Mistaken for Insane

"They just think I’m crazy?"

— Kate, Don't Look Up

This trope happens when a character is perfectly sane... yet one or more others don't believe them. Perhaps they're making wild, yet true, claims (maybe involving seeing something or someone Invisible to Normals or a conspiracy or similar that's No Mere Windmill) perhaps to the point of being The Cassandra, maybe they're eccentric but still have a perfectly stable mind, maybe they communicated badly, or the other person has Arbitrary Skepticism, or something was Not What It Looks Like, or maybe they were violent, causing an assumption of Ax-Crazy or Insane Equals Violent.

Once the character is mistaken for insane, a variety of things could happen. They might be sent to an asylum (which is often a Bedlam House), perhaps leading to a Cuckoo Nest plot or Go Among Mad People. If they're elderly, they might be sent to a retirement home (whether a Bleak Abyss Retirement Home or not). They might just be laughed at and not believed. They, or another character, might have to spend the plot of the story proving they're not insane, sometimes with the risk of drastic things happening if they fail. They might also scream "You Have to Believe Me!", which unfortunately often makes things worse for them.

Compare Mistaken for Junkie. Can overlap with Mistaken for Murderer or Mistaken for Terrorist if people think another person is Ax-Crazy. See also No More for Me when someone thinks they are hallucinating (though due to alcohol rather than insanity). When someone deliberately makes themselves out to be insane, see Obfuscating Insanity. Can be invoked via Gaslighting (if the person doing the gaslighting fools other people as well as their target) or lead to Wrongfully Committed or Insane No More. Can overlap with The Cuckoolander Was Right if the reason they were mistaken for insane is due to eccentricity. Compare with You're Insane!, which is actually a protest over someone's unreasonable action and does not make reference to his actual mental health. If the person used to be insane but is not anymore, it can lead to Crying Wolf. Also compare Diagnosis: Knowing Too Much, for when someone is deemed insane as a way of silencing them. Contrast Subverted Suspicion Aesop.

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Examples:

Anime & Manga

• Promare: The Burnish are seen as psychotic arsonists and the general public utterly despises them for it, with the terrorist group, the Mad Burnish being loathed most of all as violent pyromaniacs. However, the Burnish aren't crazy, they simply have a natural compulsion to burn things due to their link to the Promare, and the Mad Burnish are really a few attempting to save their people from torture and experimentation. The only actually crazy Burnish is Kray, due to him completely losing it from suppressing his connection to the Promare.

Comic Books

• Asterix:
  • A Running Gag is someone assuming that a particular nationality or ethnicity is crazy due to cultural confusion or the behaviour of an individual in that group.
  • In "Asterix Conquers America", Asterix and Obelix try to mime their personalities due to a Language Barrier with the Native Americans. The Native Americans assume that the heroes are crazy and tap their heads.
• DC: The New Frontier: The story features Adam Strange being institutionalized because Dr. Leslie Thompkins mistook his claims of having adventures on the alien world Rann for being indicative of a delusion. She eventually lets Adam go and apologizes after learning that he truly is a space hero in the lead-up to the heroes' final battle with the Centre.
• Squee: In the fourth issue, Squee's parents come home after they've been captured by aliens. Squee asks if the aliens have hurt them, and since they don't remember being abducted, they don't believe him and think he's gone insane. They then send him to the Defective Head Meat Institute because they're more concerned about the fact that his "insanity" is supposedly spreading to them.
• Tintin: In "Cigars of the Pharaoh", the Fakir gives Zloty and Sarcophagus a serum that makes them lose their minds and switches Tintin's letter to the sanatorium, for one saying that Tintin is insane. As such, when Tintin arrives at the sanatorium to drop his friends off, he is locked up instead.
• A story in Strange Tales # 97 by Stan Lee and Jack Kirby had a man in Present Day (1960s) London inadvertently time travel back to the 16th century, where his claim to be from the 20th century sees him get locked in the original Bedlam House. At the end of the story, he and the sadistic warden both get transported back to the present, where the warden's claim to be from the 16th century gets him led away by police.

Fan Works

• Jessica: Near the end of the story, when it becomes clear that Jessica (the eponymous Pikachu) has begun talking to Cameron and is accusing him of being a killer, he tries showing this to his friends, P and R. However, when he tries showing them this, the message replaces itself with Jessica's stats screen, leading them to think that he has gone nuts. He has also been diagnosed with Multiple Personality Disorder at this point, which likely doesn't help matters.

Films — Animation

• Beauty and the Beast: While Belle is generally simply seen as "odd" by the villagers, her father Maurice is often thought of as insane. This increases when he tells the villagers that his daughter was locked up by a monstrous beast, which is actually true. Gaston exploits it by threatening to throw Maurice into an asylum unless Belle agrees to marry him.
• Chicken Little: Something that is shaped like a stop sign (which is a piece from the aliens' spaceship) hits Chicken Little on the head. He sounds the town's alarm bell, claiming the sky is falling, and when he tries to explain what happened, an acorn lands on his head. His father Buck concludes that it was just an acorn, and this incident causes the townspeople to dub Chicken Little "the crazy little chicken".
• Coraline:
  • Zigzagged for Mr. Bobinski. He behaves very erratically, and characters speculate as to why, with their hypotheses ranging from him being insane to him being always drunk. We never find out the truth, though Coraline eventually believes he's simply eccentric.
  • When Coraline tells Wybie about the Other Mother and the fact that the doll is being used for spying, Wybie doesn't believe this and believes that she's lost it. He eventually comes around, just in time to save her no less, when he finds a picture of his great-aunt and sees she looks exactly the way Coraline described one of the ghosts she encountered.
• In Frozen (2013), Kristoff takes Anna and Olaf to see the family of rock trolls that adopted him to see if they can help with her magical affliction, but for whatever reason, they remain in their rock form long after he introduces them (probably to *ahem* troll him, given their playful nature), causing Anna and Olaf to look at him like he's crazy.
• How to Train Your Dragon:
  • Discussed when Gobber tries to reassure Hiccup that the dragons won't kill him. He claims that, due to Hiccup's scrawniness, "they'll see you as sick or insane and go after the more Viking-like teens instead."
  • Discussed again when Stoick says that if someone had previously foreseen that Hiccup would go from being his usual persona to winning at dragon training, he would have thought the person was mad.
• Ice Age: The Meltdown: When Ellie is first introduced, she thinks she's a possum when she's actually a mammoth, so naturally the protagonists assume she's out of her mind. As it turns out, she was reared by possums and simply didn't realize she was adopted.
• Mary and Max: Max pretends to be a robot while he's picking up trash. A nearby woman clearly assumes he is crazy and calls 911.
• In The Unicorn in the Garden, a man witnesses a unicorn in his garden and tells his wife about it. By the time the wife looks, the unicorn is already gone, resulting in her attempting to get her husband committed to an asylum. The attempt fails... because the way she explains things to the doctors make it sound like she's the insane one, which leads to her being the one sent away. When the doctors question the man, the man wisely claims he did not tell his wife anything about a unicorn.

Films — Live-Action

• Alvin and the Chipmunks: When Dave tells his girlfriend that his life is being sabotaged by talking chipmunks, which is true, to explain his rather odd recent behavior, she thinks he is nuts and promptly walks out, saying he hasn't changed at all.
• Beauty and the Beast (2017): Invoked. When Maurice tells the townspeople that Gaston tied him up and abandoned him in the forest, Gaston lies that he did no such thing and says that Maurice must be going out of his mind, especially since he claims to have seen the Beast (the latter of which is true). He then has everyone send Maurice to the asylum.
• Darby and the Dead: Chris suffered this after he began seeing dead people. He'd been diagnosed with psychosis and having hallucinations, spending a bit of time in a psych ward as a result.
• Don't Look Up: After Kate reaches her breaking point on live television the world thinks she's crazy and don't take her seriously about the comet hurtling towards the Earth.
• Dr. Dolittle: Dr. Dolittle (who can talk to animals) comes across two rats, and one of them appears to be going into cardiac arrest. He takes them inside his workplace and gives the seemingly-dying rat CPR, much to the disgust of his coworkers and wife. Then the rat breaks wind, revealing that he just had gas. Dr. Dolittle's coworkers promptly have him sent to an insane asylum.
• Edge of Tomorrow: William Cage is a member of the United Defense Force, a global military alliance established to combat the alien threat. After Cage is killed by a Mimic and gets the ability to time loop by being covered in its blood, he tries to warn Farell of the invasion, who puts duct tape on his mouth.
• Elf: Buddy's claims that he's an elf from the North Pole who works for Santa make people whom he meets understandably think he's nuts after they realize he isn't joking. A doctor he sees theorizes that it's Emotional Regression.
• In The Invisible Man (2020), the titular invisible man (Adrian Griffin, Cecilia Kass' abusive boyfriend) performs a ruthless campaign of terror and Gaslighting in order to convince everybody that Cecilia is insane (and thus unable to live for herself, forcing her to live with him again). The campaign is so effective that when Cecilia finally goes on the offensive to take out Adrian for good, one of the big steps of her plan is to escape the mental hospital she was placed in.
• Land of Oz: In Return to Oz, Dorothy is sent to a Bedlam House because she kept talking about the Land of Oz, worrying her aunt and uncle. Dorothy escapes before the doctors there began their electro-therapy treatment.
• The Mask, after Stanley's wild night with the eponymous mask, he visits Dr. Arthur Neuman, a psychologist who wrote a book about metaphorical masks. Stanley puts the mask on in front of him but nothing happens (it's implied that the mask only works at night). He tries dancing around to maybe "jump-start" the mask, but Neuman tells him he's not equipped to treat mentally-ill people and to get out of his office.
• In Ophelia, the title character is believed to be insane after she physically attacks another lady-in-waiting (who had been a complete bitch to her throughout the story and pushed her to her limit) and goes into a Heroic BSoD; while Ophelia is in a state of grief and extreme distress after going through a Trauma Conga Line, she's not completely divorced from reality like everyone thinks. She later intentionally plays up her supposed insanity to escape.
• In Parking (1985), Calais increasingly questions Orpheus's sanity as he realizes his near-death experience and encounter with Hades and Persephone were true, especially after Eurydice dies and he tries to find a way back to the Underworld.
• Rosemary's Baby: After figuring out Roman's true identity, Rosemary flees from Guy and the rest of the Satanic cult to Dr Hill, the doctor she'd seen earlier. She tells him everything and he seems to believe her...at least until she mentions Dr Sapirstein's name. He tells her he'll send her to a hospital, which Rosemary is (unusually for this trope) perfectly happy with, as it will allow her to give birth in private. Unfortunately, Dr Hill calls Guy and Dr Sapirstein instead, allowing them to take the apparently "hysterical" Rosemary home.
• The Shadow: After Shiwan Khan is defeated, he's sent to an insane asylum and given a lobotomy that removes his psychic abilities. Without his power, all he can do is impotently rant and threaten the guards, exactly like the other inmates.
• Shall We Play?: Stacy's ability to see spirits was misidentified as psychosis, resulting in her being medicated for this as supposed hallucinations.
• Suitable Flesh: Beth believes that Asa's belief that his father is swapping bodies with him, and his personality changes when it happens, are the result of a dissociative disorder. Later, Beth herself is believed by Dani to be suffering a psychotic break when she's the one trying to warn people about the entity trying to steal her body. And at the end of the movie, Dani is locked away in a padded room after being trapped in Beth's body, likewise written off as having lost her mind.
• Terminator:
  • The Terminator: Time-traveling soldier Kyle Reese attempts to warn modern-day police that Sarah Connor, whom he kidnapped as part of his orders to protect her, is being hunted by a Killer Robot from a post-apocalyptic future. Naturally, the cops don't believe him, and their resident psychologist Dr. Silberman calls him a "loon" while gushing about the fortune he could make studying Kyle's "delusions".
  • Terminator 2: Judgment Day: Ten years after the first film, as well as the death of Kyle, Sarah is arrested and locked in an insane asylum for believing (correctly) Kyle's statements about the Killer Robots and The End of the World as We Know It. We find out that Dr. Silberman actually did gain wealth and renown, though off of her rather than Kyle. However, the trope is ZigZagged; Sarah is completely right about the future and time travel — but the knowledge about the coming end of the world, and paranoia about she and her son John being hunted by more Terminators has made her dangerously unstable. So, her jailers are technically Right for the Wrong Reasons.
  • Terminator Genisys: In a partial retelling of the first film, police officer O'Brien tries to arrest Kyle Reese only to be attacked by a T-1000 Terminator. O'Brien's partner is killed, while he himself is rescued by Kyle Reese and Sarah Connor. When Kyle and Sarah time travel 33 years into the future, O'Brien has spent his career trying to find evidence of time-traveling Killer Robots, only to be mocked and thought of as crazy by his fellow officers. But his persistence reunites him with Kyle and Sarah, who haven't aged a day while he is now an old man.

Literature

• In Alice's Adventures in Wonderland, the Cheshire Cat assumes Alice is mad because she's in Wonderland, where practically everyone is.
• Captain Underpants:
  • The teachers at Jerome Horwitz Elementary aren't insane, they're just cruel, but in "Captain Underpants and the Tyrannical Retaliation of the Turbo Toilet 2000", they mistakenly think they're dreaming (thanks to George and Harold tricking Ms. Anthrope into believing she's dreaming) and start running around in their underwear now that they can supposedly do whatever they want. They are all sent to the asylum.
  • In "Captain Underpants and the Perilous Plot of Professor Poopypants", Mr. Fyde tells Mr. Krupp that he's going to resign from his job because he fears that he's lost his mind after having witnessed the results of George and Harold's mischief. Mr. Krupp tells him that what he's seen is all George and Harold's doing, and when Mr. Fyde says he's seen a bald man in his underwear jumping out a window^note Captain Underpants, Mr. Krupp is convinced that Mr. Fyde really is crazy.
• Charlie and the Chocolate Factory and Charlie and the Great Glass Elevator: Zigzagged for Willy Wonka. Many of the characters suspect him to be insane, and he is very strange and reckless in his behaviour, but his sanity levels are ultimately left ambiguous.
• Charlotte's Web: Fern Speaks Fluent Animal, but her father doesn't realize this, so when she tells him that the animals talk to each other, he thinks she has gone insane.
• Circleverse: In The Circle Opens, Daja encounters a man in a mental ward who seems strangely put together. In The Will of the Empress, it is revealed that he was perfectly sane before being committed and pumped full of drugs. He was thought to be insane because he could see visions on the wind, a rare ability that only a few people are born with each generation.
• In Cloud Atlas, both the book and the movie, Timothy Cavendish is pranked by his brother into committing himself into a mental institution. His brother, unfortunately for both of them, has a stroke only a few days later and dies, so he has nobody that can attest to the subterfuge when he tries to convince the staff that he is mentally healthy so they refuse to allow him to leave, keeping him trapped on the property.
• Diary of a Wimpy Kid:
  • In the first book, Rodrick tricks Greg into thinking it's the first day of school. Frank yells at Greg for waking him up so early in the morning and Greg tells him what Rodrick did. They go to Rodrick's room, where he has fallen asleep so that he won't be suspected, and Greg comments in his narration that Frank probably thinks that Greg "has a screw loose or something".
  • In "The Long Haul", the Heffleys' car gets a flat tire. Two men stop their car and approach them, and since they only speak Spanish, the Heffleys try to non-verbally tell them what happened by pointing to the tire and blowing a raspberry to simulate a deflating sound. Greg notes that the guys probably think they're crazy, at least until Manny notifies them of their situation in Spanish.
• Durarara!!: Inverted. Everyone assumes Mikado as a regular kid with no abnormalities, in stark contrast to the Cast Full of Crazy, with Masaomi trying to actively keep him out of the insanity happening around them. However, Aoba finds out the hard way that Mikado is deeply twisted beyond his or even Izaya's comprehension, being the creator of the Dollars who only grows more ruthless and insane as the series progresses.
• A Fly Went By: When the boy confronts the pig, he wonders if she's "out of [her] head" for allegedly wanting to bite the dog. However, she isn't out of her head; she's running away from a cow.
• Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix: Harry spends almost the entire book labelled as an attention-seeking crazy person because he keeps insisting that Voldemort is back and the Minister for Magic simply doesn't want it to be true.
• Haruhi Suzumiya: In The Melancholy of Haruhi Suzumiya, Kyon (and, at this point, also the reader) thinks that Yuki is completely nuts after she tells him that she is not a human, but instead an interface for a Sufficiently Advanced Alien race whose sole purpose right now is observing their classmate Haruhi, who supposedly has divine powers, because, face it, that’s pretty much exactly the sort of thing a schizophrenic would say, and she is unable to give him evidence at this time, claiming his mind would be unable to take it, not to mention she invited him to her condo at night and claims to have no family. In fact, this is actually a step up from Kyon’s previous opinion of her, him having thought there was something seriously wrong with her since she didn’t react in any way to Haruhi sexually harassing Mikuru and instead just read her book as if she were the only one in the room. It’s only after he sees her and Ryoko use Reality Warping while Yuki protects him from Ryoko’s attempted homicide that he understands that she was telling the complete truth, and in later installments they eventually become very close friends because of all the times she saves his ass.
• The Martian Chronicles. This is what causes the demise of the Second Expedition to Mars, when the humans get euthanized by a Martian doctor due to their 'delusion' of coming from another planet. Unfortunately insane Martians can manifest their delusions in physical form, so even their rocketship doesn't convince him. When the rocketship remains after the humans are killed, the alarmed Martian is convinced he's been infected by their insanity and shoots himself as well.
• The Mysterious Affair at Styles: When investigating Emily Inglethorp's room after her murder, Hastings and Poirot stumble upon an old envelope with "possessed," "He is possessed," and "I am possessed" scribbled on it multiple times (with some instances of the word "possessed" being misspelled as "posessed"). Hastings theorizes that Mrs. Inglethorp was insane and delusionally thought that someone was suffering from demonic possession. Turns out she actually forgot how to spell the word "possessed" while writing her will and tried writing the word a few times on an envelope to see which spelling looked right.
• Night of the Living Dummy II: Slappy the Demonic Dummy keeps causing trouble and framing Amy for it. Amy's attempts to prove that he's the culprit result in her parents wondering if she needs help and they consider sending her to a psychiatrist after Slappy coats Sara's room with paint, only to just ground her. Slappy later reveals that he's trying to invoke this trope by convincing Amy's parents that she's lost it if she doesn't obey him.
• In the children's book Nobody, Him, and Me, the three eponymous mice beat up a talking cat, and when his owners ask him who did it, he tries to tell them, but they think he's saying that his male owner did it, then that no one did, then that he himself did it. He is thus sent to a mental hospital for cats.
• In Real Mermaids, Jade's dad finds a book on mers that includes an article from 1908 about a man who tried to jump off a cliff into the ocean. After he was "rescued," he said he was a merman who was trying to return to the ocean. He was taken to a mental hospital, where he was drugged and electrocuted and spent the rest of his life in a catatonic state.
• The Stormlight Archive: In her Back Story, Jasnah was locked in a dark room (the setting's traditional way of treating the mentally ill) because her family thought she was losing her mind - while in fact it was the result of her Radiant powers manifesting.
• In Theres No Such Thing by Paul Jennings, the main character's granddad is thought to be senile and sent to a nursing home because he keeps ranting about a dragon. His grandson finds out that there is a dragon, but she's now dead. He takes an object he finds to the nursing home, which turns out to be her egg, and it hatches into a baby dragon.
• Warhammer 40,000: In the novella "Prince of Crows", numerous characters refer to Sevatar as mad/insane. While it's clear he's a sociopath (albeit an oddly principled one), he's not the lunatic everyone assumes he is. He simply has zero social skills, no tolerance for stupidity, and no time to bugger about, what with the 8th Legion on the verge of imploding around him.
  "Sevatar, are you mad?!"
  "I don't think so. I feel fine."
• Warrior Cats: Mad Oracle Goosefeather was treated like a lunatic by the rest of ThunderClan, in part due to his old age and erratic behavior. Despite that, however, a lot of his premonitions came true- including the one about Tigerkit being evil.
• The Witches: Discussed. After the protagonist has turned into a mouse, his grandmother says she can't take him to a dentist or the latter would consider her crazy.
• At one point during The Witchs Daughter, the authorities think that the eponymous girl, Perdita, is "a wild little thing, half-crazed", but she's actually in shock.
• World of the Five Gods: Ista in The Curse of Chalion was broken by her failure at lifting the curse, but not insane. Her Gods-touched perspective was seen as insanity, though, except by others who were similarly touched by the Gods.

Live-Action TV

• Chuck: In "Chuck vs. the Tooth", Chuck is convinced that Dr. Martin Kowambe is a Ring agent who has intel on the hostile organization hidden in his tooth. Chuck knocks his tooth out and it is shown to be completely normal. As a result, Beckman has Chuck committed to a psychiatric facility, believing that the Intersect is damaging Chuck's mind. As it turns out, Kowambe is a Ring agent. Chuck just knocked out the wrong tooth.
• Dark (2017): Towards the end of the first season, Ulrich Nielsen travels to 1953 in an attempt to kill the child self of Helge Doppler, the man he suspects to have been involved in child abductions and murders, as an adult. Ulrich actually manages to severely hurt Helge and locks him in a bunker. Due to Ulrich's suspicious behaviour — he talks about changing the future, refuses to say his name, and insults the police officer — he is Mistaken for Murderer and arrested. Season 2 reveals that he was been committed to an asylum and is still there 33 years later.
• Doctor Who: It's mentioned in both "The Eleventh Hour" and "The Big Bang" that Amelia Pond's insistence that "the Raggedy Doctor" was real led to her seeing several child psychiatrists. It probably didn't help that her reaction to being told he didn't exist was to bite them.
• Farscape: Pretty much everyone thinks Crichton is insane since he's from a planet located far away from everyone else and does not know about most of the basic tenets of life in space. Constantly making pop culture references no one understands doesn't help, either. Eventually, a horrific Trauma Conga Line results in him going crazy for real.
• The Greatest American Hero: Ralph running around in a cape and tights usually has observers thinking he's some kind of nutjob^note the series is Like Reality, Unless Noted, and superheroes aren't a thing in this universe.
• In a Happy Days episode, Richie has a crush on a girl, so Fonzie tells him to emulate James Dean. When Richie kisses her out of the blue, she thinks he's insane. This causes him to question his sanity for the rest of the episode.
• House of Anubis: Patricia's obsession with finding Joy at the beginning of the series led to the rest of the House thinking she'd gone nuts, with some of them mocking her for it. This leads to her falling deeper into the rabbit hole, as she becomes isolated from everyone else and snaps at people when they attempt to help her. Eventually, however, her friends discover that she was right to be so paranoid and help her to find Joy.
• When Danny first shows up in Iron Fist (2017) claiming to be the heir to a mammoth company who went missing and was presumed dead 15 years earlier while looking like a hobo and having no ID, everyone presumes he is out of his mind. After he's committed to a mental institution, the psychiatrist there assumes the same at first... until he checks on some details of Danny's claims and sees that they are things that only the real Danny Rand could have known. Unfortunately at that point Danny starts talking more about how he avoided death in the plane crash that killed his parents, and his story about being found, rescued, and taken in by magical kung fu monks living kinda in the mountains but also in Another Dimension promptly makes the doctor decide that while Danny really is Danny Rand, he's also had some kind of break with reality.
• In the pilot of Mork & Mindy, Mork, an Amusing Alien, is mistaken for a deranged human and has to take tests to prove he isn't insane.
• Paper Girls: Mac tries to meet her brother, who's a doctor in the future. It turns out she'd died long ago in the past, so he believes that she's a mentally ill girl and brings a social worker for her, to Mac's annoyance. Mac telling her her age (to judge by it she should be forty three though looking twelve) and a time traveler naturally does not help. Dylan Dylan runs a DNA test on a saliva sample from Mac's glass, realizes she really is his sister, then gets Mac released into his custody by claiming that she's his illegitimate daughter and he doesn't want his wife to find out.
• Red Dwarf:
  • After the eponymous mining ship's entire crew is resurrected by nanobots in "Back in the Red", a psychiatrist is left convinced that Kryten is in need of a factory reset when Kryten claims to have been created after the psychiatrist died and that the psychiatrist has been brought back to life by "teenty little robots," then demonstrates some of the character faults and emotions Lister taught him to help break out of his programming.
  • This is insinuated, but not directly stated, in "Give & Take". Lister is abducted by the apparently insane medical droid Asclepius. When the rest of the crew rescue him they accidentally destroy a specimen jar containing two kidneys in the crossfire, and when they examine Lister they discover he's missing his kidneys. However, the plot is later resolved when they travel back in time, remove the kidneys from the past version of Lister and implant them in the present-day version, meaning Lister already had no kidneys before Asclepius abducted him. The implication is that the droid was actually perfectly sane, and was actually trying to give Lister a life-saving operation.
• Resident Alien: It's usually played for humour (albeit of the dark variety), but Max's ranting and raving that the new doctor is an alien only he can see — leading to his self-admitted recruiting a friend to break into Harry's home — definitely gets serious when his parents get so concerned about him they seriously consider sending him away to a school in Georgia where he can get psychiatric help. Remove the fantastic elements of the series and suddenly seeing a young boy have a seeming break from reality is quite sobering for any parents watching.
• Seinfeld: As a result of a series of wacky Contrived Coincidences, George is mistaken for mentally ill by a childhood neighbor. In a later episode, his boss, who really is suffering from dementia, does George's work for him without either of them realizing it, resulting in George being forcibly institutionalized. When in the mental hospital, George sees the childhood neighbor who is glad he's getting the help he needs.
• Stargate SG-1: In "Legacy", Daniel is infected with leeches that are engineered to target Goa'uld symbiotes but have side effects when they're present inside a human body. He starts rambling and seeing things, and a psychiatrist incorrectly diagnoses him with schizophrenia.
  Daniel Jackson: Why are you so quick to jump to the conclusion I'm crazy? That I'm dangerous, I'm out of control? It's 'cause I'm kinda acting that way, aren't I? I just…I just need to get these drugs out of my system. Look, Doctor, I know you probably hear this from patients all the time, but I think I'm cured.
  • In later seasons, the characters wise up and realize that just because someone is seeing things doesn't mean they're crazy, considering all the things they've already seen out in the galaxy. When Jonas Quinn sees weird insectoid creatures crawling around the base and tells General Hammond, Hammond immediately orders the base locked down, not taking any chances (the creatures turn out to be benign and only exist in another phase of reality, Jonas just started seeing them after touching a device that enables this sight; chaos comes from humans starting to see what they aren't meant to).
• Star Trek:
  • Star Trek: Discovery: One arc in Season Two involves Spock apparently killing some people and frequently muttering equations under his breath. He turns out to be trying to decipher a code given to him by the Red Angel, and the footage of him killing the people was faked.
  • Implied in an episode of Star Trek: Enterprise, when a man from the 21st century is being hauled away by the police and ranting about what went on during the episode, which involved aliens and Ray Guns, the police look at him incredulously.
  • Star Trek: The Next Generation: In "All Good Things", a future Picard keeps seeing people who aren't there and going back and forth in time. His friends wonder if he's going senile, especially since in this alternate reality he does have a brain condition that can cause senility, but it turns out he really is time-travelling.
  • Star Trek: Voyager:
    • When Suder kills a crew member simply because he looked at him funny and confesses to hardly ever feeling emotion, the crew wonders if he's insane. The EMH scans him and finds no specific mental illnesses.
    • In "Pathfinder", Reg Barclay becomes preoccupied with Voyager and spends most of his time on a holographic recreation of it. His friends, coworkers, boss, and even his therapist all think that this is an unhealthy obsession because he claims to be "obsessed" with Voyager and he has had an unhealthy obsession with a holodeck program before. Actually, he's finding a way of communicating with the ship.
• The Twilight Zone (1959):
  • Zig-zagged in "The New Exhibit". It is left ambiguous whether Martin, his wife, and his friends were killed by the wax figures of Jack the Ripper, Albert W. Hicks, Henri Désiré Landru, William Burke, and William Hare or if he really did go insane, kill everyone, and commit suicide after being told that the museum would be torn down and replaced with a shopping market.
  • In "Nightmare At 20,000 Feet", Mr. Robert Wilson, sees a bulky, furry creature on the wing trying to destroy the engine. When he tries to tell the other passengers including his wife, they all think he's losing his mind. It doesn't help that he's just been discharged from a mental asylum.
• Victorious: In "Crazy Ponnie", the titular character keeps tormenting Tori when no one else is around, and everything thinks Tori is going crazy as she tries to tell them of things Ponnie did she has no evidence for or looks like she did to herself.

Music

• In Black Sabbath's "Paranoid", the singer says that people think he's crazy because he's frowning all the time.
• The Suicidal Tendencies song "Institutionalized" is about a teenage boy named Mike, whose parents keep sending him to institutions because they think he's not right in the head (and that he's on drugs). He's really just a nonconformist, though.

Tabletop Games

• Chronicles of Darkness: Soul loss slowly destroys the Sanity Meter and Willpower before it reduces the victim to an Empty Shell, making Muggles mistake them for The Mentally Disturbed or Addled Addicts. Given the Crapsack World, many Crazy Homeless People are actually the victims of various soul-stealing monsters.

Theater

• By the end of Act IV of The Comedy of Errors, Adriana is so astonished by Antipholus' behavior that she hires an exorcist to cast out the demon that must be driving him mad.
• In Peter Fleming Meets Doctor Who, Fleming describes two occasions when he saw kids in a playground playing at Doctor Who and realised how important the show was ... before adding that, at the time, he just thought they'd all gone mad, and called the police.

Video Games

• In the 8-bit text adventure Bugsy, it's possible for the protagonist (a three-foot-tall blue rabbit) to buy a clown costume. If so, it quickly ends the game by means of a double use of this trope:
  Suddenly I am accosted by two gentlemen in white coats.
  "Hey," says the first to the second, "what happened to dat guy what said he saw a rabbit in a clown suit?"
  "Padded cell," says the second to the first.
  "Okay," says the first to the second. "Let's get him out and get dis character in."
• In Final Fantasy XIV, Quinfort, a member of the Night's Blessed, raves about how he's going to be the Rak'tika Greatwood's chosen savior, worshipping an oversized worm as "the Great Serpent of Ronka" and insisting that the markings on its body are harbingers of impending disaster that must be thwarted. His Childhood Friend Valan is exasperated by Quinfort's antics and even the Warrior of Light can consider Quinfort a lost cause. But they soon find that Quinfort's visions and claims are all coming true and listen to him despite his quirkiness and fervor bordering on insanity.
• In the mission "Back from Reality" from The LEGO Movie Videogame, when Emmet tells Justin Furneaux about his experience in the real world after returning to Bricksburg, Justin thinks he just got out of an insane asylum.
• For most of the Mass Effect series, Commander Shepard is occasionally labeled a deluded madman/madwoman because of their repeated warnings that the Reapers are going to invade and wipe out all advanced life in the Galaxy. Which no one believes until the very last second, when the Reapers finally arrive in the third game and start killing/harvesting everyone.
• Persona 5: Tokyo is plagued by a series of incidents caused by people suddenly undergoing psychotic breakdowns, such as a subway conductor deciding to crash a train. It turns out Akechi has the unique ability to drive targets berserk and was using his powers on his victims' Shadows in Mementos, resulting in the apparent insanity in the real world. Downplayed when he uses the technique on himself, as at it only makes him appear more unhinged than he already is.

Web Animation

• Minilife TV: In "A New Terror Arrives", after Jack snaps out of his amnesia after hitting his head in a car accident and reveals to Chris and Ian that he's the former mayor of Minilife, they think he's delusional until the doctor reveals he's telling the truth.

Web Original

• Neopets: Implied for one of Lord Darigan's prisoners, known as "Number Five". He is thought to be insane and locked up in the prison due to ranting about a place called Jelly World. Jelly World actually does exist (it's a hidden area of the site that isn't shown on any map), but unfortunately for Number Five, most people in Neopia don't know that it's real, and even the site staff claim that Jelly World doesn't exist as a Running Gag.

Web Videos

• Paint: In the second "After Ever After", Cinderella tells the prince all about her Fairy Godmother's magic and how she made it to the ball... and he promptly throws her into the literal Bedlam House.

Western Animation

• The Adventures of Jimmy Neutron, Boy Genius: In "The Eggpire Strikes Back", Carl falls from a high distance and utters, "Shiny metal chicken..." Jimmy thinks this is a Non Sequitur, *Thud* and that the fall has made Carl delusional, but then it's revealed that the metal chicken in question is the Yolkians' mother ship.
• American Dad!: In "American Fung", Stan puts Francine in a psychiatric ward so he can have more time to prepare for their anniversary (which he has forgotten). Francine screams at him for what he's done, so the doctors falsely believe she has some kind of anger disorder and have her locked up again.
• Chaotic: Unlike his friend Tom, who keeps his mouth shut about the titular card game being a real place because he knows how crazy it sounds, Kaz tells stories about Chaotic constantly with no regard to how delusional he comes across. In one episode, Kaz gets his Chaotic stuff confiscated and sent to a school psychologist because everyone thinks he Cannot Tell Fiction from Reality. In the end, despite Kaz being unable to prove Chaotic's existence to his psychologist, his mom gives him his Chaotic gear back, because from her point of view, it's a harmless delusion that makes her son happy.
• Chip 'n Dale: Rescue Rangers: During the episode "Weather or Not", Monterey Jack encounters Professor Nimnul using a weather machine to commit crimes. However, every time he tries to show the other Rangers, there is nothing there, causing them to think that Monty has lost it until he leads them right to the bank Nimnul is robbing.
• In the Droopy cartoon "Droopy's Double Trouble", Spike is the victim of a Twin Switch; whenever Droopy leaves, his stronger twin brother Drippy comes and beats Spike up. When Spike confronts him about it, Droopy says, "Why, Spike, I haven't touched you all day." Thinking he's cracked up, Spike calls for the insane asylum to come pick him up. When the van arrives and Spike calls for Droopy, both he and Drippy respond; seeing double, Spike has a Freak Out and is the one taken away to the looney bin.
• Family Guy: In "Guy, Robot", Peter and his pals go to a '50s-style asylum to look for Peter's old mattress. A Psycho Psychologist takes Deliberate Values Dissonance to an extreme and wrongly declares Peter, Cleveland, and Joe insane for being friends with a black person, speaking up to a white person, and being crippled, respectively.
• Frances the Badger: In the Animated Adaptation episode "A Whiny Sister for Frances", Gloria's somewhat out-of-it due to her stomach flu, and Frances briefly wonders if Gloria has lost her mind before her father clarifies what's wrong with her.
• Futurama: In "Insane in the Mainframe", Bender and Fry's lawyer pleads insanity after they're framed for a murder case, so Bender and Fry are sent to a robot institution. Fry tries to convince everybody that he's not actually a robot, but they assume he's just delusional. Eventually, his spirit is so broken down that he actually becomes delusional, believing he's a robot.
• In Horton Hears a Who! (1970), when the kangaroo tells a bird named Mrs. Toucanella that Horton is talking to a dust speck on a clover (actually, he's talking to tiny people who live on the speck), she and her friends suspect that Horton is delusional and requires psychoanalysis.
• Invader Zim: Dib is constantly belittled and dismissed as insane by everyone, due to believing in paranormal things that the rest of the human characters don't. The fact that his bad luck means that he always loses any evidence he manages to find doesn't do him any favors.
• King of the Hill: In "Naked Ambition", Boomhauer falls asleep in an inner tube and drifts all the way to Houston, where his condition (sunburned, wearing only speedos and his usual gibberish speech) get him locked up in a local mental institution. In the same episode, when Boomhauer calls Dale to get him out of the mental hospital, Dale decides to infiltrate the place and sneak out. When he accidentally gets locked in, he goes to the director and rants about a conspiracy theory before telling him that he and Boomhauer are in there by mistake and should be released, but this convinces the director that Dale is just another delusional patient.
• Looney Tunes:
  • In "Napoleon Bunny-Part", Bugs Bunny gets the real Emperor Napoleon dragged away to a psychiatric hospital because the orderlies think he's suffering from Napoleon Delusion.
  • In "One Froggy Evening", the man and the frog are alone in the park until a policeman overhears the frog singing and approaches them. The man points at the frog to wordlessly tell the cop that it was the frog, but the frog has already clammed up at this point. The cop then has the man committed to a psych ward.
  • In "Punch Trunk", a man calls up the police department when a 5-inch-tall elephant takes a bath in his birdbath. However, when help arrives, it's not to get rid of the elephant but to have the man committed and taken away, believing that he's nuts.
    Man: But I did! I did see an elephant in my birdbath!
    Asylum Worker: Sure, sure, I know. I keep a giraffe in mine.
• Martha Speaks:
  • In "Ain't Nothin' but a Pound Dog", when Martha the talking dog has soap on her mouth, two men see her and think she's mad (possibly due to rabies).
  • In "Martha in Charge", Martha tries to telephone Helen's school, but accidentally phones a psychologist instead. The psychologist believes Martha is a human woman who simply thinks she's a dog.
    Psychologist: Since when did you start thinking you were a dog?
    Martha: Since I was a puppy?
  • In one episode, Martha is taken to a hotel but, due to the hotel having a "no pets" policy, she's disguised as Helen's grandmother. When a bellboy sees Martha taking a nap on the floor next to her disguise and the bones of some meat she'd been eating, he thinks Martha is mad and has eaten Helen's grandmother.
• ¡Mucha Lucha!: In "Shamrock 'N' Roll", a villainous leprechaun named Rick O'Shea is going around framing Rikochet for misdeeds. When Rikochet tries to explain to the townsfolk that a little man in green told him to hurt people, they immediately assume he's out of his gourd and send him to an insane asylum, which is depicted as a literal funny farm.
• Phineas and Ferb: Candace suffers from a severe psychosis because she can't convince her mother that her little brothers make a habit of violating the laws of common sense, physics, or current technological progress. Every time she tries to expose them, some remarkably convenient plot device eliminates the evidence just as their mother arrives on the scene. Her mother has commented on this being a delusion.
• The Pink Panther: In "Pink Campaign", the Pink Panther gets back at Little Man for cutting down his tree by building a new home out of his home. As the Little Man sees his house gradually disappearing (unaware of the Panther), he calls a termite exterminator, the police, and a psychiatrist, all of whom believe he's lost his mind.
• Robot Chicken: Zigzagged in "Happy Birthday, Calvin!", where it leaves it ambiguous as to whether Calvin was thought to be insane by his parents when he was actually just pretending that Hobbes was real, only to actually go insane and start truly thinking Hobbes was real when he got shock therapy and pills, or if Calvin was always insane and always thought Hobbes was real.
• Ruby Gloom: In "Doom with a View", Doom is the only one who can see Boo Boo the ghost and tries to point him out to everyone else. They wonder if Doom has lost it or is possibly having a nervous breakdown, so Ruby and Doom have to prove that Boo Boo does exist.
• The Simpsons:
  • In "Stark Raving Dad", Homer goes to work with a pink shirt (due to Bart putting his red hat in the wash) instead of a white shirt like his coworkers. Mr. Burns believes he's not in his right mind but takes the precaution of having Homer take a written test to prove his mental state. However, Homer is too lazy to fill it out and has Bart do it for him, and the "results" make the doctors think he's mad and take him to an asylum; not helped at all by Homer blaming it all on "the boy".
    Marge: Doctor, if you just talk to him for five minutes without mentioning our son Bart, you'd see how sane he is.
    Doctor: You mean there really is a "Bart"? My God!
  • In "'Round Springfield", Bart says that he hopes to get reincarnated as a butterfly, leading to an Imagine Spot of Principal Skinner being arrested and declared insane for burning down the school and saying that "the butterfly" did it.
  • In "The Bob Next Door", Sideshow Bob escapes from prison by switching faces with Walt, his cellmate who was due to be released. Because Walt couldn't talk straight with his new lips, the guards believed that "Bob" had gone insane and put him in a padded cell.
  • In "Don't Fear the Roofer", Homer is believed to be crazy by the rest of his family when he insists that he's friends with a contractor that none of them has seen (through bizarre coincidences, including a miniature black hole forming in between Bart and said contractor), which eventually leads to Homer being put in a mental institution and given electric therapy by Dr. Hibbert.
  • In "King-Size Homer", Homer, realising the Nuclear Power Plant is about to explode, tries to get an ice cream truck to give him a lift to the plant. Unfortunately, due to the fear-stricken Homer babbling incoherently, the driver thinks Homer is a madman after his ice cream and runs away.
  • In "The Front", Bart and Lisa write scripts for The Itchy & Scratchy Show while using Grampa's name and face to fool the studio execs (since they don't hire kids). When he tells Homer that he gets paid $800 per week to "tell a cat and mouse what to do", Homer has an Imagine Spot of him wheeling Abe to the looney bin.
  • In the final act of "Brother's Little Helper", everybody else believes that Bart is undergoing a paranoid breakdown as a side effect of the Focusyn he's taking when he's ranting about Being Watched, when in reality Bart discovered that the Major League Baseball is performing Sinister Surveillance on everybody in town through a Spy Satellite as an extremely aggressive and vile method of marketing research. The reveal of this occurs when Bart shoots down said satellite with the cannon of the tank he steals at the climax.
• South Park:
  • In "City Sushi", Dr. Janus misdiagnoses Butters with multiple personality disorder because he innocently loves to play pretend.
  • In "Mr. Hankey the Christmas Poo", Kyle tries to show the titular poo to everybody in town, but all they see is Kyle playing with shit. Mr. Mackey diagnoses him as a "clinically depressed fecalphiliac on Prozac" and sends him to a mental institution.
• SpongeBob SquarePants: In "Hall Monitor", SpongeBob pretends to be the "Open Window Maniac" to scare some people into closing their window. However, this causes the citizens to think he actually is a maniac and he even ends up on the news.
• Star vs. the Forces of Evil: After his revival, Glossaryk, normally a Trickster Mentor, seems to have lost his mind, unable to say anything but "Globgor" as he runs around on all fours. With Eclipsa back and Miss Heinous causing trouble, the cast don't really have time to find a way to fix him though. Then comes the season finale when it's revealed Glossaryk hasn't lost his marbles, with him explaining he'd been simply warning them that Eclipsa will try to reunite with her monster lover; Globgor.
• Tintin — The Adventures of Tintin (1991): In "Tintin in Tibet", when Snowy runs wild, the monks think he must be insane.

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