Scientists call solitary confinement 'damaging and unnecessary'
"The more common response is for people to become increasingly depressed, and to be enveloped by a sense of hopelessness."The terrible nutrition and lack of vitamin D is enough to make anyone chronically sick.
Self-harming is not an uncommon practice, he says, and there are documented cases of individuals with no pre-existing mental illness or psychiatric symptoms going on to develop them in the course of their isolation.
Prof Huda Akil from the University of Michigan studies the brain biology of stress, emotions and depression. She said there was ample data in the literature to demonstrate the deleterious effects of solitary confinement.
"We have a vast amount of knowledge about the brain and how it responds to each one of the elements [of solitary confinement]. The lack of physical activity, the lack of interaction with the natural world like sunlight, the lack of interactions with other human beings, the lack of visual stimulation, the lack of touch - each one of those has been studied not just in humans but in animal models such as rodents. And each one by itself is sufficient to change the brain and change it dramatically."
Institutional induced illness.
