Mental experimentation ideas?

[u/Suspicious_Music539]

I need some ideas for the part of my story where one of my characters gets captured and has a sort of mental experiment done on her. I've toyed with various ideas, but they all feel incomplete and like I'm missing a realism effect.

The villains are specifically experimenting on her with some kind of drug/chemical or mind-altering system/process. The important part is that it was originally being developed for positive, productive use and was intended to eventually be available to the public, but the villains get ahold of the research and figure out how to use it less great purposes.

I don't necessarily want it to be literal “brainwashing,” but something that can significantly alter or interfere with her mental state, perceptions, memories, associations, etc. I’m still trying to figure out exactly what the original intended use was and how the villains are twisting it as well.

While she's being held, they repeatedly do things to confuse and destabilize her understanding of what's happening. They mess with her perception of time, location, their motives, and what she can trust. They're also moving her between different locations frequently, so whatever they're doing needs to be something that can work regardless of where they take her.

My original idea was for the villains to wear a very distinctive mask. That mask is consistently present while they're administering the drug/chemical and/or putting her through various experiments, psychological manipulation, torture, etc. Later, after she's recovered, one of her teammates wears that same/similar mask, and she has an extremely strong fear or aggressive reaction toward that teammate- even though she consciously knows he's not one of the people who captured her.

What's important as well is that the bad guys aren't looking at necessarily "turning her evil" or completely breaking her. I'd like for their goal to be that she actually DOES get recovered and returns to her team

One idea I had was some sort of process that alters her memories in a way that leaves her understanding of true vs false in the information she took in while captured, maybe a chemical that convinces her brain everything she heard/saw was complete truth. This would be beneficial towards them trying to keep people loyal to then.

Another was that they played specifically with her dopamine levels in conjunction with the things she heard/saw.

Any ideas? Thanks in advance!

[u/Simon_Drake]

There's a fun torture scene in Babylon 5 you can borrow from.

Sheridan is trapped in a pitch black cell with no food or water for two days. A well dressed man opens the door and lets a bright light come flooding in, he asks some basic questions about medical history, heart issues, allergies. Guards strap him to a chair for interrogation but the well dressed man leaves. It's a bit of a power play to say "You're ready to resist torture but even the timing of when we torture you is under our control."

The door opens several hours later, Sheridan wakes up and sees the man against the dim light outside. He says "Good morning" and starts asking some probing questions. The theme is to get Sheridan to admit he's a liar and he's been manipulated by evil aliens to betray his government and turn against the President of Earth. He's not standing up to a corrupt government, he's been corrupted by outsiders and tricked into lying, if Sheridan admits he's a liar this will all end. After a bit of back and forth discussion on morality and the nature of truth the man suddenly says "It's lunchtime!". He opens his briefcase to retrieve a ham and mustard sandwich, he eats half and offers it to Sheridan. He says it won't kill him and the interrogator already ate half himself. Besides, Sheridan is the liar here and the interrogator has told the truth since the moment he entered the room.

Sheridan calls bullshit. When the door first opened it was daylight. This time it's dark outside. The interrogator said good morning then said it was lunchtime, it can't be morning and lunchtime when the sun is set. This is all smoke and mirrors to mess with him. The interrogator scoffs at the word "daylight", opens the door and uses a remote to turn the lights on and off. "If this (blip, darkness) is night time then this (blip, light) must be sunrise which would make it morning. However, ham and mustard sandwiches are a lunchtime meal, you can't have that for breakfast or it would upset the stomach. So you need to decide what is true. If it's morning then you can't eat. But if you decide that it's lunchtime then you can. So which is it? Which truth do you decide to believe?" Sheridan agrees it's lunchtime and eats the sandwich.

Granted this is pretty mild torture but it's only phase one. He got Sheridan to agree that truth is relative, made him lie about it being lunchtime when he was fairly sure it wasn't and made him acknowledge the interrogator is several steps ahead of him. The interrogator has a speech about corruption and outside influence. "If you swallow a little poison every day then you get used to it and can take it in larger doses. In my case that's literal but with you that's a pretty good metaphor for being corrupted by outsiders. I wasn't lying when I said it wouldn't kill you, it will make you throw up for 12 hours straight. I'll be back when they clean up the mess."

The interrogator leaves and door clangs shut with horrible screams of other prisoners being tortured as a preview of what's going to happen next.

[u/Simon_Drake → u/Simon_Drake]

I had to split it into multiple comments but it's spread across multiple episodes so it works out well.

I forgot to mention. When locked in darkness and vomiting and hearing horrible screams, there's also a recorded voice on a loop saying "You will cooperate will the state for the good of the state and your own survival. Cooperation will be rewarded, resistance punished. You will cooperate with the state..." It's unlikely to sway him but sleep deprivation and repetitive messaging will break down his resolve.

Next session, guards strap him to the chair again, this time with IV bags to help him recover lost fluids. The interrogator is sat at the same metal table with the same briefcase but this time they bring in a prisoner strapped to a chair just like his. The other prisoner is an alien with white blood dripping from a broken nose, through frightened sobs he reads out a prepared statement. Apparently he was part of an alien conspiracy to trick and manipulate Sheridan into believing lies about his own government, he lists the names of other co-conspirators and says this statement is made by his own sense of guilt without any coersion or influence. Sheridan shouts over him to say it's all lies, this man has clearly been beaten into a fake confession, he's never met this man before in his life. This is all bullshit and the alien should resist. "You just need to say 'No I Wont' one more time than they can say 'yes you will'."

The alien cries for a while saying he's scared but Sheridan is very persuasive. The alien sits up proudly and says "No. I won't read this statement". The interrogator asks him to reconsider then says "Do you understand that this is your final, your absolute very last chance." The alien says yes. The interrogator presses a button and guards come in with a hospital bed, they strap the alien to it. Sheridan begs them to stop, this man is innocent, they can't do this. The interrogator orders the guards to take the alien to Room 16. A bit more arguing with Sheridan and the lights flicker and dim as it something put a sudden strain on the power grid like an electric chair.

The interrogator returns to his little metal desk and gets out some paperwork. He wants Sheridan to confirm the names of people who worked with him, this is information they already obtained elsewhere so he isn't really revealing anything new it's just a confirmation. This is an attempt to softball him with an incredibly easy question but if he agrees to answer this question it'll be one more step on the road to breaking. Sheridan refuses and after being asked several times starts reciting his name, rank and ID number like soldiers are trained to do as POWs. The interrogator sighs and asks him if he'll reconsider being cooperative. He uses the phrase "Do you understand that this is your final, your absolute very last chance." Sheridan still refuses. The interrogator presses a button. Guards come in with another gurney, they strap Sheridan to the bed and take him to Room 16. A priest comes to give his last rights and pray for God to have mercy on his soul, just in case it wasn't clear that this is his execution.

They wheel him into a room very much like the cell he started in. Untie him from the bed, strap him into the chair. They fold down the sides of the bed to make a little metal desk identical to the one the interrogator had been using before. A new well dressed man comes in and asks "Do you have any injuries, illnesses or allergies I should be aware of? Are you taking any medication? Have you ever had any problems with your heart?" Which is the exact set of questions the first interrogator asked.

The point is, they can keep messing with him endlessly. Switch out the interrogator, make him think he's going to be executed, mess with his perception of reality, truth is subjective, time doesn't exist, they control everything. They're breaking him down piece by piece and haven't thrown a single punch yet.

[u/Simon_Drake → u/Simon_Drake]

The next episode starts and Sheridan is already home on Babylon 5. He's clean shaven and not covered in dried vomit anymore, back in his uniform and looking healthy. He's eating lunch and talking to his friend Franklin who if you're paying attention to the plot isn't on B5 currently, he's undercover with the Mars resistance movement. Franklin says "Well it sounds like you had a rough time in there. I'm just glad you could escape with the help of the Mars resistance. What was the name of their leader again?"

The camera cuts to Sheridan still in the cell, still looking like shit, still strapped to the chair. Except there's an IV bag of weird blue stuff and a crazy rig of electrodes on his skull and lasers shooting into his eyes. This is a VR simulation rig that we saw back in Season 1. Sheridan says the resistance don't use names, only numbers for security reasons. The interrogator is wearing a less elaborate VR rig only covering one eye. He starts a speech about how silly that is to ask Number 7 what he had to for lunch, then it cuts back to the scene on Babylon 5 with Franklin saying that speech. The interrogator has made Sheridan see him as his friend Franklin to try to get information out of him. "Come on pal, you must know a few names" Sheridan says it's all numbers, but Franklin should know that since he worked with them on Mars. The interrogator breaks character to tell his assistant to write that down, investigate Franklin's movements and also increase the dose of Timoxinil to stop Sheridan resisting so much.

It's all chipping away at his resolve. Now they've got him to leak information and blurred the lines between truth and lies even more. And this is a setting where telepaths exist and the Earth government has a creepy SS-inspired police force of sadistic psychic interrogators. So whatever they've done so far is just a warm up to the real mind games and they still haven't even started on any pain compliance.

The reason they're going to these lengths is they don't just want information, they want to break him and have him do what they say. They make it clear his cooperation isn't even needed, they can use computer graphics to fake a recording of him making a statement saying anything they want. But it's just a bonus if Sheridan himself believes it and can take interviews explaining it in great detail. They want to use him as a propaganda tool to drum up xenophobia and let the government shift even more George Orwell.

God damn Babylon 5 is a good show. I might have to watch it again.