What solitary confinement says about loneliness

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I was scrolling through Twitter, as I do, when I came across a tweet about how damaging solitary confinement is. I’d read a million years ago that the Geneva Convention defines solitary confinement as torture, which really surprised me.

As it turns out, solitary confinement is really, really bad for you. According to WaPos, “Solitary confinement causes terrible psychological trauma and leads to increased risk of depression, anxiety, and psychosis.”

According to the below New Yorker documentary, your brain actually begins to atrophy after 14 days in solitary. “You don’t feel like the person you were before,” said James, who spent a long time in solitary as a teenager.

Solitary confinement has to be pretty bad if prisoners prefer the violence, rape, and theft of gen pop.

Absolutely to beat a dead horse:

Psychedelics tend to dissolve the ego and point to a oneness. They’re also rated as among the most meaningful experiences of people’s lives. Baby monkeys prefer cloth mothers without food to cold machines with food. Baby humans given adequate food, water, and shelter will literally die without touch. Social support determines whether an event is traumatizing or merely unpleasant.

That being deprived of contact with other humans literally turns your brain into mush should tell you something.

You can say what you want about the purpose of life. And maybe you’re the outlier who could live alone in the woods with no human contact for decades and suffer no ill-effects.

But for most of us, most of the time, human connection and social support are 👏 simply 👏 not 👏 optional 👏.

In the documentary, James talks about how he would cover the window to his cell so the guards would come in and beat the shit out of him because that was better than having no human contact at all. That’s distressing, I thought.

But thinking about it now, it’s also kind of fucking beautiful. James’ brain told him he needed human contact to survive. And he wanted to live so much that he did what he had to do to get what he needed. Hopefully I’m not assuming too much here, but if human contact is so important that sometimes an ass beating is better than nothing, I’m thinking probably a short conversation with a store clerk is also better than nothing.

We have brains that really want us to survive. We are surrounded by other people who are also in desperate need of connection. If you’re in a situation in which you can obtain some human connection that doesn’t come with a side of ass-whipping, let’s go out there and get some.

Also, end solitary confinement. And prisons.