If an Ice Pick Is No Longer Politically Correct…

     Yale trained physician Walter Freeman’s idea for curing mental illness would be seen as simply ludicrous buffoonery if he hadn’t taken it seriously. Instead, he travelled around the country in his “lobotomobile” training hospital staff to stick an ice pick-like tool under a patient’s eyelid and pound it through the skull bone with a mallet before twisting it around in the brain to sever the neural paths which were suspected to cause the patient’s mental illness.

     Over his forty year career he performed nearly four thousand of his lobotomies on mental patients. One hundred of his patients died of cerebral hemorrhage. Countless others had their lives ruined. Some of his victims were only twelve years old. He was finally banned from performing his surgery in 1957, and since then modern ethical medical boards strictly prohibit this barbaric procedure.

     But psychiatry has a fix for this.

     Another Yale educated physician, William Scoville, had a “hunch” that psychosurgery would cure one of his patient’s epilepsy. Scoville surgically “re-sectioned” – a euphemism if ever there was one — part of his patient’s brain, but unfortunately ended up destroying the man’s ability to remember anything. Nonetheless, Scoville helped develop the psychosurgery procedure (called a bilateral cingulotomy) which has replaced the now quite politically incorrect Freeman lobotomy.

     Today the procedure for damaging a specific part of a patient’s brain is used as the psychiatric treatment of last resort, even after ECT has failed to help a “treatment resistant” mental patient. The surgery involves drilling burr holes through the skull and then focusing intense heat inside the brain to sever the neural circuits that are presumed – yes, only “presumed” – to connect psychiatric distress with negative emotional responses and habitual undesirable behavior. The procedure is used to treat patients with major depression or obsessive-compulsive disorder.

     “When in doubt, cut it out.”

     That’s apparently still the psychiatric operating basis here. Remove those parts of the brain causing that chemical or neural imbalance that, per psychiatry, is behind all mental illness.

     Only about thirty percent of cingulotomy surgery patients “respond positively” without that part of their brain still in their head. Short term “side effects” include mild headaches, nausea, vomiting, and temporary confusion. Longer term symptoms can be apathy, diminished drive, or mild memory lapses following surgery. More serious “complications” involve seizures, bleeding, or infection.

     But no ice picks are involved.