That’s fair. I actually misread the quote. It’s about the future, not sci-fi in general. Egan is undoubtedly sci-fi (among the hardest there is), but only some of his stuff is about the future. Or at least our future.
If a novel reflected the same frequency of it’s plots in real life it wouldn’t be, well, novel.
There is that. As has been said of movies, a good show is real life with all the boring parts edited out.
It’d be deathly exhausting to actually live through a month in the life of most TV or movie characters. But what a way to go! 
This post contains spoilers for the ten-year-old novel (and subsequent Netflix film) Bird Box.
The story hinges on the concept that the mere sight of a–something–(presumably an alien)–‘drives you mad’, to the point of murdering anyone around you and then yourself. This is said to happen instantly for most people, though some people just go on being ‘mad’ if they were that way to begin with.
The creatures are never described in the novel nor shown in the show (I’m told–I’ve read the book but not seen the show). The show-makers initially wanted to include visuals of creatures based on characters’ “greatest fears,” though how your greatest fear could lead to you doing murders seems poorly-supported. (I could see having a Greatest Fear lead people to have heart attacks or other deadly reactions, but why would your Fear make you murder others?)
At any rate, it was certainly “driven mad as a trope,” in spades.
All the time; check out “female hysteria”. It’s an idea going back literally thousands of years in various forms.
Wasn’t there a Larry Niven story in which an alien planet had a cliff so high it would drive people crazy? That’s all I remember, so it probably wasn’t one of his classics.
I think that would be A Gift From Earth. It was part of his classic Known Space universe. All settlements on that particular world were on a single group of plateaus with enough height to project up out of the poisonous mists that covered the rest of the planet. But it wasn’t the height of the cliffs that drove people mad; it was the sense of looking into infinity (due to the vast, featureless mist) that caused people to become hypnotized.
“Plateau Trance”
Niven described it by analogy to highway hypnosis.
Not really “madness” or other kind of psychotic break. Just a temporary autohypnosis.
Opideus has to be a contender. He went mad and cut his eyes out when he discovered he had, as was prophesized, killed his father and married his mother
Apparently dear @griffin1977 has been driven mad by the exertions of spelling “Oedipus”. And still fell short of his task.
“Opideus” makes me think of the patron god of Mayberry.
Does Caitlin from Clerks qualify?
I’m sure the ancient Greek dramatists would have had a great time with autocorrect as a plot device
Literature has always had a fascination with crazy women, especially around Victorian times (or at least those are the best examples I know.) This is partly based on the fact that a lot of women were having problems in those times, particularly the women who were rendered utterly useless by social convention. If a wealthy woman had children, she wasn’t the one raising them. But she wasn’t allowed to work, either. There was nothing really she could do with herself. So a kind of sickness set in that was characteristic of the time. Combine that with the physical effects of conforming to beauty standards such as disfiguring corsets and worse, women really were physically and emotionally fragile.
The best madwoman example I can think of is the secret wife in the attic in Jane Eyre. Her madness came at least in part from being forced to live a life she didn’t want to, IIRC (it’s been a while.) There’s also a whole book from her POV called Wide Sargasso Sea. I haven’t read that one.
It’s worth noting that a lot of times with these madwomen, their madness is framed as a result of injustice, something deeply tied to their gender. It’s as if there was some recognition of how crazy making it was to be a woman.
Interesting how 11-year Conrad Aiken was present at his parents’ murder/suicide, which by prevailing literary conviction should have made him immediately insane. But instead the main character in Silent Snow, Secret Snow is a boy who only gradually retreats into his fantasy life, and with no noted traumatic incident.
Three words: undiagnosed tertiary syphilis.