Basic Trope: A mental hospital with old-fashioned and horrifying methods of treatment.
- Straight: Alice and Bob get committed to Tropeville Mental Hospital, where they're both lobotomized and frequently tortured with ECT, among many other terrifying ways of being treated.
- Exaggerated:
- The mental institution will even lobotomize or outright kill patients over the slightest inconvenience.
- The hospital is in such bad shape that even the infrastructure is falling apart.
- Downplayed: Tropeville Mental Hospital has a few outdated methods of treatment, although they could easily be a case of what was Fair for Its Day.
- Justified:
- The story takes place in the 18th or 19th century, where mental hospitals were actually like this.
- Tropeville Mental Hospital has been around for a long period of time and hasn't really bothered to update any of their treatment methods.
- Tropeville Mental Hospital is run by people who don't actually care about or understand mental illness.
- The evil doctors see the mentally ill patients as easy victims who they can torture with impunity.
- Tropeville Mental Hospital sees the Insanity Defense as a get out of jail free card, so they make there treatments de-facto punitive.
- Inverted: Tropeville Mental Hospital is actually extremely pleasant, and does a wonderful job at getting Alice and Bob to get over their mental health problems.
- Subverted:
- Tropeville Mental Hospital is one of these facilities at first, but after it becomes known how they treat their patients, they reform and become an actual place for treating mental health.
- Alice and Bob hear that they're being sent to an asylum. They're scared at first, but when they get there, it's a lot better than they expect.
- Double Subverted:
- Tropeville Mental Hospital does reform... but not by very much. They still treat patients rather badly.
- Alice and Bob find the hospital better than expected, until they upset the Psycho Psychologist and/or Battleaxe Nurse and find out just how terrible the hospital really is.
- Parodied: The reason the asylum is so terrible is because the head doctor is a dentist that knows nothing about psychology. He got the job by lying on his resume.
- Zig-Zagged: Some mental hospitals are scary places that use outdated methods, others are fair and modern.
- Averted:
- Mental hospitals are not mentioned.
- A mental hospital does appear, but it's clean, modern, and dedicated to truly helping patients.
- Enforced: The writers are trying to make a point about the negative ways that mental health facilities often treat their patients.
- Lampshaded: "Help me...this place is straight out of a horror movie."
- Invoked: Emperor Evulz keeps the mental hospitals in his realm in a bad state to get rid of the mentally ill by physical sickness, cold and suicide, since he views the mentally ill as undesirable elements of society.
- Exploited: Charlie fabricates mental health diagnoses for Alice and Bob despite them being quite healthy. He plans to get them sent to Tropeville Mental Hospital to have them lobotomized there.
- Defied: Once authorities find out what's going on at the Tropeville Mental Hospital, they shut the place down or demand better treatment options.
- Discussed: ???
- Conversed: "If a character gets sent to a mental hospital in fiction, it's almost never a nice place."
- Implied: Mental hospitals aren't shown, but all characters dread being sent there, and sending them to a mental hospital is used as a tale to scare people into obedience.
- Deconstructed: Alice and Bob become far worse thanks to their treatment, culminating in them rallying up their fellow patients, murdering most of the orderlies, stretching out their last painful moments to as long as possible, and ultimately burning down the asylum with the few surviving officials in it while escaping, becoming full-blown SerialKillers, trapping innocents in an abandoned building and torturing them in the near-exact same way, continuing to do so for as long as possible until the fuzz inevitably find out and sentence them to Death Row.
Back to Bedlam House... but don't let the Psycho Psychologist know you've been here.
