Rape Leads to Insanity

Rape Is a Special Kind of Evil and is a horrible thing to have to experience. In most cases it can negatively affect the mental health and cause depression and sometimes lead to Sanity Slippage. With this trope, a woman or man^[1] who is raped experiences significant Sanity Slippage and may or may not regain their sanity. Compare Shell-Shocked Veteran (another common portrayal of PTSD), Break the Cutie, Rape as Drama. Sometimes the rape might not have actually happened and it will just be Attempted Rape.

No real life examples, please; this is a rape trope, and All The Tropes does not care to squick its readers.

Examples of Rape Leads to Insanity include:

Anime and Manga

• Perfect Blue: Mima begins to lose her grip on reality after she is supposedly raped for a film during her new acting career. Or does she get raped? After this scenario is shown, we hear a bell ring and a director yell "Cut!" and the movie continues into more twists and turns.
• Casca of Berserk went mad and mute after a horrifying rape at the hands of her former commander turned demon god Femto during the Eclipse.
  • Guts is a partial example. He Used to Be a Sweet Kid, but now he's a Byronic Hero with some serious issues that also Hates Being Touched. He became this way after he was raped as a kid, and it just got worse with the Eclipse where he was Forced to Watch the above-mentioned rape in circumstances that all but mirrored his own traumatic childhood ordeal. Let's just say that he has all the reason in the world to want Griffith dead.
• Konuma Ryuuko of Wolfen Crest. She's a nymphomaniac middle-schooler with what appears to be profound psychological damage from repeated rapes in her past, which made her a nihilistic sociopath.
  • Later, Haguro tries to use gang-rape on Hot Teacher Aoshika to Break the Cutie.
• Deadman Wonderland: One of the factors that made Genkaku Ax Crazy was rape.
• In Black Butler II, episode 8 Alois is raped by old man Lord Trancy. It's implied that this is what made him so Ax Crazy.
• In Black Lagoon, rape and torture is implied to have been what made Hansel and Gretel so Ax Crazy.
• In Peacemaker Kurogane, Suzu becomes Ax Crazy and a Depraved Homosexual after an old man rapes him.
• Legato Bluesummers from the Trigun manga is shown to have been raped (possibly numerous times) by the town mayor, or something like a mayor. As you might guess, he's now quite Ax Crazy.
• Tsubaki Kasugano - The 6th of Mirai Nikki.
• In Hellsing, Alucard, aka Vlad Tepes Dracul of Wallachia was sexually abused as a child during his time spent as a political hostage for his father under the Ottoman Empire by the sultan. Currently, he's clearly off his rocker.
• In School Days, Kotonoha's mental and emotional breakdown hits her fully after she's raped by her Stalker with a Crush, Makoto's best friend Taisuke.
• In Sakura Gari, a big reason Souma is so messed up and a Depraved Bisexual is because of all the rape and other trauma he endured in his past.
• In Neon Genesis Evangelion, Asuka crosses the Despair Event Horizon and ends up catatonic after her Mind Rape. By Word of God we're supposed to understand that she literally gets raped.
• Much like Souma from Sakura Gari above, this is one of the reasons why Gilbert from Kaze to Ki no Uta is so utterly messed up: In his youth, he suffered rape and other kinds of trauma.
  • Auguste and Rosemariné (to an extent) as well, as Auguste was raped by his stepbrother and Rosemariné was raped by Auguste when Rosemariné was fifteen.
• Hinako from Bitter Virgin was traumatised by years of sexual abuse at the hands of her stepfather. This severely messed with her mental state and caused her to develop an aversion to men and Hates Being Touched except by Daisuke. She gets better through her relationship with Daisuke.
• In Fushigi Yuugi, both Miaka and Yui experience rape attempts and go through Break the Cutie processes as a result. They also believe they actually got raped at some point and experience significant periods of depression and self-harm as a result.
• In Count Cain, Augusta went insane after giving birth to her brother's Child by Rape and had to be institutionalized. When Cain, not knowing she was his mother as well as his aunt, went to visit her in secret, she freaked out and threw herself out the window. At the end of the series, we learn that this is a subversion. While Augusta really did go insane afterwards, she had been more than willing to sleep with her brother all along.
• Sensual Phrase: In the manga, Aine's raped by a high-ranked executive who had a beef against Sakuya. Poor girl nearly splinters mentally after that.

Fan Fics

• The CSI fanfic 'Face the Music' by Elm22. Link if you want it: http://www.fanfiction.net/s/4828756/1/Face_The_Music. Granted, part of Grissom's mental affliction was the torture that went with the rape, but the rape still played a big part in the problems he struggled with.
• Light in the Death Note fanfic "Broken"
• Maka and admittedly Soul in the Soul Eater fanfiction Scars and Stitches.

Film

• In the classic silent film The Wind, Lillian Gish, who is already being driven around the bend by the neverending titular wind, finally cracks completely when the bad guy rapes her.
• The sister of the Anti Heroine in the Dirty Harry sequel Sudden Impact becomes catatonic after the two of them are gang-raped.
• Subverted in The Generals Daughter. It turns out that it wasn't her brutal gang rape during military school that lead to the late Elisabeth Campbell's Sanity Slippage. The betrayal of her General father, who refused to investigate the crime further because he thought they wouldn't be able to apprehend the suspects and because he allowed himself to be bought out by his own superiors, was the event that broke her mind and sent her into a downward spiral.
• Most Rape and Revenge films, though some victims (like the ones in Torched and Baise Moi) go a bit more violently psychotic than others, their newfound bloodlust not being restricted to just their rapists.

Literature

• The Chronicles of Thomas Covenant has this as a major theme. Covenant rapes a girl early in his first visit to The Land, and it haunts him throughout the ensuing stories. Part of the consequences is that Lena (the girl) definitely loses it because of the rape.
• Tender Is the Night: Nicole's sexual relationship with her father when she was a teenager (hence statutory rape) leads to her becoming schizophrenic.
• Speak: The book centers around a teenager named Melinda, who's just entered the 9th grade. She's not exactly the most popular kid in school, due almost entirely to her calling the police at a Wild Teen Party last summer. After the events of said party, Melinda goes from a bright, outgoing, friendly teenager to a bitter, angry, depressed one. Her grades go down the toilet, her parents are alarmed, and Melinda can't find the words to tell anyone what really happened; eventually, she stops speaking almost entirely. The plot mostly centers around Melinda's gradual decline, up until The Reveal of how she was raped by Andy, and then her gradual climb out of the hole.
• Nimue in The Warlord Chronicles wasn't the most stable person around to begin with, but her rape at the hands of King Gundleus pushed her over the edge. When she got over the worst trauma she was actually grateful in a way, as a great priestess must pass through three severe trials on their path to true power according to her beliefs, and the rape counted for two of them. But it doesn't prevent her from exacting revenge brutal enough to make battle-hardened warriors cringe when she gets Gundleus in her hands.
• In The Perks of Being a Wallflower Charlie's aunt was raped as a young girl, which led to her having serious psychological issues, which is why she herself molested Charlie.

Live Action TV

• Jan from Days of Our Lives was an Alpha Bitch before she was raped. Afterwards, she turned crazy.
• In Oz, Beecher's rape at the hands of Schillinger definitely didn't do any favors for his mental health.
  • Same deal with Cyril.
  • Adebisi brutally rapes the semi-conscious Schibetta at one point. As a result, Schibetta, traumatized by the rape, begins losing his mind and is transferred to the psych ward.
• "Revenge", the very first story on Alfred Hitchcock Presents, played on this idea without using the R word. A woman already recovering from a nervous breakdown is "assaulted" in her trailer. Her husband looks to avenge her by killing her assailant. One day she points the man out to her husband, and he does the deed. Then she points to another man, and another, and another.
• Supernatural: Arguably what happens to Sam Winchester after he is freed from Lucifer's cage.

Music

• In the Three Days Grace music video "Never Too Late" a woman is almost driven to suicide (she works through her issues though) and we learn that she became that way as a result of possible abuse physical and sexual at the hands of a man in a striped sweater.

Theater

• In A Streetcar Named Desire, Blanche's descent into insanity becomes especially evident after Stanley rapes her.
• In the second book of The Sword of Truth series, a queen (Kahlan's sister) is left in a prison for a few days with several criminals. She is rescued right before an execution. At first, she's catatonic, then suicidal, then she seems to recover, but ends up incapable of fighting the very enemies who threw her in the prison.

1. ↑ (the victim is usually, but not always, female)