• New World Order. 6:45-8:15 p.m. Tuesday.

Independent Film Channel.

• Mental. 9-10 p.m. Tuesday. Fox.

• Hitched or Ditched. 9-10 p.m. Tuesday. The CW.

Everybody's seen that bumper sticker that says, ''Mental illness is contagious . . . you catch it from your kids.'' On Tuesday night, we're going to see if you can get it from television, with three shows that -- intentionally or otherwise -- document seriously disturbed minds, with results ranging from riveting to revolting.

Tending toward the latter is Mental, Fox's new drama about doctors at a psychiatric hospital, which may already have been canceled by the time you get to the end of this sentence -- shows on this touchy subject tend to have a life span measured in hours rather than months. Remember Wonderland? Crumbs? Head Cases? No? See what I mean?

But whatever political-correctness charges are brought against Mental by activist groups will be bolstered by the show's tepid silliness. It's a One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest Lite, with mildly fascist doctors (no music in the therapy room!) and harmlessly crazy patients (dead cats in the freezer!) At this hospital, ''radical therapy'' means not lobotomies or electroshocks, but compulsory salsa-dancing.

Mental's putative star is Chris Vance, lately of Prison Break, the new director of a psychiatric staff of officious jackasses and frustrated libidos. You can tell that he's cool because he rides a bicycle; that he's a madcap nonconformist, because he does card tricks at staff meetings; and that he's smart, because he's got a British accent. His favored treatments include neither drugs nor any of that boring Freudian stuff, but aromatherapy and acupuncture. Here's hoping that Hannibal Lecter checks into the hospital soon.

The word ''crazy'' never comes up in New World Order, IFC's respectful but nonetheless damning documentary on conspiracy theorists, but you'll be thinking it within minutes. Directors Luke Meyer and Andrew Neel open by giving their subjects time to talk relatively sanely (if not entirely logically) about the Kennedy assassination, but the paranoia quickly boils over: These people see everything from Dealey Plaza to 9/11 to Hurricane Katrina as part of one seamless web of oppression spun by a tiny cabal of global overseers.

There is literally nobody or nothing that cannot be woven into their massive tapestry of treachery. Bilderbergers. Freemasons. Rockefellers. Henry Kissinger. William Shatner. Woodrow Wilson. Bill Clinton. Anybody named Bush. They all dance across a nightmarish landscape of FEMA camps, black helicopters, the United Nations, Waco, the Federal Reserve, NAFTA.

It's tempting to blame all this on a generation of Internet idiots (and the temptation is certainly fed by one young man who explains that YouTube ended the Vietnam War) but in fact the conspiracy subculture is simply a modern manifestation of the ancient human rage against random misfortune, a certainty that bad things don't happen to good people without outside intervention. Five hundred years ago, plague and pestilence were were blamed on witches and demons; now we know it was the Trilateral Commission.

'If you look at the world today and you go, `Why is everything going wrong and why are people dying and there are civil wars and unrest and people dying of famine,' you can't see what the connections are,'' says one earnest believer in New World Order. ``But when you look at the plans that, for example, the Bilderberg Group or the secret government have had since the '50s, suddenly everything becomes simple.''

New World Order is full of statements like that, sometimes hilarious, sometimes infuriating, but ultimately terribly sad. ''It's not a joke,'' says one addled but utterly sincere man, tears of frustration on his cheeks. ``We're not kidding. We're for real!''

You may question the sanity of the conspiracy nuts in New World Order. But you should certainly question your own if you sit through the entire hour of Hitched or Ditched, The CW's vicious new reality show in which brides and grooms jilt one another at the altar for fun and prizes.

The participants in this sadistic garbage heap of a show, in which unmarried couples are tempted with loot to marry, then confronted with tapes of their own families recounting their lousy character, range from vapid narcissist fools to violent criminal trash. In other words, they're a born posse for producer Mike Fleiss, who started out nine years ago with Who Wants to Marry a Multi-Millionaire? and has been rolling downhill from there. One of these days, perhaps, Fleiss will quit victimizing the rest of the American populace and star in a reality show with his cousin Heidi, the Hollywood madam. We could call it Which Fleiss is the Bigger Pimp? I think the Los Angeles cops guessed wrong.

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