SOCIAL DEATH

In 1993, social psychologist Craig Haney  began studying the effects of solitary confinement at Pelican Bay State Prison in California, one of the first "super-max" prisons in the country.

Twenty years later, he went back to gather more information — and found many of the same inmates still suffering alone in their cells.

"It was shocking, frankly," Haney, a professor in the psychology department at the University of California Santa Cruz, recently told The New York Times.

Despite not being peer reviewed as a formal study yet, Haney's interviewed of 56 prisoners, all of whom spent between 10 and 28 years in solitary confinement.

The results provide the most comprehensive look at the effects of long-term solitary confinement yet, according to the Times.

An estimated 75,000 prisoners across the US live in Special Housing Units, also known as the SHU — what the Federal Bureau of Prisons calls solitary confinement. There, they spend up to 23 hours locked in cells often no larger than the span of their outstretched arms with little to no interaction with others. 

During their few precious hours free from bars, they shower, exercise, and tend to their medical needs, still often alone.

In such extreme isolation for years, the prisoners Haney interviewed at Pelican Bay experienced what he calls a "social death."

“They were grieving for their lost lives, for their loss of connectedness to the social world and their families outside, and also for their lost selves,” Haney told the Times. “Most of them really did understand that they had lost who they were, and weren’t sure of who they had become."

The inmates describe the experience much more viscerally.

One compared Pelican Bay's solitary confinement wing to "a weapons labs or a place for human experiments," the Times reported. Another admitted he imagines his family watching TV with him and talks to them.

"Maybe I'm crazy, but it makes me feel like I'm with them," the inmate told Haney, according to the Times.

Yet another had considered begging a judge for the death penalty.

In 1993, the inmates Haney interviewed reported high rates of psychiatric issues, like depression and irrational anger and even confusion and dizziness.

When Haney returned to Pelican Bay in 2013, according to the Times, the prisoner's conditions hadn't improved.

Sixty-three percent of the inmates in solitary for more than 10 years told Haney they felt near an "impending breakdown," the Times reported. 

By contrast, only 4% of the regular inmates at the maximum security facility described themselves in the same manner. And 73% of solitary prisoners reported being chronically depressed, compared to 48% of maximum-security inmates.

Prolonged depression has been linked to the shrinkage of the brain's hippocampus, an area of the brain that helps us form new memories, process long-term memories, and link emotions to those memories.

Ian Hickie, the co-director of the University of Sydney’s Brain and Mind Research Institute, helped lead the largest international study comparing brain volumes in people with and without major depression. The study, published in June 2015, found that "more episodes of depression a person had, the greater the reduction in hippocampus size," he told The Guardian newspaper.

Aside from depression, the lack of physical activity, social interaction, or natural sunlight in solitary would likely be enough to cause a person harm, explained, Haney. "Each one is sufficient enough to change the brain and change it dramatically, whether it is brief or extended. And when I say extended, I mean days, not decades," he said.

While these studies show that isolation in a prison setting can cause severe mental and emotional problems, when we examine LOST's foundational story lines that have the basis in severe emotional and mental issues, one can see a link between the two.

Isolation does not have to come from prison confinement. At times, people create their own prisons. They withdraw from the world; hide in their own homes; remove contact with friends and family members. In such a situation, their mind preys upon their anxieties, fears, phobias and disillusions about how bad their life has become because of X, Y or Z reasons.  

Normal human beings live life. They work, try, fail, learn and try again. But those people trapped in their own mental prisons create the illusion of a real life because they cannot experience a real one. And this illusion based on past memories can be as vivid as reality itself.

So, even non-institutional people can create their own "social death." People are  grieving for their lost lives, for their loss of connectedness to the social world and their families outside, and also for their lost selves. That sounds like the foundational story engine for the LOST series.