When dealing with facebook sometimes, like when it kicks me off the site for a day for incorrectly labeling a nuclear accident victim as nudity, I’m left wondering if the people who run this site have wilted cabbage for brains.
So let’s talk lobotomies.
Today’s daily Moment of Science… the Nobel Prize winning breakthrough of brain scrambling.
Once upon a time, our options for managing the wide range of mental health needs included heavy drinking or warehousing. We sucked at managing mental illness harder than we suck at managing a functional democracy. We’d figured out a lot of things about the human body, but the brain and all its trappings were largely a mystery. Anything that promised to give mental health relief was hailed as a breakthrough.
Portuguese neurologist Egas Moniz theorized that mental illness was a result of abnormal mental connections. He thought “fixed synapses” were causing mental illnesses like schizophrenia, and the clear solution was to go into the brain and manually break up these connections. The procedure he came up with in 1935 was deemed a leucotomy (a precursor to the lobotomy).
In an era when relief from mental illness seemed an impossibility, he observed what appeared to be real improvement in a large portion of his patients. It would have been hard to view their relative improvement, compare it to the well documented misery and abuse suffered by mentally ill people stuck in warehousing, and not think “this is probably better.”
We’ve fucked up so many things. So unforgivably badly.
Walter Jackson Freeman II was an American physician who lost his license to perform surgery after his last patient died on the operating table. So…popularizer of the lobotomy. Naturally.
Moniz had been a mentor for him; Freeman nominated Moniz for his eventual win of the Nobel Prize. Freeman adapted the leucotomy slightly into a new procedure with a similar outcome of ‘fucking up your frontal lobe,’ the lobotomy. In 1936 he started working with partner James Watts who performed the operations. Allegedly, over 60% of patients saw improvement.
Then shit got weird.
The transorbital lobotomy, aka the ‘ice pick lobotomy,’ is a procedure in which the brain is scrambled through picks inserted via the eye sockets. It introduced by Amarro Fiamberti and adopted by Freeman in 1945. Which, for some odd reason, he was allowed to perform without a surgical license.
Shit was bananas in the good old days, eh?
At this point, his partnership with Watts broke down. It probably had to do with Freeman’s drive to shove icepicks in the eye sockets of anything that blinked. He made a show of it, at one point performing over 200 ice pick lobotomies in two weeks in state hospitals in West Virginia in a stunt branded ‘Operation Ice Pick.’
Yes, some people suffering with severe mental health difficulties appeared better, which gave doctors confidence that this was a miracle. There were a range of reactions to lobotomies, from people being turned apathetic and passive to the world, a shell of their former selves, to people whose mental illnesses were further agitated. It also doesn’t appear there was a clear protocol for who was lobotomized. Howard Dully was lobotomized at age twelve in 1960 by Freeman, and reading an account of why, it sounds like he was just a rambunctious twelve year old boy.
Freeman performed his last lobotomy in 1967, his third lobotomy on the same patient, causing her a fatal brain hemorrhage. He was barred from operating, and the era of psychosurgeries was swept out when the new age of pharmaceutical interventions dawned. Anti-psychotics, tricyclic-antidepressants, anti-anxiolytics, and the lot of off-the-shelf neurotransmitters changed the face of mental health management.In a hundred years when we have laser beams to cure everything, someone will call what we’re using now the lobotomy of the early 21st century.
Is there anything we can learn from an era of lobotomies? Well, much like when facebook said “we’re gonna start moderating content,” when we said we wanted mental health breakthroughs, it was better than nothing but we should have been more specific.
This has been your daily Moment of Science, and my kvetch about being banned from facebook the same week as Donald Trump.
I worked in a community mental health center in Seattle in the 1970s, a place that in the previous decade had used electroshock. One of the older nurses on the staff recalled one lobotomy patient — before the operation he spent all his time shouting back at the voices in his head. After the operation, he kept shouting — saying “speak up, damn you, I cannot hear you!”
Barbarism.