Another former prisoner who spent two years in a supermax prison in California chose to refer to ‘seeing others lose it’ and described similar scenarios25: I have seen inmates lose their mind completely because of the sound of a light where they are yelling at the light, cursing at the light, believing that for some reason the [authorities] planted some kind of noise inside the light purposely…and so the inmates that ain’t strong minded, don’t have something to hang on to, the light, the sound of the door, can make them lose their mind… I found it strange, you know, how can a grown man, a very big, grown man, break down to a light. But that’s what [that place] can do. And once you lose your mind, you don’t know right from wrong. You don’t know that you’re breaking a rule. You don’t know what to do exactly [Former prisoner, USA, cited in Shalev forthcoming]. Seeing and hearing other prisoners break down is a stressful experience in itself, as Henry Charriere (‘Papillon’) found during his time in isolation on ‘Devil’s Island’, a French penal colony in Guyana: “A great many suicides and men going raving mad around me… it’s depressing to hear men shouting, weeping or moaning for hours or even days on end”. He himself survived eight years in solitary confinement through fantasy: “thanks to my wandering amongst the stars it was very rare that I ever had a lasting despair. I got over them pretty fast and quickly invented a real or imaginary voyage that would dispel the black ideas” (1970:354-356). One of the problems with such techniques is that the boundaries between fantasy and reality can become dangerously blurred, as was the case for one former female prisoner, who regularly ‘left her body’ to ‘travel’ in the outside world. These were not daydreams, but out-of-body experiences from which at times, according to her, it was “really hard to come back”: The first four years of prison was such a fantasy world… I was in segregation. I could be in my cell and shut everyone out and I would go travelling. I would go up and out of prison and fly over the beaches and mountains of Okinawa, where I used to live. Sometimes it was really, really hard to come back [Former prisoner, USA, cited in Shalev, forthcoming]. As her time in isolation grew longer, so did the intensity and frequency of her ‘travels’, until one day the prison chaplain saw her lying on her cell-floor in a near catatonic state and took her under his wing. British prisoner Doug Wakefield had somewhat less pleasant hallucinations after a period in isolation, “usually in the form of spiders and insects crawling over the floor, the bed and walls, and at such times it is common to hear voices and strange noises” (Wakefield 1980:28). Describing himself as a ‘graduate of 1000 days in segregation’, he wrote: “fantasising and day-dreaming become prevalent pastimes and the obvious danger here is that this activity could become a permanent feature of the mind with the consequent disadvantage of not knowing at times whether you are in reality or fantasy” (Ibid at p. 30). The similarities between these accounts of time in isolation in different contexts, geographical locations, and for varying periods of time are striking and cannot be easily discounted. Further, the personal accounts cited above are consistent with research findings on the health effects of solitary confinement reviewed previously. Some of the reported health effects of solitary confinement, both physiological and psychological, are listed in the following section. 14 Sourcebook on solitary confinement: The health effects of solitary confinement