Lobotomies: Still the Psychiatric Model for Improving Mental Health

     You’d think we were making this up, but we aren’t.

     Psychiatric destruction in the name of help is essentially what a lobotomy is. An instrument like an ice pick is placed under the eyelid and against the top of the eye socket and a mallet then drives the instrument through a thin layer of bone and into the brain.

     American physician Walter Freeman streamlined the earlier leucotomy procedure of Nobel Prize winning Doctor Egas Moniz – can you believe it…for leukotomies? — to “treat” mental illness so that it could be performed by an untrained psychiatrist as an office procedure that did not require hospitalization. Freeman performed the lobotomy without anesthesia because he used a portable electroshock machine to trigger a seizure that distracted the patient, apparently, from feeling the ice pick enter the pre-frontal cortex of the brain.

     Freeman traveled around the country in what some wag dubbed his “lobotomobile” and performed at least 2500 of his ice pick procedures. Most were delivered as free demonstrations for mental institution staff on their incarcerated patients. He lobotomized nineteen minors, one of whom was a four year old child.

     About 15 percent of his patients died from the procedure. Why was he doing this? Lobotomies reduced the symptoms of mental disorders.

     No kidding. If you destroy a brain, any disorder it has is also going to be destroyed.

     After a lobotomy, patients were left in a stupor. Many developed ravenous appetites and gained unhealthy amounts of weight. Some began having seizures. Freeman described his lobotomized patents as people with “infantile” personalities.

     In that sense, of course, they were free of their troubles. One 29 year old woman Freeman lobotomized could not remember Feeman’s name afterward and obsessively poured coffee from an empty pot. He described her as a “smiling, lazy and satisfactory patient with the personality of an oyster” …“satisfactory” being the key criterion.

     Great bedside manner, eh?

     The reduction of any mental disorder was done at the expense of the patient’s intellect and personality. That was psychiatry’s rationale and their justification for performing these unspeakably gruesome procedures. The same rationale is used for electroshock therapy. Memory loss of parts of one’s life and decreased cognitive ability are acceptable trade offs for no longer feeling unhappy.

     Today 43,000,000 Americans take antidepressants. And what do these drugs do? They perform a chemical lobotomy. They subtract out part of your life force so you don’t feel whatever emotional pain you might have been suffering from. 

     Of course, you won’t feel much of anything else anymore either.

     Kind of like a happy oyster.