Should I Get a Lobotomy?

For starters: No. You should not have (or perform) a lobotomy. It would be impossible to find a surgeon willing to take on this procedure, and whatever is wrong with you would be better treated by other means. Hypothetically, however, you could ask a friend to perform a lobotomy on you with a few instruments and without too much difficulty – if there has ever been a do-it-yourself brain operation, it is a transorbital lobotomy. If you survive this, you will probably not even be dissatisfied with the results of the procedure, but only because “you” will not have much to worry about.

What is a lobotomy?

A lobotomy (or leucotomy) is a surgical procedure in which the prefrontal lobe is physically separated from the rest of the brain by cutting the nerves that connect them. It was developed in the 1930s by the Portuguese neurologist Antonio Egas Moniz, who received the Nobel Prize in Medicine in 1949 for his work. Primarily used to treat major depressive disorder, obsessive-compulsive disorder, and sometimes schizophrenia, about 50,000 lobotomies were performed in the United States, most between 1949 and 1952, but the procedure was still practiced here until the late 1960s -s years.

As for the theory of how surgery helps people with mental illness, I rely on the opinion of psychiatrist Richard L. Jenkins , who wrote the following in his article ” The Effect of Prefrontal Lobotomy on the Patient with Severe Chronic Schizophrenia ” published in the American Journal of Psychiatry. in 1954:

It is hypothesized that the splitting of the schizophrenic process is the result of an insoluble conflict for the patient … on the neurological side, an irresolvable painful resonance or whirlwind of nervous activity between the cortex and the diencephalon, which jams the higher circuits.

— Painful resonance? “Whirlwind”, which “suppresses the higher chains”? Sounds like legitimate neuroscience to me; let’s cut out the brains!

Alleged benefits of lobotomy

The popular press of the 1940s and 1950s, under dizzying headlines like “The Magic of Surgery Restores Sanity to Fifty Raving Maniacs,” called the lobotomy a miracle cure for mental illness. With an outpatient procedure that could be completed in an hour, patients who had been institutionalized for decades could return home to their families and lead productive lives. People tormented by anxiety have become carefree. The violent patients became obedient. Once upon a time, in severe depression, people smiled all day long.

But the Saturday Evening Post and other publications missed something of their rave descriptions of the benefits of a lobotomy: The procedure often erases the victim’s identity and personality.

The many disadvantages of lobotomy

The prefrontal cortex is the part of us that plans complex cognitive behaviors. It is the source of self-expression of the individual, decision-making and the containment of social behavior. In essence, the prefrontal lobe is what makes us human, so people who have it separate from the rest of the brain change dramatically. According to neurologist and lobotomy pioneer Dr. Walter Freeman, “The patient’s personality is altered in some way in the hope of making him more receptive to the social pressures in which he must exist.” And a lobotomy does it (if you don’t die from it), but life after a lobotomy is not the kind of life that many aspire to.

Freeman called the condition after the lobotomy “surgical induced childhood”, but this is not true. Lobotomized patients became smiling blank sheets—pleasant, uncomplaining, but unable to dress themselves, unwilling to get out of bed, and apparently incapable of introspection or self-awareness. Freeman reported that about 25% of his patients remained like this (in his words, at the level of “pets”), but over time, some of them were able to learn to do menial work or even gained the ability to perform simple mathematical operations. . Some have relapsed and their symptoms have returned. Some of them reportedly recovered and their symptoms disappeared. About 14% of patients simply died from the procedure.

Although the lobotomy has never been widely accepted by the medical community, it has been popular in mental hospitals, and it’s easy to see why: it makes people docile. In his 1950 book Psychosurgery, Freeman illustrated this with a description of Oretta, a hospital patient who required five people to hold her down during anesthesia prior to a lobotomy. After that, “we could playfully grab Oreta by the throat, twist her arm, tickle her ribs, and slap her bottom without eliciting anything but a wide grin or raucous chuckle,” Freeman wrote. Hooray?

However, severely mentally ill patients were not the only ones to be lobotomized. Freeman operated on wives who no longer wanted to clean, 12-year-olds who dreamed too much and stole candy , and many others. The most famous of them was Rosemary Kennedy.

At age 23, the often rebellious sister of President John F. Kennedy was living at a convent school in Washington, DC. After Rosemary is caught escaping at night, the school nuns become concerned that she might be involved with sexual partners. Her father, Joe Kennedy, took Rosemary to see Freeman, who lobotomized her in November 1941.

Whether it worked or not depends on your point of view. At first, Freeman called the operation a success, and Rosemary did lose her will to sneak out at night, but she also lost her ability to speak and walk. Years later, Rosemary partially recovered, but never spoke clearly again and never felt well enough to take care of herself. In 1949, she was transferred to a special cottage at St. Coletta’s School for Gifted Children (formerly known as “St. Coletta’s Institute for Retarded Youth”), where she remained until her death in 2005.

But enough history; Let’s move on to brain surgery!

Lobotomy step-by-step instructions that you should never follow, and I shouldn’t tell you.

Nobel Laureate (I can’t get over it) António Egas Moniz’s original lobotomy involved drilling holes in the skull and pouring alcohol into certain areas of the brain to kill tissue there – not something you can or should do at home. Fortunately, Freeman, P. T. Barnum in the field of lobotomy, pioneered the transorbital lobotomy, a simplified procedure that did not even require an operating room; he eschewed the formality and sterility of the operating room and simply lobotomized patients anywhere. In fact, it’s so effective that Freeman could complete the lobotomy in less than 10 minutes. Fun fact: Freeman had no formal surgical training.

These instructions are taken from Walter Freeman’s Psychosurgery in the form of Jack El-Hai’s excellent biography The Lobotomist . If you followed them, you would be guilty of several crimes and someone would probably die.

Necessary materials

• ice ax
• small hammer
• Electroshock therapy device

Procedure

To perform a lobotomy, Freeman:

• Sterilize his ice pick. Usually. Sometimes he didn’t bother.
• Deliver shocks high enough to induce unconsciousness with an electroconvulsive therapy machine. However, sometimes Freeman did it without anesthesia.
• Pass the ice pick under the victim’s upper eyelid, next to the tear duct, keeping the shaft parallel to the bony crest of the nose and pointing slightly away from the center of the head.
• Now the tip of the ice ax rested on the thinnest part of the skull. Freeman tapped the hammer lightly to pierce the bone.
• Now he can easily stick an ice pick in the brain. Freeman advised to go 5 cm deep. Not too deep or the “patient” would probably die.
• Pull the handle of the ice ax “as far as the edge of the orbit allows”. This should sever the fibers at the base of the frontal lobe. With hope.
• The move is the “tricky part” because the arteries are within reach, Freeman says. He returned the instrument to its previous position and advanced it further to a depth of 7 cm from the edge of the upper eyelid. Then move the ice ax 15-20 degrees medially and about 30 degrees laterally. If this is done incorrectly, the person will die. If done right, they will probably only die.
• Remove the ice pick with a twisting motion while applying pressure to the eyelid to prevent bleeding.
• Re-sterilize the ice pick.
• Repeat with the other eye. A true showman, Freeman sometimes played both sides at once.
• Lobotomy completed!

What happened to the lobotomy?

Lobotomy became less and less popular in psychiatric circles throughout the 1950s, partly because it is horrendous and usually doesn’t work anyway, but also because new discoveries in psychoactive drugs could calm anxious people without cutting out their brains. . Why do surgery if Thorazine is suitable? Despite growing misgivings about the procedure, Freeman continued his lobotomies until 1967, when the last institution to allow him to perform the procedure finally said “enough” after he killed a woman there.

However, lobotomy is not completely dead. A modified, much improved version of the procedure is still in use today. A temporal lobectomy is used to treat severe cases of epilepsy that do not respond to medication. While this is a far cry from Freeman’s “stick a needle in their brain and wiggle it around”, the basic idea is the same; it’s just targeted and as minimally invasive as it can be right now. It also gives much better results: patients usually come out of it with a reduction in epilepsy symptoms and with an intact personality.