Mental patient

A mental patient is a loony. For whatever reason, these people have suffered from circumstances in their lives that have made it impossible to deal with reality. In the best of cases, they receive treatment from a respectable psychiatrist or mental health facility. In the worst of instances, they are remanded to a sanitarium because they're a five-star certified whack-a-doodle. In some cases, a criminal might fake having a mental condition in order to go to a mental hospital rather than to prison. Such was the case with rapist R.P. McMurphy, played by Jack Nicholson in One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest, who pretended to be crazy so he could have an easier time living at a state run facility rather than going to jail. Another example of a mental patient is Karl Childers, played by Billy Bob Thornton in the 1996 film Sling Blade, who was remanded to the care of a state facility in Arkansas after murdering his mother and her lover with a Kaiser blade.