PSYOPS - Psychological attacks

White torture is a non-physical form of torture.  It includes sensory deprivation, isolation, solitary confinement, threats against one's family, "white noise," being made to wear restricting clothes and to stand in stressful positions, sleep deprivation, loss of all privacy, and cutting the prisoner off from all information, under bright light and constant noise, never allowed to see a human face or hear a human voice,

Anybody who escapes such treatment is at least psychologically scarred for life, if not completely mad.
These practices are used because they dodge Geneva conventions and human rights laws, because they can't be proven as they leave no physical scars.

These techniques aren't considered "real" torture. People often dismiss mental anguish because "it's all in your mind."  

Gaslighting 
is a form of mental abuse in which the victim is tricked into doubting their ownsanity. Its name comes from the 1938 stage play "Gaslight" where a man slowly drives hiswife insane just by disturbing her reality. 

An example would be if a group of people in your home decided to take something of yourswhen you're not looking, then when you asked where it was, everyone would conspire to pretend as if it never existed and you were making it up. 

Or, you might decide to "haunt" somebody with a guilty conscience by making ghostly sound effects and "unexplained" startling events, to convince them that a ghost was haunting them. 

Gaslighting is an important step in brainwashing. Since you're trying to change a person's whole frame of reality, it helps to break down their prior sense of reality first so you can rebuild them in your ideal. 

It is also quite easy to gaslight someone innocently. In psychiatry, one example is the "Martha Mitchell Effect," in which a sane person's claims are chalked up by a mis-diagnosis as being the product of delusions or hallucinations 

John Mitchell, Attorney-General in the Nixon administration, whose claims of White House officials engaging in a criminal conspiracy were first put off to paranoid delusions. 

 You almost can't run out of variations on the theme of gaslighting. In fact, some form or another is employed whenever a person in authority leads those under them to a deliberately wrong conclusion. In the workplace, a boss may gaslight a secretary they don't like in order to try to force them to quit. 

In the military, a drill sergeant may gaslight one private under his charge as a method of driving them to either shape up or quit. 
Anything you could qualify as "head games" can usually be classified as gaslighting.


It is unlikely that the average individual has the resources to enact some elaborate campaign of slow psychological abuse complete with Gothic period atmosphere. 
But small change, casual incidents of shaping somebody else's reality can be pulled off with little preparation. 
The effect may not be lasting, but a pattern of cumulative effects over time, if carried out in a dedicated manner, can add up to the target having an increasingly slippery grasp on reality.

While gaslighting cannot actually induce proper mental illnesses, it can produce an effect similar to a delusional state.

If gaslighting is the act of creating false events to fool someone, catfishing takes the extra step of creating a whole fake person! Catfishing is a more recent invention, named after a 2010 documentary film called "Catfish," in which a person is led astray by the creation of a fake persona.