History Main / ChemicallyInducedInsanity

* One of the parts of Project MKULTRA involved giving drugs such as LSD so as to attempt mind control.

** Another episode {{invert|edTrope}}s it, by having a corrupt nursing home take a patient off his meds to prevent him from telling anyone about a patient who died due to negligence.

* In ''Literature/DragonBlood'', the protagonist is given drugs as part of a plot to make him seem unfit to rule. The reader gets to know what he thinks his surroundings look like (people talking to him are monsters, etc).
* ''Literature/HerculePoirot'': The Cretan Bull (part of ''Literature/TheLaboursOfHercules''): the "bull" in this case is a huge and energetic young man named Hugh who is suffering from hallucinations and sometimes wakes up with bloodied hands and the news that animals have been found butchered nearby. As his family has a history of congenital madness, he's afraid of going off the deep end and resolves to commit suicide when he thinks he's close to harming his fiancé. [[spoiler:He's perfectly sound in mind, the hallucinations being produced by drugs in his shaving cream. The actual madman is his father- or rather, his mother's husband, who does suffer from the family insanity and resolved to drive Hugh to suicide in revenge, having murdered his wife years ago. He shoots himself once found out.]]

* In ''The Celebrated Cases of Literature/JudgeDee'' a woman who murdered her husband to have an affair with a neighbor gave her daughter a drug that rendered her unable to speak comprehensibly to keep her from exposing her. During the trial, Judge Dee cures the daughter so she can testify.

* Inverted in a ''Literature/LordPeterWimsey'' short story, where the villain withholds a drug that the victim needs to stay mentally healthy.

* A persistent ScareEmStraight UrbanLegend holds that there is a man in an asylum who believes himself to be an orange after taking LSD.

Compare PsychoSerum where a character intentionally takes a drug to [[SuperSerum enhance himself]], but it induces insanity as a side-effect; also compare InfectiousInsanity where insanity is induced by contact with an already insane person, and MushroomSamba for cases where a character is under the influence of hallucinogens (voluntarily or otherwise). See also {{Gaslighting}}, another way in which one character can make another seem insane.

** Professor Milo's schemes have included subjecting Batman to a drug that made him afraid of anything bat-shaped, and gassing Batman with a compound that made him lose his will to live.

* ''Film/{{Nightbreed}}'': Dr. Decker convinces his patient Aaron Boone that he is responsible for a horrible series of murders that have plagued the city for the past several months, then he prescribes him some anti-psychotic drugs. It turns out that the drugs were actually intended to ''make'' Boone psychotic: [[PsychoPsychologist Decker is the real killer]] and is trying to cover up his own crimes by [[FrameUp framing Boone]].

* In ''The Celebrated Cases of Literature/JudgeDee'' a woman who murdered her husband to have an affair with a neighbor gave her daughter a drug that rendered her unable to speak comprehensibly to keep her from exposing her. During the trial Judge Dee cures the daughter so she can testify.

* The ''Series/{{Endeavour}}'' episode "Canticle" has the murderer giving massive doses of LSD to their victims in order to make killing them easier, or even having them get themselves killed in a delirious state. One of the intended victims does survive but is left in an insane state from which we are told they may never recover.
* In an episode of ''Series/GetSmart'', Max gets a TapOnTheHead and is diagnosed with amnesia. He's given some pills which are supposed to help. However, the doctor is actually working for KAOS and the pills ''cause'' amnesia. Every hour, just as he's starting to remember things, he has to take a pill which sets him back to square one.

* An episode of ''Series/ThePretender'' has Jarod investigating a woman with a psychological condition. She's on medication, but it doesn't seem to help. At one point, she accidentally drops one of the pills into a glass of water. When the water turns red as a result, he realizes that the medication is not what she thought and leads him to discover that it's what's causing her condition.

* ''TabletopGame/DungeonsAndDragons'' supplement ''Unearthed Arcana''. The Elixir of Madness is a magical liquid that causes anyone who drinks it to go insane. If it is slipped into someone's drink, it will cause them to go mad when they drink it. The victim can be restored to normal by one of three high level spells: Heal, Restoration or Wish.

* In ''VideoGame/AssassinsCreedBrotherhood'', Ezio is able to give drugs to make the target assault passer-bys, much like a spree killer.

* In ''VideoGame/WeHappyFew'', the entire populace of Wellington Wells is addicted to "Joy", which causes people to forget their troubles (especially the "Very Bad Thing") but also causes hallucinations and erratic behavior. Those who are not on Joy are brutally attacked by users until they either give in and take the drug, or are killed.

* One of the parts of the Project MKULTRA involved giving drugs such as LSD so as to attempt mind control.

* ''Animation/BoBoiBoy'': Adu Du makes "Chemical Emotive X", a serum to toy with the emotions of anyone who consumes it. Sure enough, anyone who eats Yaya's biscuits containing the chemical acts crazy; getting emotional over flat tires, forlorn over having money, or in Gopal's case, a compelling urge to sing and dance.

* ''Wiki/SCPFoundation'': Dr. Clef once held an orientation meeting with new researchers on the subject of {{Reality Warper}}s. He'd spiked the food and drink with hallucinogens so that when he started yelling at them that reality ''was'' being changed, they believed it, driving home just how helpless you are against such [=SCPs=].

* In ''Film/{{Red}}'', Marvin is clearly shown to be [[{{Cloudcuckoolander}} a bit insane]]. Frank reveals to Sara (and the audience) that he'd been secretly fed LSD for eleven years.

* ''Franchise/{{Batman}}'':
** Professor Milo's scheme have included subjecting Batman to a drug that made him afraid of anything bat-shaped, and gassing Batman with a compound that made him lose his will to live.
** One of the more common backstories for ComicBook/TheJoker has him fall into a vat of chemicals that bleached his skin, turned his hair green, and we all know what it did to his mind.
* In the ''ComicBook/CaptainAmerica'' comics, the very first appearance of villain [[PsychoPsychologist Doctor Faustus]] had him driving Captain America insane with a combination of psychoactive drugs and {{gaslighting}}.

* In the ''ComicBook/{{Tintin}}'' album ''[[Recap/TintinCigarsOfThePharaoh Cigars of the Pharoah]]'', the Egyptologist Dr. Sarcophagus is given drugs to make him insane, so as to cover up an opium-smuggling ring that was running through Egypt. The Rajaijah Juice or "poison of madness" then pops up again in next album ''[[Recap/TintinTheBlueLotus The Blue Lotus]]'' where Tintin is [[spoiler:dosed with a placebo]], though at the end of the album, Dr. Fang (who was kidnapped by the drug ring because they feared his research on madness) develops a cure for its effects.

[[folder:Films — Live-Action]]

* ''Film/{{Nightbreed}}'': Doctor Decker convinces his patient Aaron Boone that he is responsible for a horrible series of murders that have plagued the city for the past several months, then he prescribes him some anti-psychotic drugs. It turns out that the drugs were actually intended to ''make'' Boone psychotic: Decker is the real killer who is trying to cover up his own crimes by [[FrameUp framing Boone]].
* In ''Film/{{Red}}'', Marvin is clearly shown to be [[CloudCuckoolander a bit insane]]. Then Frank reveals to Sara (and the audience) he'd been secretly fed LSD for 11 years.

* In the ''TabletopGame/{{Warhammer 40000}}'' novel ''Literature/BloodAngels: Deus Encarmine'' the traitorous Inquisitor Stele drugs a Blood Angel who stumbled onto his plot to trigger the Black Rage in him.

* One of the viewpoint characters of ''Literature/{{Rule 34}}'' by Creator/CharlesStross is a contract killer who ended up with a form of paranoid schizophrenia due to medical experiments on him, and [[InvertedTrope now has to take drugs to remain lucid]]. He's fortunate in one case that Scotland still has a National Health System ([[TakeThat England has apparently gotten rid of theirs]]) which supplies it for free.

* ''Series/TheCosbyMysteries''. A VictimOfTheWeek is poisoned with mercury placed on his desklamp; the heat of the lightbulb vapourised the mercury and he inhaled the fumes, making him as mad as the proverbial hatter.
* ''Series/DiagnosisMurder'', season 6, episode 6 'Alienated': in a possible ShoutOut to ''Series/TheXFiles'' and its 'Anasazi' episode a doctor is poisoned by a pharmaceutical company inducing paranoia regarding a [[{{Area 51}} secret military base]] to destroy his credibility in respect to a new drug.
* Sierra's backstory in ''Series/{{Dollhouse}}''. After spurning the advances of a rich man, he is so angered that he doses her and has her put into a mental ward. She is then turned into an Active, a programmable love slave hired out to rich clients, which includes the man responsible for her state.
* The ''Series/{{Endeavour}}'' episode "Canticle" has the murderer giving massive doses of LSD to their victims in order to make killing them easier, or even having them get themselves killed in a delirious state. One of the intended victims does survive, but is left in an insane state from which we are told they may never recover.
* In an episode of ''Series/GetSmart'' Max gets a TapOnTheHead and is diagnosed with amnesia. He's given some pills which are supposed to help. However, the doctor is actually working for KAOS and the pills ''cause'' amnesia. Every hour, just as he's starting to remember things, he has to take a pill which sets him back to square one.

** Another episode inverts it, by having a corrupt nursing home take a patient off his meds to prevent him from telling anyone about a patient who died due to negligence.
* Inverted in an episode of ''Series/{{Leverage}}'' where Parker checks into an addiction-treatment center as part of the team's latest con, where she is given anti-depressants and becomes temporarily relieved of her kleptomaniacal tendencies.
* An episode of ''Series/ThePretender'' had Jarod investigating a woman with a psychological condition. She's on medication, but it doesn't seem to help. At one point, she accidentally drops one of the pills into a glass of water. When the water turns red as a result, he realizes the medication is not what she thought and leads him to discover it's what's causing her condition.

** In "Shawn Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest," Shawn goes into a mental ward to try to prove that a crimelord is faking insanity to get an InsanityDefense. Turns out this trope is at play instead, and he is being continually dosed by one of the nurses.
** Happens to Lassiter in "Heeeeeere's Lassie", where the killer is putting a chemical in the air vents to drive certain residents insane.
** Occurs yet again when a law firm has a man dosed so that people think he's an insane [[ConspiracyTheorist conspiracy nut]] to discredit them when he is building a case against them when he finds that they've had some shady dealings.

* ''Series/TheXFiles'': In the second season finale, it is revealed that Mulder's erratic behavior of late was due to drugs in his water supply, presumably done by The Conspiracy to discredit him.

* ''Videogame/BatmanTheTelltaleSeries'': [[spoiler:Thomas Wayne]] uses drugs to drive Mrs. Cobblepot insane so they can seize her assets. Penguin, seeking revenge on everyone involved, drugs Harvey Dent and Mayor Hill with an unstable truth serum on national television (which is what turns Dent into Two-Face). [[spoiler:Vicki Vale]] drugs Bruce with steroids to make him maul Penguin in public.

[[quoteright:250:[[ComicBook/{{Tintin}} https://static.tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pub/images/rajaijah_juice_2.jpg]]]]

* ''Franchise/{{Batman}}'': Professor Milo's scheme have included subjecting Batman to a drug that made him afraid of anything bat-shaped, and gassing Batman with a compound that made him lose his will to live.

* In the ''ComicBook/{{Tintin}}'' album "[[Recap/TintinCigarsOfThePharaoh Cigars of the Pharoah]]", the Egyptologist Dr. Sarcophagus is given drugs to make him insane, so as to cover up an opium-smuggling ring that was running through Egypt. The Rajaijah Juice or "poison of madness" then pops up again in next album "[[Recap/TintinTheBlueLotus The Blue Lotus]]" where Tintin is [[spoiler:dosed with a placebo]], though at the end of the album, Dr. Fang (who was kidnapped by the drug ring because they feared his research on madness) develops a cure for its effects.

* In ''Crash Deluxe'', Literature/ParrishPlessis is nearly driven insane by [[ToxicFriendInfluence Glorious]] and her powerful pheromone blends.
* In the opening of the ''Literature/VenusPrime'' series, Sparta has spent several years of her life being drugged into oblivion by the Free Spirit.
* In the ''TabletopGame/{{Warhammer 40000}}'' novel ''Literature/BloodAngels: Deus Encarmine'' the traitorous Inquisitor Stele drugs a Blood Angel who stumbled onto his plot to trigger the Black Rage in him.
* In John D. [=MacDonald=]'s ''Literature/TravisMcGee'' novel ''Nightmare in Pink'', [=McGee=] has a hallucinatory drug slipped into his drink. When he loses control, he's taken into custody by the bad guys and sent to a mental hospital so he can be interrogated and lobotomized.

* In ''The Celebrated Cases of Literature/JudgeDee'' a woman who murdered her husband to have an affair with a neighbor gave her daughter a drug that rendered her unable to speak comprehensibly to keep her from exposing her. During the trial Judge Dee cures the daughter so she can testify.
* In ''Literature/TheStainlessSteelRat'', Jim has trouble predicting a psychopathic murderer's next move, so he takes a drug combination temporarily giving him the same kind of insanity.
* ''Literature/VattasPeace'': In ''Into the Fire'', the people who survived Miksland with Ky Vatta in the previous book have been quarantined and drugged into a stupor by TheConspiracy for fear that what they saw on the supposedly uninhabitable continent could derail their EvilPlan.

* ''Literature/HerculePoirot'': The Cretan Bull (part of ''The Labours of Hercules''): the "bull" in this case is a huge and energetic young man named Hugh who is suffering from hallucinations and sometimes wakes up with bloodied hands and the news that animals have been found butchered nearby. As his family has a history of congenital madness, he's afraid of going off the deep end and resolves to commit suicide when he thinks he's close to harming his fiancé. [[spoiler:He's perfectly sound in mind, the hallucinations being produced by drugs in his shaving cream. The actual madman is his father- or rather, his mother's husband, who does suffer from the family insanity and resolved to drive Hugh to suicide in revenge, having murdered his wife years ago. He shoots himself once found out.]]
* One of the viewpoint characters of ''Literature/{{Rule 34}}'' by Creator/CharlesStross is a contract killer who ended up with a form of paranoid schizophrenia due to medical experiments on him, and [[InvertedTrope now has to take drugs to remain lucid]]. He's fortunate in one case that Scotland still has a National Health System ([[TakeThat England has apparently gotten rid of theirs]]) which supplies it for free.
* In ''Literature/ACaribbeanMystery'', this turned out to be the chief cause of [[spoiler:Molly Kendal]]'s mental instability. The guilty party kept drugging [[spoiler:her]] for a long while [[spoiler:so that her eventual murder would look like suicide]].

* In ''Heavy Weather'' by Creator/BruceSterling, a member of the conspiracy doesn't like the protagonist staring at him, so threatens to inject her with a drug that will do this.
* ''Literature/JoePickett'': The bad guys in ''Out of Range'' use psychoactive drugs added to his drinking water and [[{{Gaslighting}} psychological trickery]] to turn game warden Will Jensen's depression into paranoia, which ultimately drives him to suicide.

* Used a few times in ''Series/{{Psych}}'':
** In "Shawn Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest," Shawn goes into a mental ward to try to prove that a crimelord is faking insanity to get an InsanityDefense. Turns out this trope is at play instead, and he is being continually dosed by one of the nurses.
** Happens to Lassiter in "Heeeeeere's Lassie", where the killer is putting a chemical in the air vents to drive certain residents insane.
** Occurs yet again when a law firm has a man dosed so that people think he's an insane [[ConspiracyTheorist conspiracy nut]] to discredit them when he is building a case against them when he finds that they've had some shady dealings.

* ''Series/TheXFiles'': In the second season finale, it is revealed that Mulder's erratic behavior of late was due to drugs in his water supply, presumably done by The Conspiracy to discredit him.
* ''Series/DiagnosisMurder'', season 6, episode 6 'Alienated': in a possible ShoutOut to ''Series/TheXFiles'' and its 'Anasazi' episode a doctor is poisoned by a pharmaceutical company inducing paranoia regarding a [[{{Area 51}} secret military base]] to destroy his credibility in respect to a new drug.

* In an episode of ''Series/GetSmart'' Max gets a TapOnTheHead and is diagnosed with amnesia. He's given some pills which are supposed to help. However, the doctor is actually working for KAOS and the pills ''cause'' amnesia. Every hour, just as he's starting to remember things, he has to take a pill which sets him back to square one.
* The ''Series/{{Endeavour}}'' episode "Canticle" has the murderer giving massive doses of LSD to their victims in order to make killing them easier, or even having them get themselves killed in a delirious state. One of the intended victims does survive, but is left in an insane state from which we are told they may never recover.

* ''The Cosby Mysteries''. A VictimOfTheWeek is poisoned with mercury placed on his desklamp; the heat of the lightbulb vapourised the mercury and he inhaled the fumes, making him as mad as the proverbial hatter.

* In ''VideoGame/WeHappyFew'', the entire populace of Wellington Wells is addicted to "Joy", which causes people to forget their troubles (especially the "Very Bad Thing") but also causes hallucinations and erratic behavior. Those who are not on Joy are brutally attacked by users until they either give in and take the drug, or are killed.

* ''Videogame/BatmanTheTelltaleSeries'': [[spoiler:Thomas Wayne]] uses drugs to drive Mrs. Cobblepot insane so they can seize her assets. Penguin, seeking revenge on everyone involved, drugs Harvey Dent and Mayor Hill with an unstable truth serum on national television (which is what turns Dent into Two-Face). [[spoiler:Vicki Vale]] drugs Bruce with steroids to make him maul Penguin in public.

Despite being perfectly sane, a character is given drugs that make people around him think that he is insane. This is usually done maliciously and without the character's knowledge. Frequently done to get a character out of the way when killing them would be too messy, or simply to discredit them

* In the ''ComicBook/{{Tintin}}'' album "[[Recap/TintinCigarsOfThePharaoh Cigars of the Pharoah]]", the Egyptologist Dr. Sarcophagus is given drugs to make him insane, so as to cover up an opium-smuggling ring that was running through Egypt. The Rajaijah Juice or "poison of madness" then pops up again in next album "[[Recap/TintinTheBlueLotus The Blue Lotus]]", though at the end of the album, Dr. Fang (who was kidnapped by the drug ring because they feared his research on madness) develops a cure for its effects.