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.

Many fine young whack jobs may even find themselves as patients at the Westin Hills Psychiatric Hospital, which is located near the town of Springwood, Ohio in the A Nightmare on Elm Street film series. Here, groups of teenagers are placed on suicide watch after suffering intense nightmares involving a demonic killer named Freddy Krueger who murders them in their dreams. Although staff members generally write these patients off as being Cuckoo for Coco-Puffs, they are actually correct in their assertion that someone is using their dreams to kill them. To keep the more unruly patients in line, the staff at Westin Hills would prescribe an experimental dream suppressant called Hypnocil. Although this was used only in special cases at the onset, it eventually became standard medication once the staff learned the truth about Krueger.