especially at the end.
• "Binge And Purge" by Clutch
• "Talking To Myself" by The Linda Lindas deals with obsessive thoughts and sounds like a cry for help
  We're all talking to ourselves
  About things we cannot help

• "I Am Slowly Going Crazy," a children's song of uncertain origin.
• Several of Happy Rhodes' songs; it's a theme throughout her very diverse musical omnibus.
• "The Painter" by Chris de Burgh, which is sung from the perspective of an unhinged and insanely jealous man murdering his wife for what appears to be an imaginary fling with the titular painter, and for plus points is also sung in a manner similar to "Psycho" Strings.
• "Climbing Up the Walls" by Radiohead. "Do not cry out or hit the alarm, we are friends til we die."
  • That track sounds scary. "No Surprises" however is so pretty and inoffensive, it could be played in supermarkets. Well...so long as no one pays attention to what Thom's singing:
    A heart that's full up like a landfill
    A job that slowly kills you
    Bruises that won't heal
    ...A handshake of carbon monoxide
    • Not to mention that over the crescendo, the chorus is imperceptibly singing "get me out of here" over and over again.
  • "Paranoid Android" too, at least in part.
    • Climbing up the Walls is possibly a Most Triumphant Example, even without understanding the lyrics.
  • "Everything in its Right Place" and "How to Disappear Completely" are this, bordering on BSoD Song. The lyrics of both consist almost entirely of Madness Mantra.
• "Madhouse" by Anthrax.
• Many songs of ''Agatha Christie'', a russian gothic rock group.
• In Ruddigore, Despard and Margaret sing a song ("I once was a very abandoned person") all about how crazy and evil they used to be, before they got better. But as soon as the song's over, Margaret goes right back to being mad. So it's sort of a Sanity Immediately-Pre-Slippage Song.
• Garbage's "Bleed Like Me". The song alone might qualify, but the music video is about a nurse tending to the mentally ill and swiftly slipping into insanity as she does so.
  • "Medication".
  • "I Think I'm Paranoid" is not really an example, but could be mistaken for one, given the title and refrain. For the most part, it's a love song, although perhaps a love song from the perspective of someone who's mentally ill given lines like "prop me up with with another pill".
• Avenged Sevenfold's "Almost Easy". It even has the lyrics "I'm not insane" repeated several times.
• A large amount of tool songs can be interpreted this way. "Prison Sex" is perhaps the most overt (and by a large margin the squickiest) example.
  • "Rosetta Stoned" is another notable example, if you're able to actually distinguish what the lyrics are in the first place.
• "Dieter Meyers Inst." and "På ditt skift" by Kaizers Orchestra. Both involve mental institutions— the first is the character losing his mind in one, the second is about the character killing the director of the institution.
  • "Bak et halleluja" is another Sanity Slippage Song.
• "Headfirst for Halos" by My Chemical Romance is a perky one.
• Several songs by The Used qualify— "Lunacy Fringe", "Take It Away", "The Bird and the Worm", "Come Undone", "Paralyzed", etc, etc...
• "The Mind Electric" by Miracle Musical. It's about a man who is held on trial. He pleads that "his brain has claimed its glory over him" and he "has a good heart, albeit insane", which leads to him being sent to the infirmary for electroshock treatment. This is incredibly painful and distressing for him, including lines like "Someone help me understand what's going on inside my mind/Doctor I can't tell if I'm not me". However, the protagonist survives to the end of it, and even admits that he's somewhat calm now.
• Another "whole album" case: Quadrophenia, by The Who. Features such songs as "Is It In My Head?" and "Doctor Jimmy."
  • Not an obvious choice but a good one. The first track with vocals, "The Real Me", sets the tone: "I'm crazy Ma, help me/'I know how it feels, son/'Cause it runs in the family.'" "Helpless Dancer" extends the implication of insanity to include not only the narrator, but the entire world.
    • The Who did this long before Quadrophenia with the John-Entwistle-penned "Whiskey Man." It's all about a guy who has an imaginary friend and ends up locked in a mental hospital for it.
• Rihanna's "Disturbia" probably qualifies.
• "Where's Gerrold?", which is the final song from Orgy's Concept Album Vapor Transmission. "Cover my eyes / I'm feeling sick / I'm getting paranoid."
• Juliet by Sonata Arctica. The mood and sound of the song changes every thirty-ish seconds as well as there being all sorts of strange noises and utter mindfuckery going on in the background. It's subtle but it's possible to hear stuff like high pitched screeches, lalala's, weird twinkly noises and possibly a train whistle. It's not exactly a song about going insane, since it's part of a series of four songs and the character went insane in the first and pretty much went more insane in the other three. This is the last song, and fittingly the most insane. The other three songs are Caleb), The End of This Chapter and Don't Say A Word.
• Quite a bit of Korn's early production was about this, with the breaking point usually identifiable by the point where Jonathan Davis switches to a sing-song voice, and switches back to his normal when it's time to go Ax-Crazy. One of the interlude tracks is even named "Am I Going Crazy".
  • The most epic example of this is "Daddy," off their self-titled album, where Jonathan Davis get through the song, starts getting really emotional, and then breaks down and sobs for ten minutes while the rest of the band self-consciously improvises music around him, ending only when someone walks out of the studio and slams the door.
• "Flowers on the Wall", by the Statler Brothers.
• "Lighten Up McGraw" by Crack The Sky seems to be this trope, but it's a little hard to tell whether some of the weirder lyrics are meant to represent insanity or if they're just regular old Word Salad Lyrics. But considering that it has lines like "Well, I eat what I am and I'm not overdressed / I just can't understand why I'm sometimes depressed" and "I haven't giggled in thirty-five months", it probably counts anyways.
• "Leica" by Havalina could be interpreted as this in light of the final lines:
  And nothing ever seems strange
  when you're finally insane.
  I could sure use a little help.
• "Insane in the Brain" by Cypress Hill is definitely this trope; the only question is whether it's being Played for Laughs or played straight. Its refrain is "Insane in the membrane / Insane in the brain!"
• "Isolated" by Chiasm
  The monsters make me hide
  Perhaps i'll eat myself alive
  Internally there's nothing left for me to be
  • For that matter, pretty much anything by Chiasm.
• "Undone (The Sweater Song)" by Weezer.
• Oddly enough, Elvis had one in the ratherrather trippy "Edge of Reality" from Live a Little, Love a Little.
  I can hear strange voices echo
  Laughing with mockery
  The border line of doom I'm facing
  The edge of reality
• Pet Shop Boys' "I Want To Wake Up". The verses cover the narrator simply having bad dreams about his unrequited love, then progress to him suddenly crying whenever "Tainted Love" comes on the radio, declaring single-minded obsession for the love interest, and finally the ominous line "Play with fire, play with guns/It's easy to impress someone"^note  This from a time period when the attempted murder of Ronald Reagan by a crazed Jodie Foster fan was still quite fresh.. At the end, a breakdown is implied as he desperately shouts, "I want to wake up, wake up, wake up with you!" All this to some creepy Lyrical Dissonance.
• "I'm So Sick" by Flyleaf. This is the chorus:
  I'm so sick, in-fected-with
  Where I live, let me live without this
  Empty bliss, selfishness
  I'm so sick
• "Mad World" by Tears for Fears. Opening to the chorus:
  I find it kind of funny and I find it kind of sad
  The dreams in which I'm dying are the best I've ever had
  • Only the Tears For Fears version though. The Gary Jules version is more of a Spiral Into Depression song.
• Surprisingly enough, Slipknot has quite a few. "Eyeless" comes to mind: the first word sang (er, screamed) in the song is "INSANE!"
• "See You All In Hell", by Jonathan Coulton begins with a list of things needed to film a scene for a movie, and ends with "And now my left arm is not working. I fear nothing anymore. See you all in hell." The weird part is that this is apparently made from a text message a friend of Coulton's actually received.
• Frou Frou's "Psychobabble". It's about a hostage situation that may or may not exist only in the mind of one, and by the end it's hard to tell who's who, or even if there were two to begin with.
• Tourniquet, Haunted, The Other Side, Lose Control, Even In Death- Evanescence
• The song "Mathilde" by Jacques Brel shows the singer slowly losing his grip until he's willing to accept back a woman he knows will make him miserable.
• "Don't arrange to have me sent to no asylum. I'm just as sane as anyone. It's just a game I play for fun..."
  • "Just Another Nervous Wreck" seems to play this trope much straighter.
• Midnight Syndicate's "Gates Of Delirium" tells the story of an asylum. Wanna guess how many of the songs fit this trope?
• Waffle King by "Weird Al" Yankovic tells the story of a man that makes an usually good waffle recipe, then becomes convinced that he has become a celebrity, before going A God Am I.
• "Seasons In The Abyss" by Slayer.
• The Pogues love to do this, often combining it with Lyrical Dissonance.
• Most Doors songs can be interpreted as Sanity Slippage Songs. It's quite explicit in "Celebration Of The Lizard King":
  Once I had a little game
  I liked to crawl back in my brain
  I think you know the game I mean
  I mean the game called "go insane"
• The Crystalline Effect's songs "Blue Sea" and (possibly) "Hypothermia".
• Showbread's "I Think I'm Going to See You". Also overlaps with Love Makes You Crazy.
  There's a hole in the fabric of my sanity
  and it's getting big enough to see through
  and on the other side of losing my mind
  I think I'm going to see you.
• Linkin Park's songs "One Step Closer", "Papercut", and "Crawling".
• Three Days Grace's "Animal I Have Become".
• Bob Dylan's "Talkin' John Birch Paranoid Blues", a satire of someone buying too much into the Red Scare and going paranoid bonkers as a result. Played for Laughs all the way.
• Foster the People's "Pumped Up Kicks". Once you realise the lyrics are about a boy getting ready to go on a shooting...
  All the other kids with the pumped up kicks
  You'd better run, better run, outrun my gun
  All the other kids with the pumped up kicks
  You'd better run, better run, faster than my bullet
• The Lonely Island's "Like A Boss" sounds like a Sanity Slippage Song Played for Laughs. A day in the life of The Boss seems normal enough at first ("Talk to Corporate LIKE A BOSS! Approve memos LIKE A BOSS! Lead a workshop LIKE A BOSS! Remember birthdays LIKE A BOSS!") but then The Boss gets rejected by Deborah, and things go downhill fast.
• "Pull Me Under" and "Panic Attack" by Dream Theater both seem to be about this. "A Mind Beside Itself", "Six Degrees of Inner Turbulence", and parts of "Octavarium" also concern various mental disorders.
• The Veronicas have done this many many times, Hook Me Up, When It All Falls Apart, Heavily Broken, Hollywood, Insomnia and How Long, Thus far.
• Delta Goodrem, Nobody Listened:
  Like a train, off the rails, to you
• I Fight Dragons has a song called cRaZie$, although the lyrics may also be interpreted as a sort of "visionaries are seen as crazy" song, depending on how you look at it.
  "Woah-oh-oh, there's a body on the floor, and the crazies, the crazies are coming to life. Woah-oh-oh, I can't take it any more, 'cuz they're crazy, they're crazy, but maybe they're right!"
• "Personal Demons" by Rufus Rex, a side project of Creature Feature, is chock full of crazy, complete with an allusion to Radiohead's "Climbing Up the Walls" ("It's just a matter of time / Till I lose my mind / And start crawling up the walls"). Heck, the opening verse goes:
  Psychosis must be setting in,
  Clouding my perception,
  Social interaction null and void.
  Contact with reality
  Is something I no longer need.
  Now I have insanity on my side!
• Unexpect's songs from the album "In A Flesh Aquarium" and "Fables Of The Sleepless Empire" are ALL about madness and hallucinations and illusions and wonders incomprehensible. Just read any of these song's lyrics.
• "He Used To Cut The Grass" from Frank Zappa's Joe's Garage
  Wait! I've got it!
  I'll be sullen and withdrawn
  I'll dwindle off into the twilight realm of my own secret thoughts
  I'll walk through the parking lot in a semi-catatonic state
  And dream of Guitar notes to go with the loading-zone announcements...
• "Disturbance" and "Cherry Blossom Clinic" by The Move. The former more or less describing an individual's growing psychosis as he grows older; the latter having another person describing various hallucinations he sees as he goes mad in the mental hospital. ^note  both Roy Wood and Ace Kefford had problems with manic depression, but Roy Wood took his pills fairly willingly, but Ace chose to treat it with alcohol and LSD, (and in one horrifying example, heroin) with effects that seem obvious with hindsight.
• "Institutionalized" by Suicidal Tendencies subverts this trope, because while other characters in the song think the protagonist is going insane, the protagonist doesn't.
  • Though the structure of the song strongly indicates that their accusations actually cause him to gradually go insane.
• Many, many songs by Van der Graaf Generator and its frontman Peter Hammill qualify as this, but the finest example is the twenty-three minute epic "A Plague of Lighthouse Keepers." It seems to be about a lighthouse keeper who inadvertently allows a ship to crash, then slowly drives himself mad with guilt, grief, and loneliness. Whether he is Driven to Suicide in the end is deliberately left ambiguous.
• Sweating Bullets by Megadeth. The video further proves the fact.
• Vanessa Amorosi: "I Thought We'd Stay Together" discusses her Heroic RRoD and shutting down creativity after a long term boyfriend left her, because of differing opinions, she then proceeds to mention how much she wants to burn her house down because he used to love her there...and how it makes her very very angry.
• "As Madness Took Me" and "Calling My Name" by Dragonland, the latter of which contains audio clips from Charles Manson.
• "Last Resort" by Papa Roach is a song about someone slowly giving into depression.
• "Spies" by Coldplay is about a paranoid schizophrenic who believes spies are everywhere. It's creepy for a Coldplay song once you know that.
• Assemblage 23's Collapse:
  I'm on the verge of collapse
  I'm on the brink of disaster
  And I'm far more lost than I would like to admit
  I'm at the end of my rope
  I'm on the edge of a breakdown
  And no matter how tightly I hold on, I still slip
• "Complicated Machine" by Future Perfect. "You gave a gift to me, a fragment of insanity... I want to thank you for the neurosis that plagues me".
• "Veteran of the Psychic Wars" by Blue Öyster Cult.
  • Similarly, "Veins" is about a man who has blackouts and thinks that he kills people.
• The entire album "A Shipwreck in the Sand" by Silverstein, with a little bit of unreliable narration in the first song. In the second, once the protagonist of the album finds out his wife has been cheating on him, he begins to slip. At first he merely hides that he knows, and tries to keep going with it... then he finds out it was his best friend who she was cheating on him with. Throw in a song that tells its own story about betrayal, and by the 9th song "I Am the Arsonist", he decides to burn down his house with his wife and daughter in it. He regrets it, goes into save them, his wife (rightly) accuses him of setting the house on fire and they go to court. He's let off because of a lack of evidence, but loses his daughter, and decides to leave the town, driving to a motel where he decides to kill himself. The final song is him reminiscing and realizing that he never could have truly loved her in the first place.
• "Madman Across the Water" by Elton John.
  It's quite peculiar in a funny sort of way
  They think it's very funny everything I say
  Get a load of him, he's so insane
• "Metal Health" by Quiet Riot is an inversion. It's about curing your insanity with The Power of Rock.
• Mental Warp by Insane Clown Posse. It is a very disturbing and surreal song which seems to be told from the point of view of a person who has slipped into a deep psychosis and just descends further and further into incoherence.
  Violent J: "Staring at the ceiling/The roof has a face/It's telling me I don't belong with the human race/He's asking me to join him in eternal sleep/I give him my soul/My body I can keep."
• Axe Murder Boyz' "God Only Knows", about a man who murders a woman, keeps her corpse in his home, has sex with her corpse and consumes her heart.
• Men at Work's "Who Can It Be Now?" could be interpreted as this.
  • There are elements of this in "Overkill" as well.
• Kasabian's Butcher Blues.
• Marina Diamandis' "The Family Jewels" album contains a lot of these.
  • "Mowgli's Road" is perhaps the most notorious, along with "Oh No!" and "Guilty".
• The very track "Electra Heart" itself is an entire Sanity Slippage song, which makes sense when you consider how it's the song that leads up to the moment when Electra breaks down and proceeds to commit suicide.
• Sodom's "Persecution Mania", which is about a Vietnam vet suffering from PTSD.
• "Terminal Eyes" by Al Stewart.
• mothy gives us "And Then the Girl Went Mad" from the Evillious Chronicles, describing how the speaker slowly lost all emotions but wrath while abandoned in a hut in the woods, beginning to hear voices and feel smothered by the darkness. "Evil Food Eater Conchita" similarly has an opsomaniac eat more and more disgusting foods until finally, after eating everyone else in her mansion she eats herself.
• "Meltdown!" by The Aquabats!.
• "Hey There, Cthulhu" by Eben Brooks interweaves descriptions the apparent singer's sanity slippage with the praise for the eponymous Great Old One.
• Ratt's "I'm Insane."
• Anna Russell traces the "gradual mental breakdown of the popular singer" through elated, depressive and schizophrenic stages, until sanity ultimately bottoms out in a song called "Mad."
• Gunpowder Tim vs the Moon Kaiser by The Mechanisms contains a song entitled "Tim Goes Crazy," in which Tim goes Ax-Crazy after his best friend Bertie is killed during the war against the Moon Kaiser.
• In Crazy Man Michael by Fairport Convention, the protagonist's sanity slips from bad to barely functional.
• Lifelover had a lot of these, although the biggest contender has to be Mentral central dialog, which consist of nothing of the repeated phrase which translates to:
  I find no answers,
  - Are there any answers?
  I find no answers,
  - Are there any answers?
  I find no answers,
  - There is no answer!
  • For the benefit of doubt, all of Konkurs is this.
• Skillet's "Monster" is about a person struggling to control their inner demons.
• Melanie Martinez has two songs with this theme in her Concept Album Cry Baby. "Pity Party" involves the titular Cry Baby breaking down because no one came to her birthday party and is set when she's starting to crack. "Mad Hatter" is about Cry Baby embracing her mental instability and slipping much further.
• The Neighbourhood has "Afraid" and "Female Robbery". The former is about being paranoid that everyone you know is lying about liking you and that you're replacable, while the latter is about a friend who has become increasingly mentally unstable.
• The 2016 album by Panic! at the Disco, titled Death Of A Bachelor, has this in "Emperor's New Clothes". It is the point at which the heart-broken bachelor returns to his life of partying and quickly spirals into an unstable mental state. The music video gives a visual representation, showing the singer transforming from a handsome young man into a demonic creature throughout the song.
• Starset has "My Demons", which is about a man dealing with his inner problems.
• Both "Control" and "Gasoline" by Halsey. The former is about someone who is hearing voices and who feels she's losing control, while latter is about someone who is spiraling downwards and who has several unhealthy habits.
• Covered in the album Pac-Man Fever (1982) with both "Pac-Man Fever" and "Goin' Berzerk".
  I think I'm goin' berzerk. I think I'm losing my mind.
  I'm getting lost in the shuffle. It happens every time.
• The favorite topic of Suffocation, to the point that it's easier to list their songs that don't involve the protagonist mentally disintegrating than it is the ones that do. Given their genre, said meltdowns frequently end in violence.
• Soul Inside by Soft Cell:
  And the beat of my heart
  Marks the passing of time
  And I just wanna scream to the sky
  There are times when my mind is an explosion of feelings
  I'm trying to hold on to the soul inside
• Eric Bogle starts to wonder if he is going insane in "Them Old Song Writin' Blues":
  I think my mind's beginnin' to go
  I just found myself wishin' I was Barry Manilow
• Blind Guardian has a few, mostly based on specific source material, but "Another Stranger Me" (notable for the Tomato in the Mirror music video) and "The Black Chamber" both stand out.
• P!nk has more the one of these, but the most obvious example is Don't Let Me Get Me. P!nk actually didn't perform this song for several years, saying she has come to hate it as it saddens her to revisit the way she used to feel while singing this song.
• The Silent by Tragic Tantrum As the song plays you hear the singer getting ever more frantic as those silent little demons and their silent little ways eat her inside out. She even outright tells us:
  It's time my body go to bed
  But who to tend to my dear head?
  The night will soothe it's deadly ways
  Into the realm of the insane
• "I'll Sleep When I'm Dead" by Set It Off is The Insomniac / Sanity Slippage Song.
  As the sun begins to rise
  I can barely shut my eyes
  This crazed, delirious mess
  Laughing at everything I see
  My sanity is spent
• Destiny Potato (now known as Sordid Pink), a prog metal band from Serbia, has a song appropriately titled "Lunatic" on their debut album Lun.
• Gorillaz:
  • A prime example of this is Phase 3's song "Stylo," which mostly consists of Meaningless Meaningful Words and the band's singer 2-D chanting the words "Overload, overload, overload, coming up to the overload" over and over again. Considering that this is the song that takes place in the direct aftermath of his kidnapping by the band's bassist Murdoc, his forced exposure to both him and the cybernetic replica of his seemingly-dead bandmate/surrogate little sister, and that within the song itself he's just had to witness both said cybernetic replica shooting a cop off the freeway, and Murdoc managing to land the both of them in a car chase with Bruce Willis, having a bit of a breakdown is a rather understandable reaction.
  • Also qualifying is Phase 6's song "PAC-MAN," whose music video consists of 2-D having a minor breakdown while playing the Pac-Man game that Murdoc bought for him, imagining that he is the Pac-Man and that his friends are the ghosts, consuming them all with horrifying glee. It only ends when Noodle gets sick of it and pulls the plug on the machine, forcing 2-D to stop. The video is also rather trippy, with Noodle shifting through several different animation styles in the blink of an eye at one point and 2-D gaining rainbow pupils shaped like Pac-Man partway through.
  You can call me cracked
  You can call me mad and stifled
  You can hold my hand
  Sail me into bathing light
  Everybody knows
  When I was sad, I fell for you
  Everywhere I go
  I'm stressin' out, I'm stressin' out, I'm stressin' out, I'm stressin' out, stressin' out
• Apollo 440's "High On Your Own Supply" is a Second-Person Narration version of this, which uses drug metaphors.
• Many of the later albums from The Caretaker, particularly the Everywhere At The End of Time series, take this to its most haunting form; Various 20's - 30's ballroom pieces are sampled with repetition, droning sounds, distortion, and ungodly noise to represent the cognitive decline of dementia, becoming an auditory representation of someone literally losing their mind.
• R.I.P.'s "Pyrite Girl" starts off as a sad, if somewhat eerie, song about an abuse victim. Then the singer gets it into her head that she can fix herself with gold...widening the cracks in her mind in the process. By the end, she's completely off her rocker.
  I've broken my mind
  One million times
  Now not one mark on me is out of line
  And I am made of GOLD!
• "Devil Speak" off Machine Girl's album U-Void Synthesizer, which includes lyrics like "Scratching my skin until I bleed / A tormenting itch that never leaves", and ends with a Madness Mantra of "I can hear the devil speak".
• Pig with the Face of a Boy's "The Lonely Shepherd" has the shepherd remembering a past sexual encounter while looking a little too lovingly at his flock. The first couple verses he catches himself ("I mustn't lie with beasts, I'll go to Hell" and "to lie with beasts, it is abomination"), but his resolve's gone by the end of the third. There's one more.
  I'll call myself an oviphile
  Of course we'll do it sheepy style
  My cries of joy will echo through the valley
  I'll discover what it feels like to love a sheep
  And as I give my milk, I'll shout out "SALLY!"
• Count Five's "Psychotic Reaction".
  I can't get your love, I can't get a fraction
  Oh little girl, psychotic reaction
  And it feels like this
  [High-pitched, frantic guitar strumming and over-energetic drumming]

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