They see things that do not exist, and they fail to see things that do’ ( 2013, p. She writes, ‘Deprived of meaningful human interaction, otherwise healthy prisoners become unhinged. In her book, Solitary Confinement: Social Death and its Afterlives ( 2013), Lisa Guenther underlines the damage of social confinement in reference to the US penal system and how this can have a profound and deleterious impact on a person’s psychological, social, and sense of identity. Their own families may be disorientated, chaotic, or dysfunctional in the lockdown experience. Many will be doing their space travel on the ground without the benefits of a supportive crew, mission, etc. In contrast, many children and young people during this last year have been subject to long periods indoors or with limited social engagement without the trained‐in resilience, scheduling, and purpose of astronauts.

While scientists in analogue stations or in space missions successfully endure long periods in confinement and isolation, this is not always without psychological deterioration despite the mitigation of having a trained crew, explicit goals, purpose, and schedule. Like those confined in prison, especially solitary confinement, who go ‘stir crazy’, or those wintering through in remote regions, or even experiencing long voyages at sea or in space (on indeed, in Arctic or other analogue stations preparing for the trip to Mars one day), many children and young people are experiencing challenging if not disturbing confinement and isolation. Cabin fever may also lead to self‐ and other‐directed violence, including suicide. At its extreme, people may feel compelled to escape their spatial restrictions or limited routines, regardless of external conditions or the cost to themselves or others. They may even develop paranoia and difficulty in rational decision‐making. A person subject to cabin fever may suffer from sleeplessness (insomnia) or sleepfulness (hypersomnia). In the book, we examine the development of the notion of ‘cabin fever’ from prolonged confinement and isolation.Ĭabin fever is not a medically defined condition but a ‘folk syndrome’ commonly understood to refer to a combination of anxiety, lassitude, irritability, moodiness, boredom, depression, or feeling of dissatisfaction in response to confinement, bad weather, routine, isolation, or lack of stimulation. As Holmes et al. ( 2020) note, social isolation and loneliness are ‘strongly associated with anxiety, depression, self‐harm, and suicide attempts across the lifespan’. The pandemic lockdown brought heightened concern from many leading bodies, not least the World Health Organization, about the mental health challenges of this radical social change. In Cabin Fever: Surviving Lockdown in the Coronavirus Pandemic (Emerald, 2021), we examine the mental health fallout of voluntary and involuntary sequestering in people’s homes, alone or with family members, friends, or even strangers, to halt the spread of the virus.

Importantly, these challenging social changes have compounded the psychological challenges and distress known as cabin fever. In addition to these contexts, many children and young people will have experienced strained relationships within their family units as parents anticipate or are subject to insecure futures due to unemployment, inability to pay for accommodation, or other major changes that have occurred such as combining working from home with involuntary homeschooling. Children and young people have been subject to disrupted education at school, college, and university, as well as hampered transition into training or the workforce for the first time. Indeed, they have been living through ‘the greatest confinement in history’ (Crawford & Crawford, 2021). The social contexts for children and young people during this last year have been markedly different to what they will have experienced before. The COVID‐19 pandemic and prolonged confinement and isolation during lockdown measures have had a deleterious impact on the mental health of children and young people.

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