YouTuber Trying to Spend a Month in Solitary Confinement Shows Warning Signs of Mental Health

A YouTube creator tries to live-stream his time in solitary confinement for a month to see if he’s “going crazy.”

Norm is a content creator who has gone viral for his shocking stunts like staying awake for 12 days.

Now he locked himself in a small storage room, leaving only a mattress on the floor, to see if his sanity could survive a month in complete isolation.

And to make things even more difficult, he plans to spend the entire time in complete darkness. A camera mounted on the ceiling provides viewers with 24/7 live coverage of the stunt.

He also earns some income by asking viewers to pay him to complete various tasks.

For $5 he will do a handstand, $20 for 15 minutes of wearing a straitjacket, and $50 for one hour of wearing a tape in his mouth.

Just over 100 hours into the experiment, he had already begun to exhibit strange behavior, causing concern among his more than one million followers.

Norm started live streaming on October 16th, and this is his fifth day of isolation.

Until now, he had been seen and heard rambling about “intergalactic aliens”, making “demonic” sounds and standing with his forehead pressed against the wall in a dejected pose.

“He needs help,” one viewer wrote in the chat as 133 hours passed on the clock. Another viewer wrote: “STOP TORTUREING YOURSELF FOR VIEWING!”

Solitary confinement causes significant damage to mental and physical health and can be as painful as physical torture.

This is because humans are highly social animals that require stimulation and interaction with other people to thrive.

This practice is commonly used in prisons and jails throughout the United States and refers to the physical isolation of individuals who are confined to their cells for 22.5 hours or more per day.

At least 122,840 people are locked in solitary confinement in U.S. jails and prisons every day, according to a joint 2023 report by the watchdog group Solitary Watch and the advocacy coalition Unlock the Box.

A large body of research has shown that solitary confinement can cause or worsen anxiety, depression, paranoia, panic attacks, hallucinations, psychosis, and self-harm or suicide.

And for people with pre-existing mental disorders, long periods of isolation can worsen their condition.

In terms of physical health effects, people in solitary confinement are known to develop chronic headaches, vision loss, sleep disturbances, weight loss, fatigue, rapid heartbeat, and more.

Experts say that even a short stay in complete isolation can have a significant impact on a person’s mental and physical health.

These effects may explain some of Norm’s anomalous behavior. But some of his viewers are skeptical about the authenticity of the stunt, viewing the abnormal behavior as a performance.

“Give your brother an Oscar for being crazy,” one viewer wrote.

Moreover, Norm’s experiment does not fully replicate the conditions of real solitary confinement.

He leaves the room from time to time, presumably to eat or go to the bathroom.

It also has text-to-speech enabled, allowing viewers to read out their chat messages through the speaker so Norma and all other viewers can hear them.

In true solitary confinement, prisoners are never allowed to leave their cells at will. They eat, sleep and go to the toilet in the same place.

Moreover, they will never have access to any form of communication with the outside world.

Whether Norm will be able to spend an entire month in his makeshift cell remains to be seen. One of his previous challenges, in which he attempted to break the world record for longest time without sleep, ended in failure.

He didn’t sleep for 264 hours straight. But the official record belongs to a man named Robert McDonald, who stayed awake for a total of 453 hours in 1986.

Norm also attempted to break the record for the longest time without blinking in a previous video.