Azerbaijan prison dispatches: isolation, self-harm, silence — the psychological toll of detention
Imprisoned Azerbaijani journalist Ulviyya Ali writes of the psychological toll on Azerbaijani prisoners in a letter dated one year after her arrest.
The following article was written from prison by Azerbaijani journalist Ulviyya Ali (Guliyeva). Ali was detained on 6 May 2025 as a suspect in the ongoing case against independent Azerbaijani media outlet Meydan TV, which she denies working with. Earlier in January, she was named a finalist for the 2025 Free Press Awards by Free Press Unlimited.
I cannot say how much blood has been washed off the floors of the medical-sanitary unit at the Baku Pre-trial Detention Centre, the place I have been held for the last year. Every time I am taken out of my cell — to see a lawyer, to attend a meeting, to go to court — and pass through the ground floor, I try to step around the drops of blood on the floor.
These experiences — along with 12 months of observations and hearing the stories of other prisoners I have spoken with — have prompted me to draw attention to the psychological condition of those held in prison.
‘It was my first day in prison, and fear took hold of me. I was afraid I would never get out of here, and that while I was here I would lose my loved ones’, a female prisoner tells me.
There is extensive research on how prison conditions damage psychological health by isolating people from society. The prison administration, in order to exploit an inmate’s lack of contact with the outside world, has the authority to ban meetings with lawyers and family members and to restrict telephone calls. As a result, a prisoner is left alone with their bare existence.
‘I have been imprisoned illegally on false charges for over three years now. In prison, people’s rights and freedoms are not protected; polite treatment and a respectful attitude toward inmates are completely out of the question’, a male prisoner tells me.
‘Those who demand their rights are beaten, and their dignity and humanity are degraded. This drives prisoners to self-harm and pushes them to the brink of death. Human life means absolutely nothing to them. Neither the Prosecutor’s Office nor the Human Rights Defender’s Office pay any attention to what is happening’, he continues.
The philosophy of prison sees rehabilitation as obedience, and here it is impressed upon the inmate that their protest will be fruitless because no one will hear them. For this very reason, one of the things most prisoners fear most is being forgotten and unseen. The majority think they will never be able to escape this place. As a result, they fall into hopelessness and live in anxiety.
After some time, you begin to adapt to the environment, but still, each day, you struggle to grasp where you are. The feeling of loneliness never leaves a person. Here, you are just another nobody to everyone. Prison seems to kill a person’s identity.
‘You feel as if no one here hears you, no one understands you. Indifference breaks a person down spiritually’, the woman prisoner told me.
Research by Harvard psychiatrist Stuart Grassian shows that isolation is not merely a form of punishment but, in fact, a biological and psychological assault on the human brain. The research states that prolonged solitude creates a specific, irreversible, and destructive pathology in the human brain. Grassian calls this condition Special Housing Unit (SHU) syndrome.
Isolation from family and social environment
In prison, inmates are cut off from their family, friends, and acquaintances — in a word, from their social circle. The right to a single weekly visit, granted under limited conditions, is not enough to bridge this chasm. Because the visits take place through an intercom behind a glass barrier, you cannot have any physical contact with your loved ones, and this builds an invisible wall between you.
Prisoners can no longer control their own lives. They are placed in a position of complete dependence on others. Even the length of your meeting with your family is decided by the guard. The visit, which passes in the blink of an eye, is cut short by the guard’s voice telling you to ‘wrap it up’.
Meetings with lawyers and family are not held confidentially. You are also deprived of the right to move freely within the prison; doors are locked and unlocked only by the guard with a key. The cell where you are held has no latch on the inside; it can only be closed from the outside. There is the guard who watches you constantly, the ‘second ear’ present during phone calls and intercom visits, and listening devices and camera surveillance in some rooms. As for the new cellmates you come to know, there can be no question of trust. As a result, the prisoner thrashes about inside the whirlpool of their own thoughts. This forces them to censor themselves more and pushes them to withdraw into themselves.
In many cases, prisoners say they cannot tell their children they have been imprisoned, and that they hide this reality from them. They are afraid a child’s heart will be crushed by such a truth. But this very lie adds an additional moral burden on the prisoners. They fear that the bond between themselves and their children will weaken entirely, or break. You can often see someone become tearful while looking at a photo of their child. Some can only manage the lie that the prison is a ‘workplace’ — and this bitter reality is sold to the visiting child in just this way.
‘When you realise that you’ve made the biggest mistake of your life and that you’ve wronged your loved ones, you live under the torment of conscience. What will happen to my daughter over these years? I won’t see her grow up; I won’t be at her side. There are so many things in life I will miss, and the fear of losing my parents engulfs me. Because of my mistake, my child’s future is in question’, the female prisoner adds.
The breakdown of family relationships also takes other forms. For example, some inmates’ families — either out of financial hardship or because they see their imprisoned relative as a source of shame — neither come to visit nor bring care packages. This has a heavy effect on the inmates’ psychological state and deepens their sense of abandonment.
Some prisoners fall into complete despair in prison. The lost time and tedium brought on by monotony cause psychological collapse. Believing that the months they spend here are wasted, and being unable to spend that time more productively makes them feel useless and worthless. One inmate told me during our conversation: ‘My mother says, “You’re just sitting around there for nothing. You’d be better off working and bringing money home” ’.
Being blamed by family is one of the heaviest factors that shatters the psychology of an inmate who already feels guilty. Even if the family doesn’t do this — even if they visit constantly — the prisoner often thinks they are a burden, that they are causing them pain.
An uncertain future
Every night before falling asleep, a prisoner tries to imagine the day of their release, but you have no idea when that day will come. You also don’t know what you will do once you are free.
In Azerbaijan, people with a criminal record are considered unfit for society.
‘I understand that I won’t be able to work in any decent job. I will never be able to explain to anyone why I made this mistake. People will only point fingers at me. This stain will remain on me for the rest of my life. I don’t know what I am going to do’, the woman prisoner says.
In his 1961 work Asylums: Essays on the Social Situation of Mental Patients and Other Inmates, the social psychologist Erving Goffman calls the path the inmate travels a ‘moral career’. Goffman notes that this is not a career advancement but a degradation of identity.
He argues that criminality is not an inherent characteristic of the individual but the result of a label society has stuck on them. Once a person has been labelled, even their normal behaviour comes to be interpreted through that label.
The prisoner has difficulty figuring out how they will get out of prison, how society will receive them once they are out, and what their plans for the future are. In detention, they can plan only for the present; they cannot do this for life on the outside. The future becomes slippery for the prisoner. This produces unstable moods: at one moment they experience flashes of aggression, at another, apathy.
Poor conditions, inhumane treatment, and the degradation of dignity
Deprivations, prohibitions, the absence of personal space, being surrounded in a cell by people you did not choose, and being forced to live a life you do not want; the psychological and physical violence inflicted (by prison staff or other inmates); leisure time filled only with the same things (television, books, board games); being locked in a single room; longing for sunlight and fresh air; being deprived of quality medical care for the protection of your psychological and physical health; as well as the poor conditions of the cell itself — all of this deepens the problem I am addressing. The inmate doesn’t even have an ordinary window — only a ceiling that opens onto the sky, and that they see only from behind iron bars.
‘After a while, I began to realise that no one cared about my illegal imprisonment. For three and a half years, I sent complaints to law enforcement agencies from the Baku Pre-trial Detention Center where I was being held. Later, I found out that more than 500 of my appeals had never actually been sent out. It felt as if my world had come crashing down. In protest, exercising my rights, I refused food and went on a hunger strike’, the male prisoner says.
‘In most cases, those on a hunger strike are beaten and humiliated by the prison wardens and their deputies. They are kept for days in unsanitary cells known as “doprexod”. Afterward, they are placed in a punishment cell for supposedly violating some prison rules. Nobody cares why you are refusing food’, he says.
Violence is a pervasive factor in prison; even without being directly subjected to it, simply seeing someone else subjected to it is itself considered psychological violence. Hearing crude, slang, and unethical expressions also plays a major role in the degradation of human dignity. All of this weakens an individual’s self-confidence, and they are diminished as a person in their own eyes.
‘False promises, empty advice, betrayals, someone trying to use you financially, those who try to climb up by stepping on you — these things have a very bad moral effect on a person’, the woman prisoner tells me. ‘After a certain point, you understand that, in order not to lose your head, the best thing you can do is stay silent. Because you can suddenly find yourself in the middle of a meaningless argument’.
‘The psychological pressure from cellmates also made me feel very bad. I would face rude behaviour, being ignored, or all my cellmates refusing to speak to me. The guards’ rude, cutting words — and the fact that they would say them in front of others — humiliated me. Everything I am describing eventually turns into thoughts of suicide’, she continues.
Self-harm and suicide
Goffman explained the state the woman described in this way: ‘We lock people up in abnormal conditions in order to make them normal. But we forget that only abnormal creatures can grow up in abnormal conditions’.
‘The walls of the detention facility don’t merely squeeze the individual’s selfhood; they shrink the self so much that, in the end, the individual disappears inside their own selfhood’, Grassian notes.
The male prisoner tells me that during his time in detention, he saw prisoners who ‘cannot bear the lawlessness’ resort to self-harm as they are ‘pushed to the brink of suicide’.
‘I have seen people slash themselves with razors, swallow spoons, forks, batteries, nail clippers, and even dominoes, cut off their fingers or ears, slice their stomachs open and tie their intestines to the door, and kill themselves by hanging’, he says.
‘In most cases, these incidents are covered up. There is not even a single psychologist to provide psychological help to the inmates.’
The woman prisoner remembers the day she tried to take her life: ‘Helplessness drags you toward terrifying feelings and toward suicide. I felt resentful of the world. I had been trying to endure for a long time. I didn’t want to give up. But when everything came down on me at once, my psyche was defeated. I decided to end it all. I wasn’t thinking about anything. I just wanted to end this torment. So I swallowed all the medications I had on hand. But my cellmate noticed and intervened immediately and saved me’.
Among the reasons that drive inmates to self-harm in prison — alongside poor conditions and the treatment they encounter inside — the most significant is ‘psychological overload’. When their cases are not handled properly, when the investigation is unjust, or when they believe they have been framed, they harm themselves or attempt suicide in order to draw attention.
The male prisoner who had gone on hunger strike spoke to me in detail about the indifference he faced in his protest against his detention.
‘During my hunger strike, which lasted for over 20 days, I screamed for help, pleading with them to do something about my illegal imprisonment. They had even taken away my right to make phone calls’, he says. ‘I found an old razor on the floor and slashed my arms. 30 to 40 minutes later, they bandaged my arm. Despite my injuries, with my hands handcuffed behind my back, they began to beat me. I lost consciousness. When I came to, I saw that I had been handcuffed to an iron bed in an unsanitary room. I was left in that condition for 12 hours’.
In March, one prisoner at the Baku Pre-trial Detention Centre took their own life. In their suicide note, the prisoner wrote that this was a protest against their unjust imprisonment and blamed the investigator handling their case. Yet a medical examination had already identified the prisoner’s psychiatric problems and recommended treatment. Had they not committed suicide, they would have been sent to the psychiatric hospital in Mashtaga only three to four days later.
Such suicides are usually covered by the media, and it is announced that a criminal case has been opened. But to this day, there is no information about any official having been punished for driving someone to the brink of suicide.
According to the Azerbaijani Human Rights Defender’s 2024 report, 163 deaths were recorded in Penitentiary Service facilities over the course of one year. There is no information about how many of these were suicides. In many cases, in order to avoid opening a criminal case, the authorities report the death as the result of ‘illness’.
Psychological assistance
According to Article 5.1 of the Law On Psychological Assistance, the state guarantees access to quality psychological assistance, and under Article 6.2.3, the state assumes the financing of psychological assistance for persons detained and arrested in accordance with Azerbaijani law.
The recommendations of the European Committee for the Prevention of Torture and Inhuman or Degrading Treatment or Punishment (CPT) regarding psychiatric care in prisons state:
- ‘Compared to the general population, the prevalence of psychiatric symptoms among prisoners is higher. This means that every prison's medical-sanitary unit must employ a doctor specialising in psychiatry, and some of the medical workers there must be trained in this field.’
- ‘The CPT emphasises the importance of the role of prison management in identifying inmates suffering from psychiatric illnesses (depression, reactive psychosis, etc.) in advance and in adjusting the environment around them appropriately.’
In the detention centre, regime officers are assigned to each block. Although they are trained as psychologists, it is unclear how many inmates are even aware of this. In general, prisoners are unaware that they have a right to access psychological assistance. In addition, can regime officers actually provide adequate and quality psychological help? It is questionable whether the inmate’s problem will remain confidential inside the prison. For this reason, telling one’s troubles to a regime officer may not be a good idea. The prisoner’s already-destroyed personal inviolability could, in this case, leave them even more helpless and push them to withdraw into themselves.
In addition, the medical-sanitary unit has neither a specialised psychologist nor a psychiatrist. This is one of the main reasons the psychological condition of inmates is overlooked.
At best, a neurologist is invited from the Main Medical Directorate of the Justice Ministry every two or three months. They, too, leave after a few hours. Only after a prisoner self-harms is a remedy found for the wounds visible on the surface. If a prisoner is ‘prone to self-harm’, those four words are stamped in red lines on their personal file, and surveillance over them is intensified. If you have self-harmed, your voice may also be heard coming from the solitary punishment cell. The prisoner’s outward wounds are healed with iodine, but no salve is considered for their inner ones.
Ulviyya Ali
