"This exploitative melodrama finds newspaper reporter Johnny Barrett (Peter Breck) trying to win the Pulitzer Prize by posing as a patient of a mental hospital. He meets with a local psychiatrist to learn enough about disorders to have him admitted for observation. Johnny convinces his girlfriend Cathy (Constance Towers) to go along with the ruse or their relationship is over. He is accused by her of sexual impropriety, and answers the questions convincingly enough to have himself placed in the hospital to probe a patient's murder. He encounters three disturbed inmates who supposedly witnessed the killing. Stuart (James Best) is the shell-shocked Korean War veteran who now believes he is a general in the Confederate Army. Boden (Gene Evans) is a nuclear scientist reduced to the level of a six year old over the horrors of nuclear war. Trent (Harry Rhodes) has been equally traumatized as the first black student at an all white Southern college, who believes he is now a white member of the Ku Klux Klan. Johnny is attacked by a roomful of female sex fiends, subjected to shock therapy and slowly loses what is left of his rational mind. Johnny survives to win his coveted Pulitzer Prize, but his experience in the hospital leaves him worse of than the patients he set out to interview."