#lethal torture

(2/2) Assuming that his captors are invested in keeping him alive (feeding tube, bare minimum medical care) What sort of state am I looking at on a rescue after two years of this? Would prefer to avoid first-hand sources, if possible, and I'm mostly interested in the psycological effects.

Honestly?I would expect him to have died in thefirst week from kidney failure.

 If thatsomehow didn’t happen I’d expect him to get bedsores in the first month whichwould become horribly infected and kill him.

 Ifsomehow neither of these things happened then the combination of solitaryconfinement and sensory deprivation would have caused mental breakdown withinthe first two weeks. If he was released after twoyears I think he’d be completelyincapable of human interaction and possibly speech.

 I thinkhe would be (I do not use these words lightly) incurably and untreatably insane.

 Your time frame isn’t just extreme it is completely outside physical possibilityfor anything remotely mammalian.

 Afterlong periods (hours to days) stuck in a cramped position such as you describe musclesbegin to break down. The destruction of muscle cells leads to a build up oflarge proteins in the blood. The kidneys can not handle the build up ofundigested protein and fail.

 This ishow stress positions can kill a person without leaving a mark on their body.

 Andthat’s not something that can be easily hand waved away with advances inmedical technology. If he has some kind of functioning kidney replacement thisdoes not get away from the fact that his major muscles are breaking down.

 I want tohelp. I really really do. But this is not survivable. At all.

 Thelongest I am aware of anyone being left in a sensory deprived, solitaryenvironment is 35 days. The subjects in these experiments commonly did not remember long periods of their livesbefore the treatment, the amount of time lost varied between six months and ten years.

 And inthese experiments people could move,they could sleep easily, they had meals and bathroom breaks. They were not in constant physical pain.

 Theexperimental conditions were much milderthan your scenario and they resulted in permanent brain damage. The researchers involved had no doubt that these sensorydeprivation rooms could be lethal.

 The longestvoluntary confinement in one was sixdays.

 I’m goingto quote one of the relevant passages from Rejali’s book; this is on thesensory deprivation research of Maitland Baldwin.

 ‘Baldwin put an army volunteer in the box andrefused to let him out. This persisted for forty hours. Finally “after an hourof crying loudly and sobbing in a heartrending fashion” to use Baldwin’s wordsthe soldier kicked his way out of the box.’

 I like tohope he punched Baldwin.

 If youwant to read about the devastating psychological effects of these devices thenthe researchers you want to look up are Donald Hebb (who conducted consensual experiments), MaitlandBaldwin (who did not) and Ewen Cameron (who tried to give people newpersonalities and succeeded only in making their mental health much worse andruining their lives).

 Therelevant papers are all from the 50s and 60s. They are mostly behind pay walls.Hebb wrote A Textbook of Psychology, Cameron’saccounts can be found in ComprehensivePsychiatry (1960, 26, 27) or Journalof Mental Science (1960, 742-54).

 If youwant this to be realistic you need to give the victim room to move and you needto cut the time down drastically or pick another torture entirely. 

Otherwisethey are so far from human you may as well be asking me about the mental andemotional state of an octopus.

 All ofthese components separately, stress positions, solitary confinement, sensorydeprivation, they all have much more extremeeffects than are generally acknowledged. And torture is cumulative. 

Note that I did not even touch the electricity torture which can by itself be lethal. 

 Please do not hand wave this. You’re talking about tortures that are regularly excused and legalised. Even though they kill people. And that background cultural torture apologia has persuaded you that a completely unsurvivable scenario is only a little bit extreme. 

I personally believe that you should not perpetrate further immoral and unrealistic misinformation, especially of this magnitude, in your writing

I’m sorry I couldn’t be more help. 

REVIEW:

LETHAL TORTURE (Lethal Legacy 4) by #PaulaWalshe at The Reading Cafe:

'The character driven premise is dark, edgy and dramatic'

REVIEW:

LETHAL TORTURE (Lethal Legacy 4) by #PaulaWalshe at The Reading Cafe:

'The character driven premise is dark, edgy and dramatic'