Is sleep deprivation "real" torture?

[cosmicalstorm]

So I've been having this argument with countless people on different forums over the past couple of days. Their argument boils down to this: Sleep deprivation is not "real" torture, because real torture is when you pull out peoples fingernails with pliars and shove burning coals up their ass.

According to these people the suffering caused by sleep deprivation is not the same as the pain caused by having ones fingers crushed with a hammer, so calling sleep deprivation torture is wrong.

Is there a real distinction here?

[DaveJB]

That argument only holds water if you're working to a very specific definition of torture. Here's what the American Heritage Dictionary has to say on the matter:

1a. Infliction of severe physical pain as a means of punishment or coercion.
1b. An instrument or a method for inflicting such pain.
2. Excruciating physical or mental pain; agony: the torture of waiting in suspense.
3. Something causing severe pain or anguish.

While sleep deprivation wouldn't count under the first definition, it would qualify under the second or third. Claiming that it doesn't count as torture at all is an example of the No True Scotsman fallacy, and also a case of circular logic ("Only inflicting immediate physical pain counts as torture, therefore anything that doesn't inflict immediate physical pain isn't torture").

[Vehrec]

Depending on the individual, it can take between 100 and 200 hours of sleep deprivation to induce hallucinations, as the mind steadily loses its capabilities. Sleep deprivation also causes severe personality changes, and can make normally placid and amicable individuals raging paranoids. It might not cause physical pain, but the mental anguish it can induce is quite real, even if it isn't rational.

[Rye]

Sleep deprivation is as real torture as food deprivation.

[Lost Soal]

Getting projects done at school and Uni, has resulted in me depriving myself of sleep and being awake for 36-40 hrs straight and I was having trouble thinking at the end of that. I don't need to stay awake any longer to know it wouldn't be good for my mental state and anyone who says otherwise is a self deluded idiot, liar or both.

[Darth Wong]

I'll say the same thing here that I've said in another thread recently: if it's not real torture, then why do they expect it to break the will of a religious fanatic?

They want to have their cake and eat it too: they want to justify it by claiming it can break a religious fanatic's will, but they want to disavow moral responsibility for advocating the kind of treatment which would break a religious fanatic's will.

[Mr Bean]

Here's the true blunt definition, Sleep deprivation by itself is not torture, combined with anything else it IS. There is an often misquoted study by the right-wing that showed subjects staying away for close to 120 hours and not reporting that many ill effects, there mental function tests came back horrible but they themselves reported no psychological stress or pain. It should be noted that the part the right omits is the fact this study was conducted under mostly peaceful conditions, the subjects were trying to keep themselves awake and had many activities to do so. They were in a positive setting with lots of distractions. And the doctors were still concerned enough to cut off the experiment after the fifth day for most subjects as there was issue with certain subjects begin to have mild to moderate hallucinations and other psychological phenomenon.

I note again this was in a positive environment where great care was taken to keep the test subjects happy and engaged. This was not someone shackled to a wall having water dumped over him and loud music blasting his ears to keep him awake.

Long term sleep deprivation combined with any other physically coercive technique is torture. Putting a prisoner your interrogating through twenty four hours without sleep is not torture, nor is forty eight hours torture, however beyond that if your doing anything to him, it becomes torture.

[Broomstick]

Sleep deprivation in humans can cause death - I believe there are a few documented cases. Had to be pretty extreme, it does take awhile, but eventually it will be fatal.

[Lord of the Abyss]

Sleep deprivation in humans can cause death - I believe there are a few documented cases. Had to be pretty extreme, it does take awhile, but eventually it will be fatal.

Fatal Familial Insomnia is a disorder that can do that.

[loomer]

Considering that I have personally experimented with sleep deprivation as a teenager (hey, going a week without sleep is a lot cheaper than buying LSD! was my reasoning.), I would argue that it is not necessarily torture. The methods used to induce it during the interrogations are almost certainly torture, however - and those hallucinations at the end are NOT fun. They are not mind opening experiences. You feel like you are dead or dying.

In a peaceful setting in which the deprivation was not forced via physical or psychological means but via subtle chemical dosing in the subject's food, assuming it went no further than three days, sleep deprivation could actually qualify as an enhanced interrogation technique without torture - three days sans trauma shouldn't cause anguish of any significant degree (obviously a psychologist with actual ethics would be required in the room throughout. Not the non-ethical ones the Bush administration saw fit to employ.) and would actually make a subject more pliable. Unfortunately such a method cannot feasibly be deployed due to the high potential for abuse.

[Darth Wong]

How does "I did it to myself" mean "it's not torture?"

There are people who voluntarily get into boxing or martial-arts fights where they get beaten and bruised bloody; does this mean it's also OK to beat a suspect until his face looks like tenderized meat?

[loomer]

Oh, no, no. That's not what I meant. I'm just saying that the actual experience of sleep deprivation did not, for me, meet the definition of torture until I started hallucinating. Now keep in mind that this was under pretty much ideal conditions, too.

The conditions used in the interrogations are still most definitely torture.

[RazorOutlaw]

If you don't mind me asking, just what was it that you hallucinated about that was bad enough to be considered torture?

[Mr Bean]

If you don't mind me asking, just what was it that you hallucinated about that was bad enough to be considered torture?

Sleep dep Hallucinations are not crazy but instead disorienting(At least they were in my case) I watched TV with the screen off. I tried to get into my neighbor's apartment because I could not comprehend the fact it was not mine. After about four days without sleep I was simply in a state of constant confusion about what exactly was going on. I spent a long hour in a laundromat reading magazines next to a washer I had neglected to turn on. I later removed said clothes and drove home without once thinking they needed to be dried. When I got home I reasoned that the tub was the best place to put them. My hallucinations where limited to the everyday, no pink elephants and talking plants, just very poor decision making and being highly unaware of what was going on. My only two "hallucinations" consisted of me being convinced it was sunny outside and watching the TV that was off. This was May of 2002, and I was not in a good way.

[Modax]

How did you manage to actually drive home in that state? You're very lucky not to have caused an accident...

[Mr Bean]

How did you manage to actually drive home in that state? You're very lucky not to have caused an accident...

See "bad decision making while under the effects of being awake for four days in a row"

[loomer]

My hallucinations were much like Bean's, but I was also convinced everyone was trying to kill, rob, or rape me and would occasionally see someone going for a phone as going for a gun, and so forth. The sleep deprivation exacerbated my natural paranoid tendencies in the same way marijuana does.

[sketerpot]

Rule of thumb for torture: if you're not sure whether or not something is torture, don't do it. If you're going to err, it's better to err on the side of not committing crimes against humanity.

Why don't people get this?

[Terralthra]

While sleep deprivation wouldn't count under the first definition, it would qualify under the second or third. Claiming that it doesn't count as torture at all is an example of the No True Scotsman fallacy, and also a case of circular logic ("Only inflicting immediate physical pain counts as torture, therefore anything that doesn't inflict immediate physical pain isn't torture").

It's actually begging the question, by stating as axiomatic their answer to the question which is fundamentally under debate.

[Formless]

It's actually begging the question, by stating as axiomatic their answer to the question which is fundamentally under debate.

No, he got it right. Begging the Question and Circular Logic are two names for the same fallacy.

[madd0ct0r]

Just to chime in, with my personal experiments two days of sleep deprivation were enough to trigger hallucinations.

Clouds of bats shaped like triangles and rhomboids in the corner of my eye; a brick pavement rolling around like a heavy sea; everything, especially, green leaves taking on a translucent glow and quite amazing feelings of emotional lightness and openness.

That said, there was quite a large amount of caffeine in my bloodstream (plus all the other suspect chemicals, I was adding Thai red chilli concentrate to the coffee) so it may be more chemically then fatigue induced.

24hrs playing and watching Halo led a rather interesting shopping trip, being aware of both the aisles and that dratted covenant brute.

All that said, it is not a mental state in which i would want to be asked questions by a loud scary man.
my vote is torture.

[Broomstick]

I found, while in college, that somewhere between hour 50 and 56 awake I start to hallucinate. For me, it starts with crawly things in my peripheral vision. I, too, would not want to be interrogated by a large, scary man in such circumstances. Let's be real, I don't want to be interrogated by ANYONE regardless of my current state of being, but being sleep deprived would only make it worse. I say it's torture.

[madd0ct0r]

Just to chime in, with my personal experiments two days of sleep deprivation were enough to trigger hallucinations.

Clouds of bats shaped like triangles and rhomboids in the corner of my eye; a brick pavement rolling around like a heavy sea; everything, especially, green leaves taking on a translucent glow and quite amazing feelings of emotional lightness and openness.

That said, there was quite a large amount of caffeine in my bloodstream (plus all the other suspect chemicals, I was adding Thai red chilli concentrate to the coffee) so it may be more chemically then fatigue induced.

24hrs playing and watching Halo led a rather interesting shopping trip, being aware of both the aisles and that dratted covenant brute.

All that said, it is not a mental state in which i would want to be asked questions by a loud scary man.
my vote is torture.

[Kanastrous]

I'll say the same thing here that I've said in another thread recently: if it's not real torture, then why do they expect it to break the will of a religious fanatic?

They want to have their cake and eat it too: they want to justify it by claiming it can break a religious fanatic's will, but they want to disavow moral responsibility for advocating the kind of treatment which would break a religious fanatic's will.

Maybe it's a variation upon the No True Scotsman fallacy (?) but something I see a lot of (most recently from Ari Fleischer) is this idea that the degree to which an act is wrong is entirely dependent upon who is doing it. For example, Fleischer had zero difficulty identifying waterboarding as torture when the Khmer Rouge did it, but while admitting that Americans had done the exact same thing to prisoners, he insisted that it was up to a court of law to determine whether or not it was torture when Americans were doing it.

In the same way, I bet that cosmicalstorm's interlocutors would have no trouble at all denouncing sleep-deprivation as torture if say, Chinese or Iranian or Venezualan authorities did it to their prisoners but would be unable to see it as the same thing at all, should Americans decide to exploit the technique.

Fortunately sleep deprivation doesn't appear to do worse to me than constant hallucinations of little catlike things moving around in the periphery of my vision. At least after about thirty hours, which is so far the longest I've had to go without sleeping.

[Mobiboros]

Depending on the individual, it can take between 100 and 200 hours of sleep deprivation to induce hallucinations, as the mind steadily loses its capabilities. .

That's a very high estimate. Most studies show that hallucinations set in between 24 and 48 hours of sleep deprivation. Usually it's just flashes or eprceived motion in your peripheral vision but it get's progressively worse and auditory, tactile and olfactory hallucinations can set in as well.