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This article offers a critical assessment of representations of psychiatric hospitalisation in modern Western societies, with the goal of informing clinicians’ approach to communication and reassurance around involuntary hospitalisation. With evidence from film and fiction, it shows that these representations overwhelmingly fall into the genre of melodrama and, further, that this genre encodes conflicting but simultaneous historical anxieties about individual self-determination and community belonging, which become engrafted to the psychiatric hospital as a subject. With this critical assessment, the article also offers a model of how humanities scholarship can inform clinical psychiatry at the level of content, as distinct from the emphasis on listening skills and empathy in recent discussions of the humanities in psychiatry.