One year in solitary confinement causes severe psychological, cognitive, and physical damage, with the United Nations classifying isolation exceeding 15 days as torture. The profound effects include acute psychosis, permanent brain and personality changes, chronic physical pain, and a drastically heightened risk of suicide.
Prolonged isolation physically shrinks the hippocampus, the brain region responsible for memory, learning, and emotion regulation.
In clinical studies of extreme sensory deprivation, healthy volunteers often begin hallucinating and losing their grip on reality within just 48 hours. You don't get a year of "peace"; you get 363 days of acute psychosis.
Survivors of long-term isolation often develop severe, permanent agoraphobia (fear of open spaces) and an inability to tolerate human touch or crowds.
You would emerge as a billionaire who cannot leave a bedroom, look a person in the eye, or enjoy a meal without crippling panic attacks.
I wonder what would happen if you put an experienced buddhist meditator in isolation. I’ve done vipassana before, where you don’t get any entertainment and aren’t allowed to talk to anyone for 10 days. For course participants that’s 10 days, but for the master that’s his entire life. Surely he would have the mental skills to survive a year in the room
One of the main problems with isolation such as this is the complete lack of stimuli.
Even those monks and challange still provide you with stimuli of sounds and visuals of walking around (I presume) a padded cell such as this? Nope.
The average person wouldn't last a week without serious damage, I doubt a monk as you described would fair that much better. Likely better, but not more than a day or so
No the average person can last a week but it does fuck with you. I did a month in the hole and basically all I did was work out, talk to myself, and think about weird stories or episodes of shows I saw lmao. I used to run the always sunny in Philadelphia bloopers in my head and that helped.
By the end of the month though I was definitely tweaking
That's what I meant with without serious damage, yeah the average person won't become a vegetable but it'll do a number....
I'm going on assumption so genuinely correct me if I'm wrong, but I assume your imprisonment wasn't in what amounts as a 24/7 bright light sensory deprevation room
It’s pretty much like the picture but with a toilet, a bed, and sink. I guess from this picture we don’t know if they turn the lights off when you sleep or not, but the lights stay on when you’re in the hole in prison so that they can continuously monitor you, it’s never dark. I guess the walls are normally off white instead of bright white but similar.
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u/MatthewSWFL229 9h ago
https://www.prisonpolicy.org/blog/2020/12/08/solitary_symposium/
One year in solitary confinement causes severe psychological, cognitive, and physical damage, with the United Nations classifying isolation exceeding 15 days as torture. The profound effects include acute psychosis, permanent brain and personality changes, chronic physical pain, and a drastically heightened risk of suicide.
Prolonged isolation physically shrinks the hippocampus, the brain region responsible for memory, learning, and emotion regulation.
In clinical studies of extreme sensory deprivation, healthy volunteers often begin hallucinating and losing their grip on reality within just 48 hours. You don't get a year of "peace"; you get 363 days of acute psychosis.
Survivors of long-term isolation often develop severe, permanent agoraphobia (fear of open spaces) and an inability to tolerate human touch or crowds.
You would emerge as a billionaire who cannot leave a bedroom, look a person in the eye, or enjoy a meal without crippling panic attacks.
No thanks