Pit Of Despair

What Is It? After the death of his wife from cancer, comparative psychologist Harry Harlow sunk into a deep depression and wanted to create an animal model of clinical depression.

To do this, he devised the worst possible imaginable enclosures for rhesus macaque monkey's and, often after they had bonded with their mother's an experienced affection, young macaques were placed in the barren cages with no social contact.

After 30 days, the monkeys were "enormously disturbed" and after a year they barely moved, didn't explore or play and were incapable of having normal sexual relations with other monkey's they were introduced to. Two test subjects even chose to starve themselves to death as opposed to suffering their barren existence any longer.

Female monkeys subjected to the treatment were tied onto a "rape rack" in a mating posture to force them to reproduce, but they were incapable of showing their babies any love and often brutally killed them.