History Main / PolarMadness

* Parodied in [[http://www.nuklearpower.com/2005/03/03/episode-522-the-descent-into-sanity/ an issue]] of ''WebComic/EightBitTheater''. Following their capture by a Yeti in the arctic region, the Light Warriors end up getting trapped in its lair when Fighter accidentally causes an avalanche that blocks the cave entrance. Being trapped under the ice with his allies takes a toll on Black Mage's already-limited sanity, causing him to believe that he's actually the protagonist of a Creator/HPLovecraft story -- complete with an ApocalypticLog. By the end of day 5, he perceives himself as hiding in a stone fortress from Lovecraftian monsters, [[CuttingBackToReality when in reality]], he's just sitting in a pile of ice while the rest of the team try to get his attention.

Also, note that while the extreme north and south are the most common sources of this trope in action, they are hardly the only locales of choice: Siberia, Mount Everest and even the Sierra Nevadas provide suitable venues for Icebound Insanity. As long as the elements of isolation, confinement, potentially lethal weather, stress and growing instability are intact, the trope still applies.

* Although it's actually set in the mainland US, ''Film/TheLodge'' is all about this trope. Set in a cabin over a snowbound, freezing Christmas, Grace goes insane, the heating stops working, and she starts to hear the voice of her dead father, which leads her to realize that she may have [[DeadAllAlong accidentally killed them all]] by using the space heater on the first night. [[spoiler:Made even more explicit by the fact that she ''hasn't''; this is in fact all caused by gaslighting from Aiden and Mia. However, when Grace tries to escape the house to get help and look for her beloved dog Grady, she gets so disorientated, lost, and nearly dies in the snow that an unoccupied house convinces her that Aiden is right and they are all dead.]]

** Crops up during the Fourth Year at [[WizardingSchool Brakebills]]: as this is the semester when student magicians are required to truly internalize everything they've learned so far, they're sent to the secondary campus in Antarctica for a TrainingFromHell at the hands of [[SadistTeacher Professor Mayakovsky]]. Worse still, students are immediately rendered mute so they won't be distracted by communicating with each other. Over the next few months, the ceaseless workload, humiliating pranks, lack of interaction between students, and the overwhelming monotony of the landscape gradually wear on the sanity of the young magicians. Quentin finds himself hallucinating various imaginary characters towards the end, obsesses over meaningless objects, and during moments of lucidity, witnesses other students who've gotten so desperate for human contact that they've started fucking each other in public.

* Combined with OceanMadness in ''Literature/TheTerror.'' Based on the events of the doomed Franklin Expedition, the crew of ''Erebus'' and ''Terror'' begin to fray under the pressure of being trapped in Arctic ice for years on end, especially with an unknown disease whittling away at their numbers and [[AnimalisticAbomination a hideous polar monster]] preying on them in the dead of night. Even the attempts to improve morale through improvised carnivals only seem to make the eccentricities even worse. By the end of the story, mutinies have torn the camps apart, people are stripping naked and stabbing each other to death, cannibalism has become distressingly common, and one particularly demented mutineer fully believes himself to be God.

* In ''VideoGame/KnightsOfTheOldRepublicIITheSithLords'', the Jedi master [[LightIsNotGood Atris]] has taken up residence at a hidden academy in the frozen polar region of Telos, where the lack of meaningful social interaction or opposing viewpoints of any kind seems to amplified her already-strict perspectives on morality to insane extremes. Styling herself as the "last Jedi," she hopes to rebuild the Order with the aid of her fanatically-loyal cult of handmaidens, even [[KnightTemplar ordering them to kill any apprentice who shows even the slightest hint of Dark Side corruption]]. Quite apart from the ludicrously unrealistic nature of her mission - especially since she doesn't even ''have'' students yet and probably never will [[CrapsackWorld given the current state of the galaxy]] - it becomes clear that Atris is ''not'' the last Jedi: she just refuses to believe any of the surviving Council members actually count as Jedi, [[HolierThanThou believing that she alone has remained true to the Code]]. [[spoiler: She's also secretly turned to the Dark Side, having accepted the tutelage of the Sith Holocrons she's collected, but [[IRejectYourReality she refuses to acknowledge it]].]]
* ''VideoGame/TheSecretWorld'':
** The mission to the Carpathian Mountains reveals that the local [[PathOfInspiration Morninglight]] lodge has been snowed in, leaving the inhabitants unable to escape when the local vampires turned on them. By the time you get up there, there's only two survivors - [[TheOphelia Rada Nastase]] and [[TheSociopath Adrian Zorlescu]] - and both of them are visibly cracking under the strain: Rada's StepfordSmiler exterior is beginning to break down under the influence of cult-issued sedatives and alcohol, while her attempts to play at being a socialite often dissolve into terrified confessions, despairing monologues, sobbing breakdowns and even [[JunkieProphet precognitive episodes]]. Meanwhile, witness statements have painted Adrian as a bully and a sadist, but he's kept it hidden for the most part; now, with nobody around to hold him back and no reason to give a damn about orders anymore, he can be found casually threatening Rada's life, allowing her to mix drugs with alcohol despite the side-effects, barely reacting to the player's [[IfYouEverDoAnythingToHurtHer warnings]] and giving every impression of being amused by the carnage going on around them.
** Heavily implied to be the case during the mission to Tokyo: collected lore on the ''Gugne'' mentions a Norwegian icebreaker sent deep into Antarctica to retrieve ''something'' from deep beneath the ice. Whatever the crew found, the process of retrieving it and the dark Antarctic environment terrified them with "memories too deep for the poor crew to have ever fathomed," and their existences becoming "short horror stories." They were able to bring the find to Tokyo, but it's implied that the process either drove them mad or killed them - or both - for by the time you get there, the ship has been abandoned in the harbour, and no sign remains of their mysterious prize. [[spoiler: The item they found is a [[CosmicKeystone Gaia Engine]], one of the legendary prisons of [[EldritchAbominations the Dreaming Ones]], and it's been hidden deep under [[TheVeryDefinitelyFinalDungeon Orochi Tower]] for safekeeping.]]

* The final stages of Hypothermia have been known to induce delusional behaviours in sufferers: among other things, victims have been known to strip naked in the belief that they're warming up, or hide under beds and behind furniture in instinctive efforts to escape the cold.

From the 19th to about the middle of the 20th century, ethnographers were quite firmly convinced of the truth of this trope and posited that the native peoples of the Arctic are prone to all kinds of psychopathologies caused by the conditions of their environment. This supposed predisposition was called "Arctic hysteria". Naturally it was assumed that people from more southerly regions who stayed in the Arctic for too long were also in danger of being seized by Arctic hysteria. The concept of "Arctic Hysteria" was abandoned by academic discourse on account of being too fuzzy and generalizing, but the term (like the concept) may still be encountered in popular images of the Arctic.

* Fanfic/AbraxasHrodvitnon: [[SubvertedTrope Subverted]]. It’s believed that the psychological symptoms experienced by some of the staff at [[EerieArcticResearchStation Outpost]] [[ShoutOut 32]] (paranoia, delusions of being watched or hunted, HearingVoices, and the occasional homicidal or suicidal urge) are being caused by this, as rotating the affected staff off-site fixes it. [[spoiler: In actuality, the symptoms are caused by [[AdaptationalAbomination Ghidorah’s]] LeakingCanOfEvil exerting [[BrownNote a subtle psychic influence]] over the researchers and soldiers]].

* Fanfic/AbraxasHrodvitnon: [[SubvertedTrope Subverted]]. It’s believed that the psychological symptoms experienced by some of the staff at [[EerieArcticResearchStation Outpost]] [[ShoutOut 32]] (paranoia, delusions of being watched or hunted, HearingVoices, and the occasional homicidal or suicidal urge) are being caused by this, as rotating the affected staff off-site fixes it. [[spoiler: In actuality, the symptoms are caused by [[AdaptationalAbomination Ghidorah’s]] LeakingCanOfEvil exerting a subtle psychic influence over the researchers and soldiers]].

* Fanfic/AbraxasHrodvitnon: [[SubvertedTrope Subverted.]] It’s believed that the psychological symptoms experienced by some of the staff at [[EerieArcticResearchStation Outpost]] [[ShoutOut 32]] (paranoia, delusions of being watched or hunted, HearingVoices, and the occasional homicidal or suicidal urge) are being caused by this, as rotating the affected staff off-site fixes it. [[spoiler: In actuality, the symptoms are caused by [[AdaptationalAbomination Ghidorah’s]] LeakingCanOfEvil exerting a subtle psychic influence over the researchers and soldiers]].

* Fanfic/AbraxasHrodvitnon: It’s believed that the psychological symptoms experienced by some of the staff at Outpost 32 (paranoia, delusions, HearingVoices, and the occasional homicidal or suicidal urge) are being caused by this, as rotating the affected staff off-site seems to fix it. [[spoiler: In actuality, the symptoms are caused by [[AdaptationalAbomination Ghidorah’s]] LeakingCanOfEvil]]

** It's heavily implied that Mayakovsky himself is suffering from this: rumours shared by Janet indicate that he used to be a much more forgiving teacher, up until he was quite literally ReassignedToAntarctica as punishment for having an affair with one of his students. Ever since then, his only company has been the annual class of Fourth-Year students, leaving him alone in Brakebills South for long periods of time, and he's not allowed to leave except to check that the portal back to the main campus is working. With all this in mind, it's perhaps no surprise that he's degenerated into the perfection-obsessed maniac he is today.

* In the ''TabletopGame/DungeonsAndDragons'' 5E module ''Rime of the Frost Maiden'', madness is a theme throughout. Two years of endless winter with no sun compounded by dwindling food supplies and isolation due to perpetual blizzards has worn at the sanity of many of the characters in the module, and some people have started resorting to human sacrifice and cannibalism. And on top of that, there's an ArtifactOfDoom floating around that drives people who touch it insane due to its demonic taint. And the demon and devil worshiping cultists that have moved into the area during the storm aren't helping matters, either.

* ''VideoGame/DeadSpace3'' is partly set on Tau Volantis, a remote ice world complete with EerieArcticResearchStation that is swarming with Necromorphs. The cold, isolation, and presence of [[ArtifactOfDoom Markers all over the place]] doesn't help Isaac or Carver's deteriorating mental states one bit.

A possible feature of NordicNoir, GrimUpNorth, and the EerieArcticResearchStation.

* This happens on a societal level for the Tsalal of ''Literature/GreenAntarctica''. That and the constant stress of living in a DeathWorld leads the many Tsalal cultures to develop BlueAndOrangeMorality where things like cannibalism, rape, incest, necrophilia, bestiality, and torture as an art form are seen as normal (though each culture generally has only one or two of these hats and thinks the others are crazy). And then it's taken UpToEleven with the [[TotalitarianUtilitarian Cold]] [[MadScientist Islanders]], who ''all'' of the mainland Tsalal are [[HorrifyingTheHorror terrified of]].

->''There'll be nothing, you hear? Nothing lives there. Nothing grows. You'll eat your shoes again. You'll eat ''worse.'' Death is slow in the Great White Nothing, and a hundred and thirty-four starved men will turn devil against you, starting with the ones you hold closest.''
-->--'''Sir John Ross,''' ''Series/TheTerror''

* Invoked on ''Series/TheBigBangTheory''. The guys are on an Artic research expedition between seasons two and three, and when they come back, they revealed that spending three months alone with InsufferableGenius Sheldon almost drove them crazy, so much they actually plotted to ''kill'' him. [[spoiler:Instead, they falsified Sheldon's data to keep him satisfied.]]

* The 2020 miniseries ''The Head'' involves several murders among the winter-over crew of an Antarctic research station, and the story of what happened has to be coaxed out of an amnesiac survivor suffering from Polar T3 syndrome. However the murders turn out to be premeditated rather than the killer going insane.
* ''Series/{{Top Gear|UK}}'' demonstrated this during their expedition to race to the magnetic North Pole. Hammond, traveling via traditional dog sled, and Clarkson and May, traveling via a specially-built SUV, all demonstrated the effects of prolonged polar travel, thanks to the extreme cold and harsh terrain, causing the normally light-hearted show to take some darker turns. The car crew got hit particularly hard when they ran into a field of jagged ice that constantly hampered their attempts to dig through and forced them to repeatedly backtrack. May admitted in a later interview that he seriously thought about killing Clarkson with a shovel. Hammond, meanwhile, had himself a "private weep" and threatened his guide Matty [=McNair=] with death in a less-than-joking fashion. Before they even started, they were warned by no less than professional polar explorer Ranulph Fiennes that this would happen to them.

* Deconstructed in ''Big Dead Place'' by Nicholas Johnson where despite official reports playing up the stress of working on isolated bases in Antarctica, you're more likely to be driven mad by [[PointyHairedBoss office politics]], {{obstructive bureaucrat}}s and PoliticalCorrectnessGoneMad.