The Person Alone | Alone in Isolation: Isolation and Psychopathology

Solitary confinement in prison is another instance of extreme isolation.

Christopher Burney (1952) described his eighteen months in solitary confinement during World War II in a German prisoner-of-war camp.When he was returned to the company of other prisoners, he was afraid to speak to anyone for fear that others might consider him insane. For Burney, as well as for the American servicemen who were captured during the Korean War and subjected to brainwashing, there was a breakdown of the normal sources of consensual validation of one’s own value standards and behavior. In reviewing the autobiographies of people who had endured extreme isolation, the pscyhiatrist J. C. Lilly (1956) concluded that, in spite of the self-censorship imposed on these autobiographies, “Persons in isolation experience many, if not all, of the symptoms of the mentally ill”. It is certainly evident that isolation is an unusually stressful experience and, according to Lilly, one from which an individual is not always able to recover fully.

(Source: Raven, Bertram H., Rubin, Jeffrey Z. SOCIAL PSYCHOLOGY. 1983. John Wiley & Sons, Inc: United States of America. 2nd Edition)

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