Last month (April 19, 2014), 3QD’s Robin Varghese linked to an article by philosopher Lisa Guenther on the effects of solitary confinement on the mind. (The original article was published in the online magazine Aeon.) Guenther’s essay is fascinating, as it provides a vivid account of how our perception of the world depends heavily on the social relations we build everyday with other people. When those social relations are stripped from us, our experience of the world goes wonky. For this reason, Guenther’s article is also disturbing, since it reveals the widespread practice of solitary confinement to be nothing less than mental torture. 

Read the more here.