Effects of Solitary Confinement

Psychopathological reactions to solitary confinement were extensively described by nineteenth-century German clinicians. In the United States there have been several legal challenges to the use of solitary confinement, based on allegations that it may have serious psychiatric consequences. The recent medical literature on this subject has been scarce. The author describes psychiatric symptoms that appeared in I 4 inmates exposed to periods of increased social isolation and sensory restriction in solitary confinement and asserts that these symptoms form a major, clinically distinguishable psychiatric syndrome. (Am J Psychiatry 140: 1450-1454, 1983)