Pit of despair

The pit of despair was a name used by American comparative psychologist Harry Harlow for a device he designed, technically called a vertical chamber apparatus, that he used in experiments on rhesus macaque monkeys at the University of Wisconsin–Madison in the 1970s.

Researcher Stephen Suomi described the device as "little more than a stainless-steel trough with sides that sloped to a rounded bottom": A 3⁄8 in.

above the bottom of the chamber allowed waste material to drop through the drain and out of holes drilled in the stainless-steel.

With the "pit of despair", he placed monkeys between three months and three years old who had already bonded with their mothers in the chamber alone for up to ten weeks.

The only connection the monkey had with the world was when the experimenters' hands changed his bedding or delivered fresh water and food.

Harlow devised what he called a "rape rack", to which the female isolates were tied in normal monkey mating posture.

[8] These experiments showed Harlow what total and partial isolation did to developing monkeys, but he felt he had not captured the essence of depression, which he believed was characterized by feelings of loneliness, helplessness, and a sense of being trapped, or being "sunk in a well of despair", he said.

Blum writes that his colleagues tried to persuade him not to use such descriptive terms, that a less visual name would be easier, politically speaking.

Gene Sackett of the University of Washington in Seattle, one of Harlow's doctoral students who went on to conduct additional deprivation studies, said, "He first wanted to call it a dungeon of despair.

Harlow wrote, "most subjects typically assume a hunched position in a corner of the bottom of the apparatus.

[11] Charles Snowdon, a junior member of the faculty at the time, who became head of psychology at Wisconsin, said that Harlow had himself been very depressed by his wife's cancer.