You can think of a house with too much going on inside it and nobody in charge — doors banging, voices over voices, no way to make it quiet. The word names a building first and a feeling second, and every use keeps that shape: it is always a place, never a person.
The word is simply mad plus house. It began as the name of a real building, and the modern everyday use borrows that building as a picture.
這個字就是 mad（瘋、失控）加 house（房子）。它一開始指的是真的一棟建築，現在日常最常用的意思，是把那棟房子借來當畫面用。
Wiktionary (kaikki extract, source_ref kaikki:3f6f69a190036ae4:1115938718:18796), entry 'madhouse': From mad + house.
Two branches
舊時真正的那棟房子
畫面本身，還沒借出去：一棟真的建築，一個舊時代的名字。
noun · C1
An old word for a building where people with serious mental illness were kept. Modern English uses psychiatric hospital instead, and madhouse now appears mainly in old books and in writing about history.
（舊時的）精神病院
吵到管不住的地方
把那棟房子的聲音和失控感留下來，房子本身換成辦公室、廚房、車站——任何當下亂成一團的空間。
noun · B2
A place that is full of people, noise, and things happening all at once, so that nothing feels calm or under control.
亂糟糟的地方