I first started reading Atul Gawande’s piece on solitary confinement in the New Yorker because 1) I pretty much love anything he writes, and 2) I love picking up the New Yorker and falling down rabbit holes of fascinating research and beautifully written tales.
But pretty quickly I realized this article has implications for long term care – where people are too often in a unique kind of solitary confinement, cut off from family, friends, personal belongings that might orient you, and the cognitive ability to connect past, present, and future.
“Human beings are social creatures,” Gawande begins the article. “We are social not just in the trivial sense that we like company, and not just in the obvious sense that we each depend on others. We are social in a more elemental way: simply to exist as a normal human being requires interaction with other people.” He proceeds to describe and connect 1950s experiments in raising baby monkeys much like people were encouraged to raise children at that time – like little independent adults. What the scientists observed was that isolating people essentially did irreparable, psychological damage.
Gawande goes on to make the case that solitary confinement is a kind of torture – that human beings must have contact with other human beings to stay sane. Without it, prisoners of war describe a slow loss of one’s mind.
And of course I think of the nursing homes. And the time we were trying to test a research method by counting the number of interactions between staff and residents. In a one hour window…we waited. And waited. And waited. And could not legitamately code one earnest interaction.
