Someone may be Driven to Madness over the course of the story. Someone may start out already insane. But then, something causes them to quickly lose their madness.
There are many ways this can happen, including but not limited to: someone or something that can cause a "sane" reaction from the insane person, a person/a technique/an object that can turn insane people sane, and so on. May involve Journey to the Center of the Mind.
May overlap with Bored with Insanity. If the character is dying, it's often a case of Dying as Yourself. Compare to Sanity Strengthening, where an insane character gains sanity over a period of time. Also compare Moment of Lucidity, when a character's sanity is restored for only a temporary period, and Throwing Off the Disability. If this happens over a much longer period of time, it's a Mental Health Recovery Arc.
Examples:
open/close all folders
Anime & Manga
- Casca from Berserk started out as a competent Action Girl and the Number Two of the Band of the Hawk, but eventually ended up getting tragically raped by Femto, the experience causing her to fall into a catatonic state, becoming mute and gaining the personality of a young child. She proceeds to stay this way for quite a while until the Fantasia arc, where, after Schierke and Farnese have a Journey to the Center of the Mind to restore her consciousness, Casca's sanity is restored and she regains her former personality and much of her skill. Of course since this is Berserk she gets flashbacks to the Eclipse whenever she sees Guts, meaning they can't resume their relationship just yet.
Comic Books
- Batman: The Joker has undergone this multiple times, usually in reaction to Batman being retired and/or believed dead (e.g. Batman: The Dark Knight Returns, "Going Sane", the end of Scott Snyder's run, etc.). A more off-kilter application was in "The Demon Laughs", where he briefly regains his sanity upon being tossed into a Lazarus Pit. However, Status Quo Is God, so these stories almost always end with Joker returning to the insane psychopath he usually is.
- Guardians of the Galaxy: In 2015, Brian Michael Bendis took the team — which at the time included Agent Venom — to the symbiote homeworld, Klyntar. There, the Venom symbiote was "cleansed" of all the bloodlust and hatred it had accumulated, and rebonded to Flash as a member of the Agents of the Cosmos. Ultimately, this proved to be short-lived, as Venom: Space Knight undid the cleansing partway through, leaving the symbiote oscillating between its new good and old evil personas.
- Wonder Woman's lasso can restore a given measure of sanity, especially to those who have lost their minds due to magical interference.
- Wonder Woman (1942): Diana's lasso can restore both the mind and body of those transformed by Circe back into their human forms.
- Wonder Woman (1987): Diana's lasso can restore the mind of those transformed by Circe, but their bodies remain in whatever monstrous form Circe chose for them when she turned them into her slaves.
Fan Works
- But Doctor, I Am Pagliacci starts with the Joker returning to sanity, but being the only one to remember that Batman ever existed, and using his newfound sanity to figure out what went wrong with the world.
- Dungeon Keeper Ami: The God of Good collective, known as "the Light Gods", can heal minds. This helps both Ami herself when getting rid of terrible memories that weren't even hers, and then a minion of hers with a mind so broken that it was acting like an animal.
- In the Teen Titans fic One Thing Leads to Another
by Katergator, Raven heals Harley Quinn's brain from all the damage The Joker did to it. The resulting My God, What Have I Done? first drives her hysterical, then catatonic... then, after the Joker is captured, she gives him a few thousand stab wounds, cuts off his head and runs away.
- Snuggles the Symbiote: After Bonesaw injects herself with a mutagen derived from the DNA of several marvel supers, the Healing Factor she gains at first damages her body, including her brain, by purging her cybernetics but she fully recovers and her repaired brain regains the capability for remorse.
Films — Live-Action
- In the movie Awakenings, which is Based on a True Story, various catatonic patients are able to regain consciousness and normalcy after being injected with a drug used to treat Parkinson's Disease. Unfortunately, after a while, the symptoms of catatonia eventually return for all of the patients.
- In Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull, Professor Harold "Ox" Oxly finds a Crystal Skull, and it immediately drove him insane, barely able to concentrate, and speaking in riddles rather than giving direct instructions as to where to take the skull, how to get there, and what to do. Once the skull is returned and Colonel Irina Spalko is granted all of the knowledge by the Interdimensional Being, Ox begins speaking more coherently and even recognizes Indy, Marion, and expresses surprise that Mutt is their son. At the very end, he goes back to his old job as a university professor and happily makes his way to Indy and Marion's wedding.
- In Serenity, River, usually a Barefoot Loon cloudcuckoolander due to her Psychic Powers, becomes lucid after exposure to The Pax, a gas that the Alliance created to make people docile.
- At the end of The Lawnmower Man 2, Jobe's intelligence is removed and with it goes his insane megalomania and desire to conquer the world.
Literature
- The Scholomance: When the protagonist El overclocks her meditative exercise for "making the choice to put yourself right" with a huge amount of Mana, it's enough to undo the physical and mental corruption her friend Liu had suffered from using Black Magic. Downplayed in that it only works because Liu was using the bare minimum and is still mostly herself; if she'd gone fully Drunk on the Dark Side, it would have failed.
- The Wheel of Time:
- In the prologue, Ishamael used the True Power to cure Lews Therin's insanity. Lews Therin's subsequent realization of what he had done while insane drove him to suicide.
- Late in the series, Nynaeve works out how to use her Healing Hands to cure the insanity caused by prolonged use of saidin, the tainted male half of the One Power. The first man she tests it on breaks down in relief when his paranoid delusions disappear.
- Rand suffers long-term Sanity Slippage from his own powers and the terrible responsibilities he's taken on. At his darkest point, he almost crosses the Despair Event Horizon but instead has an epiphany about his hopes for the future of the world, gets a Split-Personality Merge with the aforementioned Lews Therin, and shakes off his madness for good.
Live-Action TV
- Happens twice on Supernatural, interestingly with the insanity stemming from the same source. In season seven Sam begins suffering from hallucinations due to his time spent in the Cage in season six and has difficulty distinguishing illusion from reality. It gets so bad that he can no longer sleep and is serious danger of dying from the stress. He's cured when Castiel transfers the pain of the memories over to himself, which then subsequently drives Castiel insane instead (Sam evens likens the exchange to the curse from The Ring). Castiel's recovery is more subtle and somewhat inexplicable, as there's not a precise moment when he improves and no stated reason for it, but presumably his angelic nature simply allowed him better resilience than a human and his time in Purgatory may have helped shock him back to some degree of normalcy. In any case, he's back to (relative) sanity by the start of season eight. He is depressed and borderline suicidal, but that's for mostly unrelated reasons.
Tabletop Games
- Dungeons & Dragons:
- Healing magic like greater restoration and the all-purpose heal, as well as comparable Psychic Powers, remove all forms of insanity and similar mental ailments affecting the target as part of their effect.
- In 1st/2nd Edition Advanced D&D, restore mind (the reversed form of the Forgotten Realms spell dismind) can cure both normal and magical insanity.
- Mage: The Awakening: Mages in the Legion Legacy gain powers by summoning Abyssal spirits to consume and replace their body parts. One of the capstone options is to replace their brain, curing all their Derangements and making them immune to new ones, all at the low cost of replacing their brain.
- Warhammer Fantasy Roleplay:
- Priests of the Healer God Shallya have access to a spell that cures one form of madness in the target, though it's considerably harder than healing physical wounds.
- Gold Wizards have a spell that can transmute an unstable mind into a stable one, removing a number of Insanity Points. However, if the wizard fails the Channeling test to cast it, it has the opposite effect.
- Surgeons can operate on a person's brain in hopes of removing insanity points or even curing permanent madness. However, failure can cause anything from permanent intelligence loss to death.
- The God of Chaos Tzeentch offers a spell, Mindfire, that zig-zags this. If the target is entirely sane, it inflicts Insanity Points; otherwise, it burns away their madness, inflicting an Armor-Piercing Attack in the process.
Toys
- This is one of the powers of the Kanohi Rode, the Mask of Truth, in BIONICLE. In addition to letting the user see through any deception, it allows them to cleanse the minds of others and let them see things clearly if they've been driven mad.
Video Games
- In Bloodborne, Ludwig is established to have once been noble and heroic (if misguided) man and the first hunter of the Healing Church (He's the guy who created the Ludwig's Holy Blade weapon), but the DLC reveals that he has since succumbed to the Beast Scourge and become a particularly nasty monster, who fights you in the Hunter's Nightmare. That is, until the second phase of his boss fight, when he sees the light of his Moonlight Greatsword, and what remains of his sanity is suddenly restored, signified by his title changing from "Ludwig the Accursed" to "Ludwig, The Holy Blade".
- In Eternal Darkness, healing spells powered by Xel'lotath cause this, except when the plot requires otherwise.
- In Fate/Grand Order, Caligula in Proper Human History was driven mad by the affection of the Moon Goddess, Diana, which is his Madness Enhancement as a Berserker. During the Olympus Lostbelt, it's revealed that Lostbelt Artemis tried to use the same power to drive the Heroic Spirits summoned by the Counter Force insane... and picks Caligula as her first target because of his connection to Diana, Artemis's Roman counterpart. Her efforts causes a Reverse Polarity effect that makes him level-headed and sane. He can still use his Noble Phantasm, which drives others insane (or in one case, counteract against madness spread by Lostbelt Aphrodite).
Visual Novels
- No Case Should Remain Unsolved: The entire game turns out to be Jeon Gyeong's attempt to help mentally ill Song Minyeong regain lucidity.
Web Comics
- Darths & Droids: After having spent two decades going insane from the guilt of his actions, when Palpatine learns that the "Moon Ghost" is actually Anakin haunting him, he suddenly becomes far more lucid. However, he doesn't have long to enjoy this before Vader tosses him down a shaft.
Web Videos
- The Cry of Mann:
- At the end of Mann, Jack and Courtney have both undergone some serious Sanity Slippage, with Jack becoming a buff orange monster and Courtney slipping into alcoholism and a desire to be beautiful. After almost turning Jouglat's funeral into chaos and Jack only having a temporary Moment of Lucidity, the day is saved when Tank Mann comes home and defeats the Big Bad. Afterward, Jack and Courtney settle down and though they'll never be the same again, they return to acting normally.
- In the sequel The Call of Warr, Gravesite and Prince are both slipping, with Gravesite becoming obsessed with scripting an action movie and Prince becoming more and more determined to kill not only Prisoner Sarah, but several other characters as well. At the end of the series, Gravesite is reminded of how important his leadership is and goes back to normal. In stopping Prince from killing Mable and Ashes, Prince ends up turning back to normal as well... in time to fall on his own knife and die of an Agonizing Stomach Wound, with Gravesite there to help him.
Western Animation
- Gravity Falls: Downplayed with "local kook" Old Man McGucket, who starts recovering after getting his memories back at the end of "Society of the Blind Eye", but still retains much of his eccentric hillbilly Mad Scientist behavior.
- Zig-zagged with The Mask in the episode "Sister Mask". After Dr. Pretorius puts the Mask on, he becomes a Giant Spider and goes through Sanity Slippage, then later gets Hoist by His Own Petard and becomes a soccer ball due to being under the influence of the sister mask. He regains his sanity (although he's still a Mad Scientist) once the mask is off and Stanley Ipkiss starts chasing him (as The Mask). But because Status Quo Is God, every time he regains sanity, Dr. Pretorius goes back to being a Mad Scientist doing things For the Evulz.
- Star Wars: The Clone Wars: After getting bisected at the end of The Phantom Menace, Darth Maul has slowly devolved from the fearsome Sith warrior he once was, into a screaming shell of a man with only brief Moments of Lucidity. Once his brother, Savage Opress, finds him, he takes him to Mother Talzin, who uses her magic to heal his mind, returning him to the cunning warrior he once was.
- Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles (2012): After being defeated by the Shredder, Splinter lost his mind and started acting like an actual rat. Shredder has Baxter Stockman try to invoke this trope (wanting him to be aware he will be killed) and April succeeds using her powers.
