Solitary Confinement

Imagine walking into a room that holds a bed, a toilet, and a small window. Now imagine being told to stay there for days, alone. Just the thought of it will make many people feel stressed and go crazy. This used to be what was recommended to people suffering from melancholy to try and resolve the illness. This prescription of solitary confinement was specifically used to try and cure women suffering from melancholia. It was believed that they needed to have complete rest and do nothing in order to reduce the black bile that was building up within their body. On the other hand, however, men would have the opposite prescription, as they were forced to work in order to get their mind off of these melancholic ideas and get the body moving. Over time, people realized that solitary was not an effective way to assist in curing melancholy, but in many cases, it actually assisted in promoting melancholy within a person. The inability to engage in activities and being forced to be alone with one's thoughts tend to drive them to madness.

When considering solitary confinement today, many people's minds jump to how it is most commonly used as a punishment in prison. There is more to it than that though. Lisa Guenther describes in her book, Solitary Confinement: Social Death and Its Afterlives, how the possibilities with solitary confinement has expanded. There are areas that use sensory deprivation, sensory overload and psychotropic drugs. These various methods piled upon the solitary drives people insane and can result in the complete collapse of the human. When looking at the specific side effects, there are many that tend to occur. The Law Journal Library discussed four major responses that tend to occur with people who have been through solitary confinement. The first response is a hypersensitivity to external stimuli. Once being in solitary, your body adjusts to the quiet that surrounds you. Once out, they are not able to quickly readjust to hearing many different background noises that our body has trained itself to drown out. These include plumbing systems, air conditioning, and other common building amenities. Many people have gone on the record to say how they could not stand these noises and would need to start to scream in order to drown out the sounds. The next side effect that many solitary victims suffer from is hallucinations. This occurs especially when still inside of the confinement, but many people have described how they have heard various sounds and saw strange shapes when inside of the room. They would terrify the people as they knew no one was there but could not stop themselves from seeing and hearing these hallucinations. This side effect tended to lead into the next one, being panic attacks. When all of this is happening inside the mind of the person in solitary, there is no one else present to help them work through it and get them to stop having these hallucinations. This would induce panic attacks for the people, and they would be on their own to try and calm themselves down. Lastly, another result from solitary is memory and concentration loss. There was one person who was recorded to slice their wrists and not remember it due to the memory loss he suffered while in solitary. After suffering from some, or all, of these various effects, many people have a hard time readjusting to the world and interacting with others. Amelia Jarvis explains how many prisoners who went through solitary confinement turn very hostile to others, including both other prisoners and guards. A study done by the Central Danish Psychiatric Register found that 29% of people who went through solitary confinement had to be hospitalized from their conditions afterwards. This shows the overall consequences from this devilish fate that many people have suffered from and gives more of an explanation as to why many people who have went through this for melancholy did not get better, but many times got worse.