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Did anyone happen to read an article in the latest New Yorker titled Hellhole? It's about prisoners and the effects (psychological, sociological, etc.) of isolation from other humans. Apparently we have a whole bunch of American inmates (more than any other country by a large margin) held in solitary confinement for years at a time. Along with raising ethical issues about isolation as torture, this article described the difficulty inmates kept in solitude have being re-integrated in the "social world." If anyone else has read this I would love to hear what you thought, especially in relation to what we've been reading. For me, this drew together an element of pragmatism from our readings, which seems to emphasize more than other theories the social tension, or field, or forces in which human beings find themselves enmeshed as part of communication. Think of Mead's conversation of gestures, where it is taken as a given (though not a tacit given, because he describes it at length) that if another human being does something you are "caught" by it and must necessarily respond. For pragmatists the mutual or reciprocal task of responding to one another is very nearly a moral imperative - it is inescapable. So, put someone in isolation, remove them from the conversation so to speak, and they apparently lose this ability!
"One of the paradoxes of solitary confinement is that, as starved as people become for companionship, the experience leaves them unfit for social interaction. Once, Dellelo was allowed to have an in-person meeting with his lawyer, and he simply couldn't handle it. After so many months in which his primary human contact had been an occasional phone call or brief conversation with an inmate down the tier, shouted through steel doors at the top of their lungs, he found himself unable to carry on a face-to-face conversation. He had trouble following both words and hand gestures and couldn't generate them himself. When he realized this, he succumbed to a full-blown panic attack."
So we are caught and thank God for it - conversation(s) (of gestures, with others, in "real" life) maintain a continuity throughout our lives that seems integral to maintaining a healthy brain, whatever that means.
There are other interesting bits in this article that we might talk about. I know disability is a big part of this class as well as our own individual interests - someone might speak to the similarities between the effects of solitary confinement and autism. Or maybe about the psychiatric system in place to notice psychotic behaviors, make them significant, and "treat" them accordingly. If the institution knows how to deal with you as a mentally disabled or damaged person (even if it helped cause this damage), does that in some sort of way maintain your existence as a disabled person, keeping you in that position throughout your incarceration, and possibly beyond?
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