Solitary confinement is an obvious cause of this disturbing neurosis but it’s not just the incarcerated who get it. Anyone who feels confined can lose their mind to the shadows within themselves.
Our knowledge of the psychological effects caused by solitary confinement isn’t insignificant. We’ve known for a long time that a mind loses cohesion when it’s removed from the sensory and social world around it for extended periods. What we couldn’t agree on was how soon it’d happen.
Two hundred years ago, things were very different. Being sent to solitary meant going into a black hole, quite literally. There was no light, no sound inside that desolate place. It was a silent cell full of a whole lot of nothing. The mind began to wander. Prisoners were dragged back into reality to go to church on Sundays and then sent straight back to the nothingness an hour later. A heavy sack covered their heads in transit so they couldn’t speak to or see anyone along the way. It sounds absurd but there was no malice meant for the process. There was some well-intended logic behind it.
Sensory deprivation was used to re-educate prisoners and improve their behaviour. It was believed that they'd become reformed by taking everything away from them but God.
This method didn’t work. Two weeks in the hole was enough to turn them mad. Some suicide within days of being released from the hole.
To add insult to injury, those who’d passed away had their bodies examined by a doctor. It was done so he could find the inner evil in the flesh of the corpses.
No, the doctors didn’t find any badness inside the dead. It was a wasted exercise.
Solitary confinement is a whole different thing today. There are no black pits, ongoing silences, or sensory deprivation. Lights illuminate cells, even the isolated ones. That way, the senses have something to work with that allows the mind to stay within the boundaries of this reality, the same one you and I enjoy.
Mental cohesion has always fascinated me. I like to push the mind, just to see when it begins to slip all by itself. Apparently, it doesn’t take much for us to lose the plot. I’m a firm believer that psychological slippages can occur in anyone and it doesn’t require visible walls or silent black holes to do it.
Confinement can occur within an oppressive relationship, a prolonged psychological, physical or sexual abuse from a spouse, friend, parent, sibling or a work college. Over many years of torment, an invisible set of walls will surround the person, turning them into an isolated, emotionally deprived prisoner, and closing in on them a little more each day that passes. Losing one’s sense of reality in these conditions is plausible. It too would result in suicide, spontaneous acts of violence, drug use, emotional outbursts and a change in one’s moral standard. It leaves me with one important question:
Could an extremely good person be made to turn evil by the use of emotional confinement?
Find the answer here, right now
-M
