My Little Pony: Friendship Is Magic does this trope a lot, including Pinkie Pie for starters.
- Pinkie Pie in "Party of One" reverts to her depressed, straight-haired state previously seen in "Cutie Mark Chronicles" when she thinks her friends don't like her or her parties anymore.
- All of the main characters have a turn at breaking; usually, it happens because the aspect of their lives symbolized by the markings on their flanks has been called into question. This is the root cause of so many pony breakdowns that the fandom has dubbed it "Cutie Mark Failure Insanity Syndrome".
- This is made especially prominent in "The Best Night Ever." All the ponies are broken to a certain extent, but none more than Fluttershy, who is of course the super-incredibly-shy one. When the animals at the gardens at the Royal Palace subvert her special talent of caring for wildlife by running away from her, she snaps, chasing them, diabolically concocting traps (complete with Twitchy Eye, Evil Laughter, and Dramatic Thunder), and screaming at them to love her.
- Discord loves doing this (though he admittedly slides between this and Corrupt the Cutie). Twilight is the only one to escape his , and the fact her friends are brainwashed it's likely he got to her too. Fluttershy manages to partly avoid it by virtue of being aware and accepting of her faults, but he still brainwashes her anyway.
- Even though Twilight isn't brainwashed directly, she still gets hit with this. Discord reunites her with her friends after he's finished breaking them. The result is Twilight being treated like dirt by her beloved True Companions and having no idea what's happening to them. By the time the corrupted Fluttershy verbally assaults her, the poor girl has been broken as well. It gets so bad in the second episode that she turns gray without brainwashing. What helps her recover is the friendship letters returned from Princess Celestia.
- Pinkie breaks again in "Baby Cakes", where she suffers all sorts of indignities trying to prove she's responsible enough to look after the Cakes' new foals. After Pound Cake (a pegasus) and Pumpkin Cake (a unicorn) start manifesting their respective powers of flight and magic and making even more mischief, the Element of Laughter herself finally breaks down into hysterical bawling. Thankfully, it doesn't last long when the twins realize what they've done and make Pinkie laugh to cheer her up.
- Applejack gets this treatment two episodes in a row. In "The Last Round-up", her inability to win a single blue ribbon or earn any prize money for Ponyville breaks her so hard that she can't face returning to Ponyville since she feels she has let everyone down. In "The Super Speedy Cider Squeezy 6000", she is understandably driven to tears by the apparent loss of her and her family's home and vocation.
- Pinkie (again; she seems to get a lot of this) and Rarity are driven to tears by numerous insults from Fluttershy, when the pegasus tries to act more assertive in "Putting Your Hoof Down." Included among these is Fluttershy calling Pinkie "simple," calling Rarity "petty," and saying that the pursuits to which both ponies have dedicated their lives to are useless (coupled with a Hold Your Hippogriffs-disguised Precision F-Strike, no less). Note that neither of them did anything to deserve this treatment — they only tried to help Fluttershy and expressed concern about her recent behavior.
- Fluttershy gets this hard in Hurricane Fluttershy. In fact, it happens three times! First is when Rainbow Dash trying to get her to join in making the tornado brings up a pretty brutal bullying incident from her foalhood. Second is when some ponies laugh at her wing speed test, sending her running off as she cries her eyes out. And then, after she gives it her all to improve her performance by training extensively, she takes the test again only to find out that the improvement she's made isn't nearly enough and once more runs off in tears. Poor thing...
- In "A Canterlot Wedding," the characters all attend the wedding of Princess Cadance and Twilight's older brother, Shining Armor. Sounds completely lighthearted, right? Not after Twilight's hostile confrontation against "Cadance" at the wedding rehearsal causes Shining Armor to strip her of her "best mare" position and rescind her invitation to the wedding altogether, after which all of her friends and her idol, Princess Celestia, follow his lead and coldly turn on her (the point is then driven further home with a Dark Reprise sung by Twilight lamenting the loss of both her sister-to-be and her brother). Suddenly, "Cadance" reappears by Twilight's side, and for a moment it looks like all will be forgiven — and then "Cadance" claims she'll make Twilight sorry, ends Part 1 of the episode by imprisoning Twilight with dark magic, and starts off Part 2 by taunting Twilight with the fact that no one will ever hear or come looking for her. It is later shown that this wasn't the real Cadance after all.
- Cadance herself goes through a phase of this in Part 2, when she believes that she'll never make it to her husband-to-be in time. Twilight snaps her out of it, though.
- This is more or less what King Sombra's fake door does to Twilight Sparkle and Spike in "The Crystal Empire: Part 2." It leads to a vision of your worst fears, namely being abandoned by the people who care them the most (Princess Celestia and Twilight herself, respectively).
- Pinkie again in "Too Many Pinkie Pies". She has a breakdown when the clones she created to spend time with her friends cause trouble for them with their fun-seeking antics. Then she has to endure a test to prove that she is the real one with her very existence on the line.
- The CMCs in "One Bad Apple", thanks to bullying by Babs Seed. Unlike Diamond Tiara and Silver Spoon, Babs's bullying is much more serious and brutal. Justified, as this episode was intended to address the serious issue of bullying in Real Life.
- Sweetie Belle: Why do I feel like crying?note
- Pinkie yet again (Geez, Hasbro) in "Wonderbolts Academy" is driven to a sleepless near-insanity that can't leave the mailbox when she goes a few days without getting a letter from Rainbow Dash and thinks she's forgotten about her.
- The Mane Six in "Magical Mystery Cure". Twilight inadvertently causes her friends' cutie marks — and destinies — to be switched, and her friends are unable to cope with the jobs they now believe they were always meant to be doing. Seeing her friends break down leads Twilight to tears herself, until Spike helps her remember just how important her friends are to her, giving her the spark of inspiration she needed to fix the problem.
- Fluttershy in "Filli Vanilli" where she keeps getting scared out of her wits from Pinkie describing every horrifying detail about public singing. Then when it's discovered that she's been secretly singing for the Ponytones from behind the curtain, her anxiety distorts the cheering crowd into a crowd that is cruelly mocking her and she runs home crying.
- Fluttershy again in "Twilight's Kingdom — Part 2" when Discord temporarily betrays the Mane Six, particularly Fluttershy, with whom he was great friends. Just to rub salt into her wound, Discord reminds her of a promise he made of a tea party in Part 1 and then conjures up a tea party set only to smash everything on the ground at her feet. She's reduced to a sobbing wreck in Applejack's arms. It's the most distraught we've seen her as so far.
- Pinkie is still being mentally tortured in Season 6. In "The Gift of the Maud Pie", she (consensually) trades her beloved Party Cannon for a rock pouch (a gift for Maud). Maud and Rarity force the trader to make the switch back, but until then, Pinkie can only speak in a quiet, depressed voice with her head hung in despair.
- Sunset Shimmer gets put through the wringer in Equestria Girls — Forgotten Friendship. Having long left her villainous ways behind her and established herself as a loyal friend and All-Loving Hero, she's horrified to discover one morning that her friends no longer remember her good qualities and see her as the bully she used to be, and later finds the rest of her school is the same way. She still has a few friends in Equestria, but they're powerless to do anything beyond provide her with what research into the cause that they can, and Sunset's attempts to convince her friends of who they really are to each other fail because she'd been prone to faking evidence and putting on a kind facade in the past. She falls into hopelessness as she sees her friends living happily without her, with even her Hair-Trigger Temper burning away into a weak frustration, and she only manages to rally when she gets the unexpected support of Trixie. When she finally catches the perpetrator, who attempts to break Sunset even further by wiping out her friends' memories of each other as well as her, Sunset ends up Taking the Bullet to spare them and having her memories painfully extracted, leaving her confused and helpless as her friends look on in horror. Mercifully, her friends finally come to her defense and destroy the MacGuffin imprisoning their memories, reuniting them and restoring their friendship.
