or heart palpitations. Prison staff often do not respond adequately to complaints of any of these symptoms, and sometimes refuse to offer medical care or medication. Some of the anxiety that inmates, particularly female inmates, experience in solitary confinement comes from a loss or confusion of identity. Prisoners in solitary confinement are not allowed to decorate the small rooms that they are in or to bring most of their possessions that they were allowed in general confinement. This prevents the women from having any sort of entertainment, but also exacerbates feelings of a loss of individuality and of personal identity. Studies of the conditions of segregation, and interviews with the women who are subjected to them, have shown that women may also experience a collapse or confusion of identity while in prison because of their removal from their community and because of the unusual experience of space and time while in solitary confinement. Prisoners attach a lot of importance to the items that they have in their rooms; when they are placed into solitary confinement and no longer allowed to keep these identifying objects with them, they begin to lose their sense of self. Further, because prisoners kept in segregation often interact little with the outside world, and because the routines of eating and cleaning may be different from in general confinement, the women lose their ability to mark time. The Fire Inside magazine, written by offenders in California women's prisons, quotes one prisoner as saying that her recommendation for those held in solitary confinement is “to create a schedule” and figure out the time of day, because it “helps to assert control over your own life and not be totally defined by whatever ‘routine’ the prison is forcing on you.” Another aspect of their identity that is destroyed is their ability to form relationships with others. In most societies, women are perceived as being particularly social; having relationships with other people is seen as an essential element of their role as women in particular. This is of course impossible when in solitary confinement. It has been argued that this has a harmful effect on women especially. These conclusions were drawn from interviews with women who were still in solitary confinement, women who had been in solitary but had since been transferred back to the general prison population, and women who had been in solitary but had been released from