American Experience

It has been some time since I posted to this blog or updated this site. Frankly I had to turn away for a while - it was too hard to keep it up. But tonight something is happening. My family, along with Howard Dully, are being featured on PBS's American Experience. Here is a clip of my aunt and mother:

http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/amex/lobotomist/stories/jones_qry.html

This has been a long time in coming. Howard Dully has a book out called "My Lobotomy". My family has had the chance to honor my grandmother Beulah Jones and make her story known to the world. I have accomplished what I set out to do. Beulah did not die forgotten.

I will post again after the show.

More than anything I am honored, incredibly honored and humbled, to have our family and Beulah's story remembered as an integral part of American history.

Psychiatric Hospitals for Chinese Dissidents

The former Soviet Union was known to have dissidents declared "insane" as an excuse to lock them away and have them tortured. It's pretty easy to do since so many accepted psychiatric treatments are fairly brutal and designed to break the will. It was no surprise to read in today's New York Times that China does the same thing:

Dutch Doctors Say Dissident Did Not Belong in Chinese Asylum

BEIJING, March 16 — Dutch psychiatrists have determined that a prominent Chinese dissident who spent 13 years in a police-run psychiatric institution in Beijing did not have mental problems that would justify his incarceration, two human rights groups said today.

The psychiatrists spent two days testing the dissident, Wang Wanxing, in Germany, five months after China released him and sent him abroad. They said in a statement that their examination "did not reveal any form of mental disorder."

The report could add fuel to charges that the Chinese police use a network of psychiatric prisons to silence political dissidents, often without trial or right of appeal.

Mr. Wang, now 56, was confined to the psychiatric facility after he was detained in 1992 for unfurling a banner that criticized the Communist Party.
The authorities determined that he had "delusions of grandeur, litigation mania, and conspicuously enhanced pathological will," which Western human rights groups say are diagnoses officials have used to lock up troublesome dissidents who have not broken any laws.

After his release in 2005, Mr. Wang described widespread abuses in the mental asylum, known as the Beijing Ankang. He said he lived in cells with psychotically-disturbed inmates convicted of murder and was forced to swallow drugs to blunt his will. He also said that the facility use electrified acupuncture needles to punish patients while other inmates were made to watch.
...
Human Rights Watch says it has documented 3,000 cases of psychiatric punishment of political dissidents since the early 1980's. The group contends that the use of penal mental asylums to confine dissidents has increased in recent years, as the police have sought ways to punish followers of banned religious sects, political dissidents and persistent petitioners without channeling them through the court system.

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Shocking Teens

This is from today's New York Newsday. I love how shock treatment has now evolved into an "aversion therapy":

Family suing over therapy
Freeport teen's mom alleges Mass. center used excessive shock treatment on her son, violating his civil rights

The family of a Freeport teenager is accusing the school district of violating his civil rights by sending him to a Massachusetts facility for troubled youths that uses electric shock therapy.

Antwone Nicholson, 17, and his mother, Evelyn, say he has suffered emotional and physical injuries as a result of being repeatedly shocked at the Judge Rotenberg Center in Canton, Mass., according to the notice of their intent to sue the school district filed last week.

...

An attorney for the Rotenberg Center said the facility tried other therapies on Mitchell, who is diagnosed with attention deficit hyperactivity disorder and obsessive-compulsive disorder, before using shock therapy as "a last resort."

...

Between August 2004 and February, according to legal papers and Mollins, Nicholson was sometimes shocked as many as six times a day with a device that is strapped to students like a small backpack and delivers a 45-milliampere jolt.

Michael Flammia, the attorney for Rotenberg, said students who receive the aversion therapy get shocked an average of once a week for two seconds.

"I've had [the shock] and it feels like a bee sting," Flammia said. "It hurts, but it has no side effects."

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Sunday London Times

There is a fascinating article in the Sunday London Times written by Christine Toomey and Steven Young. It features Psychosurgery.org member Derek Hutchinson and mentions the Shaw family and even has a quote from me. Here's an excerpt:

Mental cruelty

The lobotomy is deemed one of the worst crimes in medical history. But a modern form of it is still practised in Britain - and may soon be performed without the patient's consent. By Christine Toomey and Steven Young

The flashbacks come late at night. First comes the recollection of intense physical pain, as if the bones in his arms are being snapped like twigs. Then he hears the voice of the neurosurgeon applying an electric current to metal pins implanted in the tissue of his brain. "How do you feel, Derek?" the surgeon Arthur E Wall asks, while peering into Derek Hutchinson's eyes to see if his pupils have yet dilated with fear.

When Hutchinson swears at the surgeon, Wall administers another electric shock to nerve centres located in the hypothalamus at the centre of his patient's brain. At this, Hutchinson's pupils dilate and he screams: "You're going to kill me, you bastard!" Hutchinson's medical records, written by Wall over 30 years ago, confirm that his patient "felt funny - as if he was dying". But as he screamed, Hutchinson recalls Wall leaning in close to his face and leering: "And I thought you were a bit of a tough guy."

His next recollection is of Wall giving orders for surgical implements to be passed. Hutchinson feels the metal pins inserted through nylon balls lodged in cavities bored into the front of his skull being replaced by thicker electrodes he says felt like "broom handles". "After that I started, I start to feel warm all over and quickly feel as if I have fallen into a vat of molten metal, as if I am, quite literally, frying," says Hutchinson, tellingly confusing tenses as he describes the brain surgery he underwent in 1974 yet still relives up to a dozen times a day and in frequent nightmares.

Throughout the surgery, Hutchinson was kept conscious; his head held in a brace, his hands and feet strapped to the operating table. Hutchinson, a 27-year-old father of three at the time of the operation, says he had not given his written consent to the operation being performed; neither had his wife - his next of kin. Instead his mother, an alcoholic, had been visited at home, in the late evening, after she had been drinking, and had been asked to sign the form. "My mother thought doctors were gods," Hutchinson says. "She'd have signed anything they asked."

More

Kings Park Murals

Here is an interesting article in New York's Newsday which discusses the murals found in the now abandoned Kings Park Psychiatric Hospital. To the right of the story there is a link that allows you to view all the murals.

Forced Treatment

There's an interesting story in today's New York Times about an attempt to force treatment on people judged to be mentally ill. It's in an article with the non-inflammatory title, "Killings Loom Over Debate on Treating Mentally Ill". Here's an excerpt:

Against the vivid backdrop of recent killings by mentally ill people, both sides in the national debate over whether mentally ill people who have not committed a crime can be forced into treatment are preparing for a showdown in the Legislature here.
...

Reviewing information from case managers from 1999 to 2004, the New York Office of Mental Health said people ordered into treatment under the law committed fewer crimes and were less likely to end up homeless or in psychiatric hospitals or harm themselves or others.

A little over one-third of the 10,000 cases referred to court, most of them in New York City, resulted in forced outpatient treatment, according to the report, which Gov. George E. Pataki cited in declaring Kendra's law a success.

But Harvey Rosenthal, executive director of the New York Association of Psychiatric Rehabilitation Services, flew to New Mexico this week to dispute the state report's findings.

Mr. Rosenthal cited a report by a legal advocacy group, New York Lawyers for the Public Interest, which asserted that blacks were five times as likely as whites to face court orders. In addition, he said, counties have unevenly applied the law, skewing the results of the study.

"New York's law is not the model it is made out to be," he said.
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In unrelated news, here is a list of murders and other crimes from the past month, also reported in the New York Times, which were committed by people who are considered sane. Perhaps we need a law to forcibly medicate sane people because they are very violent and dangerous.

Sobs and Hugs, but Not His Jailed Mother, at Abused Boy's Funeral

One Year After Chemist's Murder, a Stalled Inquiry Angers Relatives

The Tenafly Councilman and 40 Bags of Heroin

Man Appeals Conviction of Student's Murder

Michigan Couple Charged in Son's Death

Man Convicted in Two Pa. Shooting Deaths

BOROUGH PRESIDENT'S GRANDSON IS CHARGED

SUSPECT IN KILLING OF POLICE SERGEANT IS ARRESTED

Woman Gets Life in Texas Professor's Death

Ohio Doctor Indicted in Wife's Poisoning

No More Favors, Judge Tells Man Accused in Court Mayhem

Man Sentenced in 'Girls Gone Wild' Attack

Nichols May Be Tried in Atlanta Courthouse

Across the City, Gunfire and Stabbings Leave 6 Dead in 24 Hours

Murder Trial Ends, but the Mystery Doesn't

Driver Shot on Bronx Street After Police Pull Him Over

Brooklyn Jury Gets Case of Killing of Detectives

Psych Ward for a Creative Writer

I'm going to let this story speak for itself:
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Family sues after creative writing assignment lands teen in psych ward By Lisa Sweetingham, Court TV

(Court TV) — Minnesota high school student David Riehm bristled at his creative writing teacher's stinging comments at the bottom of his assignment.

"David, I am offended by this piece. If this needs to be your subject matter, you're going to have to find another teacher," Ann Mershon's critique began.

The 17-year-old's satirical fable concerned a boy who awoke from a wet dream, slipped rear-end first onto a toy cone, and then had his head crushed "in a misty red explosion" under the tires of a school bus.

"I'm actually a little concerned about your obsessive focus on sex and potty language. Make a change — today!" Mershon warned.

David did not make a change. The poetry, scripts and songs he loved to write typically earned him praise from friends and family. Mershon's rebuke only roused him to rebel against her in two more essays over the course of the term.
"Bowling for Cuntcheson," a vivid dream-within-a-dream about a boy who finds a gun under a church pew and shoots his teacher, "Mrs. Cuntcheson," so frightened Mershon that she alerted the school administration.

"I felt threatened and violated by this thinly veiled fictional account of revenge against me," Mershon wrote in a statement to authorities. "I immediately had anxieties, which I have struggled with since reading the story. It scared me, it hurt me, and it also makes me very concerned for David."

David was suspended on Jan. 24, 2005. The next night, three men — a Cook County deputy sheriff, a state trooper and a social worker — showed up at Colleen Riehm's home on the Grand Portage Indian Reservation with a court order to seize her son and commit him to a psychiatric ward 150 miles away in Duluth. (David's stepfather is Native American, but David is not enrolled in any tribe.)

With no room at the juvenile facility, David was temporarily placed in the adult unit.

"He was scared to death," David's attorney told Courttv.com. "He didn't know what was going to happen from one minute to the next."

A physician later determined David was neither mentally ill nor dangerous, and more than 100 letters of support, written by classmates, faculty and parents, were presented at a court hearing, his attorney said.

David was ordered released from the hospital 72 hours after he had been taken into custody. His mother received $6,000 in medical bills.

Colleen and David Riehm filed a civil suit last month against his former teacher, the principal, and other county officials alleging numerous violations of David's constitutional rights, including freedom of speech, due process, and protection from unreasonable seizure, false imprisonment, and negligent confinement.

"Throwing a kid into a mental hospital for what he writes and not for what he does is unconscionable and unacceptable," Riehm's attorney Peter Nickitas told Courttv.com. "I would expect to see something like this in a book by George Orwell or Franz Kafka or an excerpt from the 'Gulag Archipelago,' but this happened in Minnesota in 2005."

It has also happened in Texas, Kansas, Louisiana and public schools across the nation. link

NYT Reporter

Today the New York Times has an article about a recently deceased (2004) journalist named Lucy Freeman who, in the 1940s and 50s, wrote a great deal about mental illness. Apparently she wrote many articles about how great lobotomy was, though she was actually a psychoanalysis devotee. From the article:

In truth, many psychiatrists were trying to convert such institutions from overcrowded, custodial facilities to state-of-the-art medical centers. Believing that mental illness stemmed from organic problems within the brain, psychiatrists had devised a series of treatments, including electroshock therapy and lobotomy.

It was these advances that Ms. Freeman relentlessly publicized as The Times's reporter on mental health. Writing scores of articles like "Action Now Urged on Mental Cases" and "State Mental Care Entering New Era," she willingly blurred the roles of reporter and advocate.

Ugh, some legacy. I wonder how many people underwent that horror of an operation because of her senseless cheerleading.

Later it says, "'By saving them,' she wrote, 'in some way I also saved myself.'".

Good Lord, who did she think she saved exactly? I bet she never even bothered to meet a lobotomy victim.

The article also includes this gem, "Moreover, recent studies have demonstrated that disorders like schizophrenia have a genetic basis and result from chemical abnormalities in the brain."

Yeah, right. How come whenever Mindfreedom confronts these "studies" head-on, they never turn out to be anywhere near as conclusive as their authors claim?

link

Nude Therapy?

While perusing the news I found this odd article about a couple who ran a group home for mentally ill people. I'll let the article tell the rest of the story:

Therapist for Mentally Ill gets 30 Years

A therapist who ran a group home for the mentally ill was sentenced to 30 years in prison for enslaving its residents, forcing them to work naked and making them perform sex acts. His wife received seven years behind bars.

Arlan Kaufman, 69, and his wife, Linda, were convicted in November on charges that included health care fraud, forced labor and involuntary servitude.
...

Prosecutors contended the Kaufmans controlled the lives of their residents, including deciding who could wear clothes and forcing them to masturbate, fondle each other and shave each other's genitals — activities Arlan Kaufman videotaped.

Arlan Kaufman insisted the residents' behavior was voluntary. He testified that he videotaped them so they could see themselves more objectively later when their judgment was not clouded.

Wow. What freaks. Here are more articles I found about the case:

More about the charges

Out on bond

The Defense including the charming assertion that residents were locked in isolation rooms for "only a few days", not weeks or months as the prosecution alleged.

Interesting article about how consent was an issue - patients testify that they did consent, then talk about how they had clothes taken away as punishment and felt compelled to attend a group masturbation session called "massage group".

Finally the inevitable "How we're going to reform everything so this never happens again" article.

Downtime

As you may have noticed, we have suffered some downtime as we changed over to a new host. There are some functions on the website that still need repair, but we are back online and ready for an exciting new year!

Howard's Blog

Howard Dully has started his own blog about lobotomy. Very cool!
Be sure to check it out.

http://howarddully.blogspot.com/

Haaretz Mentions Us

In a review of the book "Madhouse" about Henry Cotton the Israeli newspaper Haaretz mentions us:

"Even after Cotton's death his students continued to perform tooth extractions and tonsillectomies, until 1960. Even the inception of a treatment that was thought to be innovative at the time - lobotomy, the surgical removal of part of the brain's frontal lobe by inserting an ice pick into it, which was supposed to replace other treatments - did not lead to the end of the amputations and other surgery. (Incidentally, the developer of the lobotomy, who performed hundreds of the procedures, won the Nobel Prize for Medicine and also a great deal of support, until the real results of the treatment were revealed: The destruction of the brain tissue affected the functioning of the patient, who became a kind of zombie. Recently, several lobotomy patients' families have asked that the Nobel Prize be rescinded.) The studies that pointed to the danger and stupidity of Cotton's methods were buried in the archives of Johns Hopkins and the management of the hospital in New Jersey."

CNN story on Howard

Procedure once considered legitimate medical treatment

(CNN) -- Howard Dully was 12 years old when he was told he was going to the hospital for some tests.

"I remember having big black swollen eyes one day and staying in the hospital for a few days because apparently I had an infection," recalls Dully, now 56, who lives in San Jose, California.

That's all Dully can remember of the transorbital or "ice pick" lobotomy performed on him more than 40 years ago.

Many in the medical community consider lobotomies barbaric by today's standards, but there was a time when the procedure was an accepted treatment for those suffering from severe mental illness.

Throughout the 1930s, '40s and most of the '50s, the main route of treatment for most of these patients was to keep them institutionalized in often filthy, deplorable conditions until they got better on their own. Many remained for years, even decades.

Then came the lobotomy. It was first performed in 1935 in Portugal by Dr. Egas Moniz, who later would win the Nobel Prize in physiology and medicine for the technique.

Neurologist Walter J. Freeman quickly brought the lobotomy to the United States, first performing it in 1936. A few months later the procedure made the front page of The New York Times with the headline "Surgery Used on the Soul Sick."

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Michael Musto mentions the NPR program

I'D RATHER HAVE A BOTTLE IN FRONT OF ME . . .

Barbaric Photoshopping of the brain, as it were, is spotlighted in the radio documentary My Lobotomy, whose premiere at Bellevue I gleefully went to, mainly to act all superior to the live guests who'd no doubt be screaming, slobbering, and belching the alphabet. But these survivors—who once had ice picks rammed into their heads for various un-chic reasons—were touching and well-spoken about the ramifications of their horror, though I was most attracted to the lady who said the lobotomy actually helped her resolve her schizophrenia. I hope she got two for the price of one.

link

Howard Interviewed on "Talk of the Nation"

Here's a link to the NPR page where the interview will be posted around 6 PM ET.

Also "A Hole in One" directed by Richard Ledes is now available on DVD at Amazon. It stars MeatLoaf Aday and Michelle Willaims of Dawson's Creek fame. It's a very interesting fictionalized account of a woman who wants a lobotomy because she thinks it will relieve her of her worries.

Howard Makes the New York Times

Here's a link to a New York Times article about Howard.

Here's a link to a Daily News article about him.

Also here is a link to his NPR interview.

His show was so popular that it crashed NPR's web servers!

Howard Dully on CNN tonight

A taped interview with Howard Dully is (probably) going to appear on CNN Thursday Night (tonight!) during the show that's on at 8pm eastern 5pm pacific.

He's also going be on another NPR show called Talk of the Nation on Thursday. He will be interviewed and take caller's questions.

Go Howard!

Howard's Radio Premier

So on Monday night my mother and I went to Bellevue Hospital in NYC to attend the premier of Howard’s NPR program called “My Lobotomy”. It was a deeply emotional experience. Psychosurgery.org member Carol Noell was there along with Howard Dully himself. While Carol, Howard, and I have communicated for years, this was the first time we met in person. All of the Sound Portraits staff who produced the documentary were present too, including Dave Issay and Piya Kochar. Jack El Hai, author of "The Lobotomist", was there, as well as Richard Ledes who directed “A Hole in One”.

The most unexpected attendee was the doctor who had assisted Walter Freeman when he lobotomized Howard all those years ago. He was tall, thin and dressed all in black which sharply contrasted with his very white hair. I’m not sure he meant to do it, but he looked like a movie representation of a “bad guy” dressed in black like that. The truth is it took a great deal of character to face such a controversial event in his distant past. It was right that he was there.

Howard is immense at well over six feet tall. That night he was nervous – the venue was full of people who were all interested in what he had to say. It was the first time he was to speak publicly about what happened to him. His bravery is incredible.

While waiting for the program to begin my mom and I talked about my grandmother (my mom’s mom) and the terrible events that led to her commitment and lobotomization. It was good to talk to people who understood the history of the issue so deeply. Carol was amazing as she told about her memories of her mother Anna Ruth. I talked to so many people who had an interesting stake in the issue. One was a woman who worked as a psychiatric nurse and court advocate for mentally ill people. She actually talked about their civil rights which impressed me greatly. By contrast, the doctor who was Freeman’s assistant could only bring up old canards about dangerous schizophrenics who had to be forced to take medication lest they mow us all down in some fashion.

When the program began we sat with our eyes closed and listened. First we heard a voice that sounded like a 1940s radio announcer. It was the only known recording of Freeman’s voice. Then Howard's speaks in a voiceover about his story and the interviews he's about to conduct.

One person Howard interviewed was one of Freeman’s sons, a monstrous person who talked with glee about his father keeping icepicks used in surgery in the back of their cutlery drawer. There was not a bit of decency or shame in his voice. He was oblivious damage his father had done. It was revolting.

Howard spoke to Carol who talked about what her mother, who was lobotomized for headaches, was like after the surgery. It was very sad. Howard also talked to a very elderly surgeon who said he had never agreed with what Freeman was doing – it was brain surgery as an office procedure and he couldn’t stand it. The most emotional interview of all was Howard talking to his father, trying to ferret out why his father let his stepmother do this to him. Even though his father kept dodging responsibility, Howard totally forgave him and told him he loved him. He was a lesson in forgiveness that I won’t soon forget.

I can’t begin to do the program justice. There was so much more. As soon as it’s available I’ll post a link to it.

Afterward a panel made up of Howard, his wife, Jack el Hai, and the doctor who assisted Freeman was available for questions. There were lots of good ones and some interesting facts came out – for example the youngest person Freeman ever lobotomized was only four-years-old. The astonishing reason he gave was “early onset schizophrenia”. Wow.

Also it was established that there was no medical reason for Freeman to have photographed every victim/patient with the icepick in their eye socket.

Not everyone there was hostile to Freeman. Another fascinating attendee was a woman who was lobotomized and felt it had helped her. Her sister stood up and implied that Freeman wasn’t as bad as he was being made out to be. She also implied that it had been an experimental surgery and was justified. Then she did the worst thing possible – she implied that Howard had been made better by the operation, something that made all of us who know that there was nothing wrong with Howard cringe. Dave Issay took the question and stated that it’s clear from the record that there was nothing wrong with him and that the operation happened because Howard’s stepmother had manipulated the situation and Freeman was a willing accomplice. The reasons they listed for lobotomizing Howard were pathetic – “he stares into space”, “responds neither to punishment nor love”, “he won’t take a bath and likes to be dirty” and he dared to glare at his stepmother. He was 12, for goodness sake!

Howard described his life after the operation. His stepmother, disappointed that he hadn’t been made into a vegetable, kept him for five months before she had him shipped off to juvenile hall. Authorities could not keep him there because he had committed no crime, so they sent him to the only place available, Saint Agnew’s Psychiatric Hospital. After being there for 14 months, and being told daily he didn’t belong there because he was fine, the hospital closed and he went back to juvenile hall where he was forced to live until he was 20-years-old. He could have gone to a foster home but his father wouldn’t allow it. After his release he lived on disability, trying to pull his life back together.

Finally, after many years, he got tired of living on disability and decided to try to go to college. He earned an associates degree in IT. Then he started driving buses and was eventually promoted to become a bus driver trainer. It was a moving story.

After the program we all gathered to talk and too soon we were saying our goodbyes. As my mother and I headed back to Penn Station to catch the train back home she said, “All this time I thought we were the only ones.” That isolation is over for all of us, now.

God bless you Howard. You are the bravest man I know.

An abridged life

This is a wonderful article about Howard Dully. I'm not sure why, but they left Psychosurgery.org out (we introduced Howard to Sound Portraits). Oh well - what can you do? I think it communicates Howard's story very well anyway.
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By Glennda Chui
Mercury News

In 1960, Howard Dully's parents took him to a San Jose hospital for what they said would be tests.

Two days later, he woke up with a headache and two black eyes, feeling like a fog had penetrated his mind.

At the age of 12, he had been given a transorbital lobotomy, in which ice-pick-like instruments were hammered through the top of the eye sockets and twirled to destroy brain tissue in an area associated with emotion.

Dully, now 56, never went back to school, never graduated. At the insistence of his stepmother, he was made a ward of the state, drifting from juvenile hall to halfway houses to Agnews State Hospital. He committed petty crimes, drank too much and lived on disability payments. He no longer felt welcome at his parents' Los Altos home.

Yet his intellect, sense of humor and emotions survived. A big, amiable man -- 6 feet 7 inches tall, with laugh lines in the corners of his eyes -- he eventually earned a two-year degree, married and became a tour bus driver in San Jose.
And five years ago he went looking for answers: Who had done this to him, and why?

The result of that quest is a radio documentary, ``My Lobotomy,'' premiering Wednesday on National Public Radio's ``All Things Considered'' program. Dully narrates the tale in his deep, gravelly voice and interviews lobotomy patients and their relatives.

``You'd probably never know what happened to me if I didn't tell you,'' Dully said in an interview. ``But I felt I was not who I was supposed to be anymore. You can't put your finger on it, but something's been taken away. Something's been altered or changed. It's very frustrating.''

In the documentary, he talks to his father for the first time about the procedure that changed his life. And he finds his medical file among the archived papers of Dr. Walter J. Freeman, the doctor who gave him the lobotomy -- years after it had been discarded as a treatment for mental illness.

``My file has everything -- a photo of me with the ice-picks in my eyes, medical bills,'' Dully says on the broadcast. ``But all I care about are the notes. I want to understand why this was done to me.''

He reads one of the entries. It's from his birthday, Nov. 30, 1960: ``Mrs. Dully came in for a talk about Howard. Things have gotten much worse and she can barely endure it. I explained to Mrs. Dully that the family should consider the possibility of changing Howard's personality by means of transorbital lobotomy. Mrs. Dully said it was up to her husband, that I would have to talk with him and make it stick.''

At the archives Dully also found a pair of leucotomes, the instruments that had been driven into his eye sockets.

The lobotomy was introduced in 1936 by a Portuguese physician, Dr. Egas Moniz. It won him the 1949 Nobel Prize in Medicine. Some 50,000 lobotomies were performed in the United States from the 1930s to the 1970s.
The original method, called prefrontal lobotomy, involved boring open the patient's skull to cut the connection between the prefrontal region -- an area concerned with emotion, learning, memory and social behavior -- and the rest of the brain. While it often relieved symptoms of severe mental illness, it also blunted emotion, leaving patients listless, apathetic and childlike.

Freeman invented an easier way, the transorbital or ``jiffy'' lobotomy, which left no obvious scars. It could be done in a few minutes as an outpatient procedure.

He traveled the country promoting the technique, performing up to 25 lobotomies per day -- some 3,400 of them in the course of his career, according to Jack El-Hai, whose biography of Freeman came out this year.

Some of Freeman's patients said they felt better after the procedure, and kept in touch with him until his death in 1972.

But others died or were severely damaged. They included Rosemary Kennedy, sister of John F. Kennedy, who was mildly impaired before the operation but had to be institutionalized afterward.

In 1954 Freeman moved from the East Coast to Los Altos, where he helped found El Camino Hospital in Mountain View. Dr. Robert Lichtenstein, 77, of Los Altos shared an office with Freeman in Sunnyvale for a few years. A neurosurgeon, he was present for half a dozen or more lobotomies, holding the instruments in position after they'd been thrust into a patient's eye sockets so Freeman could make sure they were properly placed.

In the early days, he said, when there were no effective treatments for the mentally ill, lobotomy seemed plausible.

``In the Santa Clara Valley, Agnews State Hospital was filled with thousands of psychiatric patients, and a lot of them were uncooperative and belligerent and would attack the caretakers,'' Lichtenstein said. ``So the idea of trying to render some of these people more cooperative was one of the major goals of management. Otherwise they would have to be put in a room with sometimes just a mattress on the floor, and sometimes they would destroy the mattress.''
However, by the time Freeman operated on Howard Dully, medications were available for mental illness and lobotomy had fallen out of favor.

For years, Dully told only his wife and a few close friends what had happened. He had no relationship with his stepmother, and never discussed the lobotomy with his father. But he always thought that someday he would talk to them and get some answers.

Then, in 2000, his stepmother died.

``I guess it was a jolt to me,'' he said. ``I realized I wasn't going to be able to talk to her. It was over now.''

His mother had died of cancer when he was 5, and he said he resented the fact that someone was trying to take her place.

``Oh, I hated her,'' Dully said of his stepmother. ``I didn't want any harm to come to her, physical harm. It was more a mental game. She'd tell me go to my room and I'd mutter under my breath. She always said I had a look that scared her.

``I think what happened, if you want the truth, is that when I started to get big like I am, she started to fear me.''

After she died Dully started to surf the Internet, looking for information. Eventually he was put in touch with Sound Portraits Productions, which makes radio documentaries.

``Nobody who had had a transorbital lobotomy had ever talked about it -- not that I knew of,'' said David Isay, co-producer of the radio piece. ``I was curious to know the perspective of patients.''

At first Dully did not want his name used, Isay said; later, he changed his mind.
``Having the courage to really face down his demons and ask those very, very difficult questions of the people in his life was a wonder to behold,'' Isay said.
Dully said he's thought a lot, over the years, about what life would have been like -- what he would have been like -- without the lobotomy. Yet he said he does not feel bitter.

``What good is it going to do to hate somebody?'' he said. ``I'm more about, `Let's get it out in the open and forget about it.' I can sit here and point fingers at 950 people, and it means nothing. I think we all have to live with the part we played in it ourselves.''

People Magazine for November 14th, 2005

The November 14th issue of People Magazine (Ellen Degeneres is on the cover) became available today. On page 85 is the story of Psychosurgery.org member Howard Dully who was lobotomized at age 12 by Walter Freeman himself. Howard is incredibly brave and the story is really well done. So far the story is not on their website, but I will link to it if it becomes available.

Thank goodness that people like Howard are brave enough to come forward and tell their story. We will not allow history to be re-written by people who were not there and don't understand what happened.

Walter Freeman's Handiwork

Though I never dreamed it possible, Walter Freeman actually has apologists. It's pretty stunning. This is something they should see. It is a photograph of our friend Howard Dully being lobotomized. He is 12-years-old in this image taken in 1961. The hand belongs to Walter Freeman's assistant. Freeman took the photograph. In fact, though there was no medical reason to do so, Freeman took photos of every single person he ever lobotomized with the icepick in their eye socket. I believe the reason he did it was because, like a serial killer, he wanted to keep a momento of his conquest. I suspect that Freeman looked at them with great satisfaction, enjoyment, and pleasure. Why else would he have kept taking them for so many years?

This photograph is the property of Howard Dully, rendered here with permission. It is NOT to be reproduced elsewhere without written permission from Howard Dully who can be contacted via christine@psychosurgery.org.

NPR's "All Things Considered"

As many of you know, Soundportraits has been working on a documentary for the NPR program "All Things Considered". It is called "My Lobotomy" and features two members of Psychosurgery.org. The program is going to air on November 16th. I'll give you more details as we get closer to the date. It promises to be an deeply emotional event.

He lost his mind

Salon has an article about memory and ECT in today's issue. You'll need to watch an ad if you want to read the piece.
------------------
... This winning streak came to an end in 1998, when Cott's mother died. Her death set off a bout of depression from which Cott was unable to recover. "I had been truly seriously depressed a number of times in my life, but never to the extent of being 'clinically' depressed," Cott says. "I just didn't care anymore."

That's when the electroconvulsive therapy began. Cott was given 36 treatments over the course of the next two years. When he emerged from them, he could remember nothing from the years 1985 to 2000. Fifteen years of his life -- friends he had known, places he had lived, books he had written -- had been completely wiped out.
...

In your book you quote Steven Rose describing ECT as "analogous to trying to mend a faulty radio by kicking it.

Yes, and I was the radio.

How exactly does ECT work?

They send an electrical current of about 200 volts for a fraction of a second through the frontal lobes of the brain, by means of electrodes connected to a machine that resembles a stereo receiver. But I don't remember that. I only remember receiving the anesthesia. I remember the feeling of falling off into unconsciousness, which was a beautiful feeling. But that's all.

You must have agreed to go along with it at some point.

Well, I was in a pretty distraught state, emotionally, and I think I had been talked into it by the doctors. They said I was in a really bad state and that I really needed to do this, and that there would be no serious side effects. I'd lose some memory but the memory would come back. This is what they tell patients. And when you're in a really disruptive state, like I was, it's very hard to be objective. I certainly hadn't thought about ECT treatments before. I didn't know they still gave them.

The last of the treatments happened seven years ago. Have you forgiven the doctors and moved on, or do you still feel angry?

I was angry, to begin with, that the doctors didn't really tell the truth about the possible damage that can occur, both cognitively and in memory loss. And I still feel angry about that. I believe that ECT does damage the brain. There's dispute about this, but there's increasing evidence to show that this is certainly a possibility. And there are many other people, not just myself, who suffer this kind of damage. I'm not prone to anger, but I do feel angry for the sake of other people. I really feel that ECT shouldn't be used at all except as a last resort, in the very final moments of emotional desperation, or mania, or catatonia.
...

Tell me that it's chemical again

Wounds no one was able to see

BY INDRANI SEN
STAFF WRITER

Photographed carrying a terrified, half-naked Iraqi child to safety in March of 2003, Army Spc. Joseph Dwyer, of Mount Sinai, was on front pages across the country, a potent symbol of American heroism.

Friday morning, Dwyer, 29, was arrested in El Paso, Texas, after a three-hour standoff in which he fired a 9-millimeter handgun in his apartment.
...
Family members say they saw Dwyer changed from the cheerful kid who loved to fish and played golf for Mount Sinai High School. The first sign was the 50 pounds he put on in six weeks after he returned from Iraq, more than making up for the 30 pounds he lost during his deployment. Then there was the car accident in El Paso, caused by Dwyer swerving to avoid what he thought was a roadside bomb detonating device. Friends told the El Paso Times that Dwyer had been having nightmares and had been abusing alcohol and sniffing inhalants.

Friday's incident was the most alarming, said his father, Patrick Dwyer of North Carolina.

"When he was in the apartment, he was calling for air strikes," Patrick Dwyer said. "He put a mirror out the window to see what was going on. He was being very defensive. Totally not connected to reality. And that's not like him."

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Nervous Much?

Medicine prize launches Nobel season next week

STOCKHOLM (Reuters) - The Nobel prize for medicine, called by past winners both an honor and a distraction from research, heralds the start next week of the century-old season of awards founded in the will of the inventor of dynamite.

The winner of the 10 million Swedish crowns ($1.3 million) is to be announced on Monday, October 3 at 0930 GMT.

...

AVOIDING CONTROVERSY

The prize-giving Nobel Assembly at Stockholm's Karolinska Institute of medical research has tended to avoid controversy in its awards -- a rare exception being the case of Portuguese scientist Egas Moniz, the inventor of the lobotomy.

U.S. relatives of patients who had treatment, which sought to calm mentally ill patients by severing nerve fibres in the brain, have demanded the prize be withdrawn. They say it led to injury or death for their kin.
...

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Strange but True

Woman awarded $100,000 for CIA-funded electroshock
Thu, 10 Jun 2004

MONTREAL - A Montreal woman who underwent intense electroshock treatment in a program funded by the CIA 50 years ago has been awarded $100,000.

Gail Kastner was given massive electroshock therapy to treat depression in 1953 at the Allan Memorial Institute in Montreal. She was told on Wednesday of the compensation award.

She was left out of a federal compensation package in 1994 because her treatment was deemed to have been less intense than that of other victims of the experiments. Her treatment was also found to have had fewer long-term effects.

A Federal Court judge reversed that ruling, and awarded her the same amount Ottawa gave to 77 others as compensation for their treatment.

There were 253 claims rejected.

Dr. Ewan Cameron, who was director of the Allan Memorial Institute, conducted experiments using electroshock and drug-induced sleep. The research was funded from 1950 to 1965 by the CIA and by the Canadian government.

link

So There ... Until We Comment Again

This little blurb appeared in Clinical Neurology News:

Neurologist's Nobel Intact

The Nobel Foundation is rejecting efforts by a group of physicians and family members of lobotomy patients to revoke the 1949 Nobel Prize in Medicine awarded to late neurologist Egas Moniz, the developer of the procedure. “The Nobel Committee has never taken responsibility for the fact that they awarded a prize for an operation that was a total failure and without any scientific merit,” said a statement on the Web site http://www.psychosurgery.org/, which is involved in the campaign to revoke the prize. “In the United States alone, lobotomy, leucotomy, and related operations resulted in at least 50,000 surgical casualties. Through the [Nobel] Committee's actions, they endorsed this brutal operation and provided justification for thousands of more operations.” The psychosurgery organization was founded by Christine Johnson, a medical librarian whose grandmother was lobotomized in 1954 and was in and out of institutions for the rest of her life. But Michael Sohlman, executive director of the Nobel Foundation, is having none of it. “There's no possibility to revoke it. It's a nonstarter,” he said in an interview. Asked to elaborate further in an e-mail, he wrote, “We divide mankind into two groups—one which has been awarded the Nobel Prize, and the other which has not. We only inform about the former group.” He added that “no further statements on this subject have been or, for that matter, will be made by the Nobel Foundation.”

Reuters Portugal Part II

Here is a longer version of the Reuters Portugal article that ran in today's San Diego Union-Tribune:

Patients' kin want lobotomy Nobel withdrawn

AVANCA, Portugal – An unsettling rumor is doing the rounds in the dusty Portuguese town of Avanca.

Egas Moniz, the inventor of the lobotomy and Avanca's most famous son, could be stripped of his Nobel prize because of a battle being waged overseas, residents hear.

"A bunch of American scientists, I'm not sure if they're American or British, they're going to take away his Nobel prize," grumbled 71-year-old Armando Hilario, speaking with two other friends, across the street from Moniz's cemetery plot.

"You know. That prize he won for the brain illness."

Fifty years after Moniz's death in 1955, relatives of lobotomy patients in the United States have launched a campaign which they say is meant to shame the Nobel Foundation into breaking precedent by withdrawing the scientist's 1949 award.

They argue that the Nobel prize legitimized the procedure, which sought to calm mentally ill patients by severing nerve fibers between the frontal lobes and the main part of the brain. Moniz called the process a prefrontal leucotomy.

It was later modified and popularized in the United States with the so-called "ice-pick" procedure: using a hammer to tap a metal pick up through the eye socket and into the brain.

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Bioethics Blog

I found this very interesting blog for the American Journal of Bioethics.

An entry that caught my eye was this one that mentions a survey that found most American medical students think it's okay to take gifts from drug companies and many of them do so. We're talking about people who have not even become physicians yet who are already being influenced by the giant conglomerate. Unbelievable!

Another entry talked about the use of euthanasia in New Orleans during the flood (though some question the veracity of the story). Euthanasia is illegal in Louisiana and is the focus of heated debate in the United States. Considering that two nursing home operators were charged with murder for not evacuating their residents in time, I don't see how those euthanasia physicians can go without being charged with murder as well. The nursing home people didn't even intentionally kill their patients while these physicians allegedly did. This could turn into something very big if it turns out to be true.

Reuters Portugal Story

Here's a story out of Reuters in Portugal:
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Bid to strip lobotomy pioneer of Nobel
REUTERS in Avanca
An unsettling rumour is doing the rounds in the dusty town of Avanca.

Egas Moniz, inventor of the lobotomy and Avanca's most famous son, could be stripped of his Nobel prize because of a battle being waged overseas, residents hear.

"A bunch of American scientists, they're going to take away his Nobel prize," grumbled 71-year-old Armando Hilario, speaking with two friends, across the street from Moniz's cemetery plot.

Fifty years after Moniz's death in 1955, relatives of lobotomy patients in the United States have launched a campaign which they say is meant to shame the Nobel Foundation into breaking precedent by withdrawing the scientist's 1949 award.

They argue that the Nobel prize legitimised the procedure, which sought to calm mentally ill patients by severing nerve fibres between the frontal lobes and the main part of the brain. Moniz called the process a prefrontal leucotomy.

He performed his first prefrontal leucotomies on people in the mid-1930s in Lisbon. At the time, this was considered a major medical breakthrough.

It was modified and popularised in the US with the so-called "ice-pick" procedure: using a hammer to tap a metal pick up through the eye socket and into the brain.

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Kerouac and my Grandmother

What did Jack Kerouac and my grandmother have in common? They were both diagnosed with dementia praecox (an early name for schizophrenia).

According to The Smoking Gun:

'Kerouac ... complained that the harsh appraisal, which was later softened, came after he complained of headaches and asked for aspirin. Instead, "they diagnosed me Dementia Praecox," he said.'

My grandmother also wanted to be a writer. What might she have given the world if her brain had been spared by the lobotomists?

Want a good laugh? Read Kerouac's medical history.

Emotionally Disturbed

"Emotionally Disturbed" is the catchall for people whose behavior upsets us, but who we cannot fit into any traditional psychiatric pigeonholes.

There are few crimes as upsetting as those committed against children. Last night in New York City a man was arrested for stabbing a 10-month-old baby in her stroller. The poor baby is in critical condition and her mother is beside herself. According to the New York Times, "The police official who described Mr. Derr [the accused attacker] as emotionally disturbed did not elaborate on his condition."

When did the police get into the diagnosis business? Maybe the guy is simply a bad, horrible person who wanted to stab a baby because it gave him perverse pleasure to do so. If there are people out there who are considered sane but are sexually attracted to babies, then it's not such a far stretch that there are people who are considered sane but like to hurt or kill babies.

Some people are just plain bad. They choose to do heinous things.

It's hard for us to comprehend that someone would enjoy hurting a sweet little baby. In this case there was no sensible provocation. I mention that because years ago when I lived in Ithaca, New York there was a case of a mother who shook her baby to death. No one thought she insane because the baby was crying non-stop with an illness and the mother lost her temper. She was sentenced to a long prison term.

But in this case the accused didn't even know the family or the baby (as far as I can tell). We look for excuses in these situations because it frightens us to know that there are monsters in our midst - people who hurt or kill with no provocation at all, from whom we cannot protect ourselves. We hope that there is a sign that will make the monsters obvious - maybe the mutterers, or the suicidal, or the aggressive people are the monsters. But remember Dennis Rader and Ted Bundy - some people just like to harm and there's no "emotional disturbance" about it.

Hurricane and lobotomy humor

Yeah, I know that Hurricane Katrina and lobotomy are not humorous subjects, but I couldn't help but chuckle when this reporter confused "phlebotomy" with "lobotomy". I contacted him just to be certain that it was a mistake, and of course it was.
-------------------------
State's hospitality helps ease discomfort of leaving home

It came down to her job or her kids, Sakura Johnson said.

The job lost.

"I couldn't risk it. I wanted my kids to be safe," said Johnson of Slidell, La., who fled Hurricane Katrina with her family at noon Sunday and was camped out in Jackson's Mississippi Coliseum by 8 or 9 that night.

"For the record, I may be out of a job. I draw blood," she said Monday, as children merrily ran about the coliseum, pushing toy cars across the floor and people's feet.

"I was supposed to be on the job today. I work in the lab at West Jefferson Medical Center — in the lobotomy department. I may be an ex-lobotomist now."

Figuring the Marrero, La., hospital wasn't likely to offer emergency brain-lobe surgery today — "that would be crazy," she said — Johnson decided to flee her home in Slidell, about 32 miles northeast of New Orleans.

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Regina's Record

I just discovered a wonderful book by James van Amber called "Regina's Record". It's about his mother who was ... I hardly know what to say ... who was brutalized by the Veteran's Administration psychiatric system. Even the word "brutalized" seems mild compared to what she went through ... endless shock treatments, cold hydrotherapy sessions, abuse by other patients (and no doubt by staff as well), hours upon hours spent in restraints, and an illegal lobotomy (he can prove it was illegal). All this the VA concluded was "superior treatment, even by today's standards". Dear God ... what does that say about today's standards?

James's description of "hydrotherapy" is stunning. This 'treatment' is usually considered innocuous when compared to other 'therapies' that patients have endured - it is not. The horror, the hours she spent packed in cold sheets able only to move her head, the impotent screams of hopelessness that her jailers dutifully noted - it's unbelievable.

"Regina's Record" is well written and heartbreaking. I can't recommend it enough. This is a "must read" book on this topic.

You can order it here in the US. You can order it here in the UK.

This book is well worth your while.

NurseZone Article

Since one of our members is a nurse NurseZone decided to do a story on our efforts:

Nurse Campaigns to Raise Awareness of Lobotomy

Long after lobotomy fell out of favor in treating mental illness, epilepsy and headaches, adult children of patients subjected to the brutal, debilitating procedure have begun championing their loved ones’ memories and trying to convince the Nobel Foundation to revoke the Nobel Prize given to its inventor, Egas Moniz.

“It’s not going to happen, but [the campaign] is getting people to talk about what has happened,” said Carol Noell Duncanson, RN, of Marietta, Georgia. “Families are struggling every single day with results.”

Moniz developed leukotomy, later called lobotomy, in 1936, to treat mental illness. He received the Nobel Prize in 1949.

Physicians performing the procedure would drill holes in the patient’s head and through the incision destroy prefrontal brain tissue. Lobotomy affected patients’ personalities, and they frequently became dependent on others for their care. Still physicians persisted in performing the surgeries.

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On Vacation

Christine will be on vacation and will post on this blog again on Sept. 5.

SERIOUS DECLINE IN MENTAL HEALTHCARE

Here is an interesting article from the Baltimore Chronicle that mentions our fight against the Moniz Nobel.:
-----------------------
Forgotten Victims of America’s Plutocracy
By Jason Miller

Like wolves among sheep, America's Plutocracy preys on the weaker and less fortunate members of society. Since America's founding, they have leveraged their economic power to dominate the government and the media, the vehicles through which they advance their avaricious agenda.

...

Suffering in silence

Overshadowed and often forgotten is the plight of yet another minority group which has suffered tremendously at the hands of the ruling elite. The “Land of the Free” has not been particularly kind to the mentally ill. People with mental disorders have faced many forms of abuse and discrimination before and since our founders penned the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution.

...

Horror masquerading as healing

In 1935, Antonio Moniz spawned one of the most savage, inhumane "medical procedures" in human history. He performed a type of psychosurgery which involved removing a portion of the frontal lobe of a patient's brain in an attempt to rid them of unwanted anxieties, neuroses, or psychoses. This notorious procedure, known as the lobotomy, usually resulted in impairment of the patient’s sex drive, spontaneity, impulse control, and problem-solving capacity, leaving them a mere shadow of their former selves. Despite the high risks and extremely disturbing after-effects associated with the treatment, the US medical profession raced to embrace the lobotomy as a technique to treat patients with serious illnesses.

Dr. Walter Freeman invented and popularized the Tran orbital lobotomy, which involved placing an ice pick just above the patient's tear duct, driving it into the frontal lobe with a rubber mallet, and wiggling it around to decimate the frontal lobe of the brain. Hailed as inexpensive, simple and non-invasive, US care-givers performed over 40,000 lobotomies between 1936 and 1950. Freeman traversed the country (in his van which he called his "lobotomobile") shamelessly touting his procedure. His advocacy for the "ice pick lobotomy" as a "cure all" even led to its use to manage misbehavior in children. Rosemary Kennedy represents a classic high profile case of the abuse of this twisted form of treatment. Her father, Joe Kennedy, patriarch of the Kennedy clan, authorized a lobotomy for his 23 year old daughter in 1941 to "cure" her mild mental problems. The ice pick lobotomy left her profoundly retarded. For the innovation of this human butchery, Moniz won a Nobel Prize in 1949. Family members of lobotomy victims have lobbied the Nobel Foundation to revoke his award, but their pleas have fallen on deaf ears.

read the rest

"The Lobotomist" Review

The Seattle Weekly reviews "The Lobotomist"

As Freud recedes in importance in our age of Prozac and Paxil, psychopharmacology and neuroscience having rendered him a 20th-century crank, we ought to remember that there are limits to the mechanistic view of the brain. No fan of talk therapy, psychiatrist Dr. Walter Freeman (1895–1972) set out to debunk Freud by ridding patients of their mental problems by operating directly on the brain—never mind that he was not, in fact, a trained surgeon. That he eventually simplified his technique to hammering ice picks in above the eye socket (hence transorbital lobotomy), often in a nonsterile clinical setting, has only contributed to his horrific reputation and legacy. To those who even recognize his name, it's associated more with Dr. Frankenstein or Dr. Moreau than with legitimate medical practitioners.

That's why The Lobotomist, though not so brilliantly organized or told by author Jack El-Hai, is still an important book. "Psychosurgery," as Freeman helped to coin the term, is actually making a comeback (though under a different name). Thanks to supercomputers and modern imaging, plus the most delicate of surgical techniques (some of them noninvasive, using gamma knives and the like), surgeons are again operating on people with profound brain disorders. In a sense, since brain maladies like schizophrenia are organic and not neurotic, Freeman paved the way, but he also polluted it as he went. (Incredibly, his mentor, a Portuguese doctor named Moniz, won a 1949 Nobel Prize for originating psychosurgery.)

Freeman was involved with some 3,500 lobotomies in the decades following 1936 (when he helped perform the first such operation in the U.S.). El-Hai makes depressingly clear that the surgery's popularity coincided with the huge and costly increase in the number of institutionalized mental patients, most of whom could not give Freeman their informed consent for the procedure. (The boom ended with the advent of antipsychotic drugs like Thorazine, which Freeman ironically opposed because it only masked the root causes of mental illness, rather than treating them.) This is the climate that also gave rise to electroshock therapy and One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest; Freeman's own daughter called him "the Henry Ford of psychiatry." Indeed, he took an assembly-line approach to the surgery, often driving around the country—including a stop at our own Western State Hospital—in search of patients. Of one road trip, he wrote, "I left a string of black eyes all the way from Washington [D.C.] to Seattle." (Black eyes resulted from the ice-pick procedure, which patients generally didn't remember afterward.) Among his patients were Rosemary Kennedy and the sister of Tennessee Williams; bafflingly, El-Hai skims over these sad episodes.

He also fails to integrate much current medical knowledge as he tells Freeman's bizarre saga. Since Freeman surgically violated the brain's frontal lobes, he often succeeded in abating the symptoms of mental illness without addressing their cause; the procedure amounted to "salvage, not rescue," one contemporary noted. Yet El-Hai doesn't really address why the medical establishment went along with lobotomies for so long—despite any evidence-based studies on their efficacy.

Still, there's a great story in here. Freeman is like a dark doppelgänger to Kinsey—well-intentioned, more banal than evil, and a bit of a showman. While performing a prefrontal lobotomy on a conscious patient under local anesthetic, he asked, "What's going through your mind?" On the operating table, the patient replied, "A knife." BRIAN MILLER

Marilyn Lukach Column

Some want Nobel Prize revoked from man who developed lobotomy

Lobotomy. Just the word conjures up a nightmare that was all too true for many psychiatric patients between the 1930s and 1970s.

In the current New England Journal of Medicine, an editorial discusses lobotomies and notes the "procedure was a desperate effort to help mental patients." The historian from this editorial admitted in a later interview that the "numbers that were harmed were quite substantial."

The lobotomy was first performed in November 1935 under the direction of noted Portuguese neurologist Egas Moniz. In the book "The Lobotomist" by Jack El-Hai, it was noted that Moniz did not actually perform the operation. His hands crippled by gout, he was unable to hold surgical instruments. The surgery was performed by Almeida Lima under Moniz's direction. Another interesting point to note:I could not find any articles that stated he was a surgeon, so operating should have been a moot point even without the gout.

Moniz had already refined techniques using radioactive tracers or cerebral angiographies that helped doctors visualize blood vessels in the brain. He felt that some mental illnesses were caused by abnormal stickiness in the nerve cells that caused neural impulses to actually get stuck. This caused, in his opinion, a repeat of pathological ideas in the patient. There was no real evidence for his theory, but Moniz was determined to push on.

The first attempt at psychosurgery drilled holes in the skull and gave a series of alcohol injections into the frontal lobe (which controls thinking). The switch was made to cutting the lobe with wire and severing the connections. Nothing in the brain was removed.

read the rest

NPR Interview August 10th

On August 10th an interview with Jack El Hai, Dr. Baron Learner, and me will be broadcast on the NPR radio program Day to Day.

If you miss the show, or live someplace where it isn't aired, it will be available here .

Trust the Professionals

New York makes good after having allowed some shocking abuse to happen to some of our most vulnerable children ...
--------------------------------
New law aims to protect children at out-of-state centers
BY LAUREN TERRAZZANO
STAFF WRITER

August 4, 2005

One Great Neck girl hanged herself in 2002 from a bunk bed at the dorm of her Pennsylvania treatment center.

Another 15-year-old Suffolk County girl was sexually assaulted by a worker at the St. Anne Institute in Albany, an event so traumatic she hitchhiked home to Long Island
because she was so distraught.

And a Brooklyn teenager, Vito "Billy" Albanese, while in a wheelchair for a traumatic brain injury, was beaten and tied down at a New Hampshire center and received 40 stitches from a fall when he was a resident at a New Jersey brain injury center.

There are 1,400 disabled and emotionally disturbed New York State children in out-of-state treatment centers as far away as Florida and as close as the Berkshires who cannot be helped closer to their homes because there are simply not enough beds in New York.

But because of a law signed late Tuesday by Gov. George Pataki, that could soon change. Pataki said "Billy's Law" would better protect vulnerable children across the state, "from Long Island to Buffalo," and bring many of them home.

He said the law "takes aggressive steps to help people with unique needs by directing state entities to work even more closely to ensure the treatment provided ... is the best it can be."

The law, developed after a year-long task force assembled by Pataki, calls for better scrutiny of out-of-state centers, more frequent inspections by state agencies and an attempt to create more beds in-state for disabled children. Many are placed there by school districts, local social service agencies and Family Court systems.

The bipartisan legislation, considered landmark because New York is believed to be among the first in the nation to enact such a measure, was named after Albanese. But mostly it was born of the years of kitchen-table advocacy by his 67-year-old father, Vito, of Bay Ridge. Billy was neglected, according to state findings, at the Bancroft Neurohealth Center in Haddonfield, N.J., that was recently the subject of a widespread investigation by the New Jersey child advocate's office.

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CHICAGO PREMIERE!

CHICAGO PREMIERE!

ONE WEEK ONLY!

A HOLE IN ONE

AUGUST 5-11

The Facets Cinémathèque, 1517 W. Fullerton Ave. is proud to present the Chicago Premiere of A Hole in One, directed by Richard Ledes, for one week only, Aug. 5-11. Showtimes are Fri. at 7 & 9 p.m., Sat. at 5, 7 & 9 p.m., Sun. at 3, 5, 7 & 9 p.m., and Mon., Tues, and Thurs. at 7 & 9 p.m.

Set in small-town America circa 1953, A Hole in One is a romantic drama starring Michelle Williams(Imaginary Heroes) as Anna, a young woman whose desire for mental health leads her to covet the latest fashion-a trans-orbital lobotomy. Anna is haunted by her family's insensitive treatment of her brother when he returns "shell-shocked" from World War II, followed by his unexpected suicide.

Raised in a pre-feminist era, when women were not expected to think for themselves, Anna is courted by Billy (Meat Loaf Aday, Fight Club), a small time gangster, when she is just barely old enough to be considered an adult woman. Desperately, Anna looks for a way to relieve her pain, while yearning for fulfillment, clarity and calm as madness flickers around the edges of her life.

Shot in Nova Scotia, featuring exquisite photography, rich period detail, an evocative score by Stephen Trask (of Hedwig & The Angry Inch fame) and based on meticulously researched "stranger than fiction" historical facts and medical practices, A Hole in One is a film that meticulously balances a rich original style with a captivating story and visuals that complement its intelligent humor and dialogue, as a young woman struggles against the madness of Cold War America.

Directed by Richard Ledes, U.S.A, 2004, 35mm, 97 mins.
Tickets are $9, $5 for members.
For additional information, call 773-281-4114 or visit www.facets.org

Magical Mystery Cure

This is an excellent article by Danielle Egan, a friend of Psychosurgery.org. It appeared in This Magazine earlier this year:

Magical Mystery Cure

What would you do if a lobotomy was your only hope for happiness? Today the procedure is called psychosurgery and it continues to be prescribed to treat mental illness, though many psychiatrists argue the mentally ill need it like a hole in the head

“I remember when I was having the surgery, they had put a lot of drugs in me and I was feeling heavily drunk. They said, ‘How do you feel?’ I said, ‘I feel drunk.’ They were trying to put this jig on my head, and these guys couldn’t get it on. I’m going, ‘Oh my god, what am I doing here in this operation room? This is crazy. You’re going to drill holes in my head and you can’t get this thing on!’ I didn’t think it was funny. I was a lot worried.”

Bruno (not his real name) and I are having lunch at a Chinese restaurant on the main drag of a small town just south of Edmonton. The neatly dressed 33-year-old speaks in a loud, calm voice as he describes a psychiatric neurosurgery, or psychosurgery, performed on him in November 2002 as a last resort treatment to curb his obsessive-compulsive disorder (OCD). The disorder appeared as excessive hand-washing when Bruno was 10, but eventually became debilitating. He dropped out of university during his third year and started seeing Dr. Lorne Warneke, an Edmonton psychiatrist who specializes in OCD. They spent the next 10 years trying dozens of pharmaceutical treatments, in addition to cognitive behaviour therapy, while Bruno worked on and off selling insurance. But Bruno, like about 20 percent of people who try the standard methods of treatment for mental illness, found they didn’t help him. So Warneke told him about a type of surgery that could treat his OCD by destroying pathways in his brain thought to be overactive in people with anxiety disorders.

“At first I couldn’t think of someone drilling a hole in my head and frying my neurons, you know,” says Bruno, letting off a loud booming laugh. “I talked about it with Dr. Warneke. Finally, I guess, I thought that’s what I should do.”

Performed at University of Alberta Hospital in Edmonton, the surgery, called a stereotactic bilateral anterior capsulotomy, is one of four psychiatric neurosurgeries used around the globe to treat people with severe depression and anxiety disorders. Specialists in the field aren’t sure how or why these surgeries work, and all four operations target different parts of the brain. The goal is to interrupt the neural pathways between the frontal lobes—known as the seat of personality and the brain’s CEO because they’re involved in higher functions like problem-solving, motor-control, language, memory-sorting and impulse-control—and the so-called “lower” areas of the brain, including the thalamus, amygdala and hippocampus, which initiate mood, hormones and emotions ranging from sexual pleasure to fear.

With the anterior capsulotomy, the target is the internal capsule, an area dense with nerve connections between the frontal lobes and the thalamus. About four such procedures have been done each year at University of Alberta Hospital since Warneke started referring some of his most severe treatment-resistant patients to neurosurgeon Dr. John McKean in the early 1990s. In order to be referred, the patients must have failed a number of years of standard treatment, including pharmaceuticals and psychotherapy, and be “considerably debilitated.” Psychosurgery, Warneke explains, is “a very simple procedure that effectively cuts nerve fibres. It’s a bit like cutting some wires in a telephone trunk line to reduce the amount of messages getting through.”

His explanation is similar to that of Portuguese neurologist Dr. Egas Moniz, who developed the first psychosurgeries (then called prefrontal leucotomies) in the 1930s. Moniz claimed the procedure was necessary to “change the paths chosen by the [dysfunctional] impulses … and force thoughts into different channels.” While tools and technologies have certainly evolved over the years, the premise of severing pathways in order to treat psychiatric illnesses remains the same as it was back in the early days of lobotomy.

The “jig” placed on Bruno’s head is a large metal device that makes it easier for surgeons to pinpoint the coordinates of the spots to be destroyed. When the neurosurgeon arrived and showed the attendants how to work the stereotactic frame, “there was a sigh of relief,” Bruno says, laughing heartily before taking a few bites of his buffet lunch. Bruno’s skull had already been locally anaesthetized so that he wouldn’t feel pain from the drill, and two spots on the top of his head just above the hairline had been shaved. The brain itself doesn’t feel pain, so Bruno was wide awake as doctors drilled two dime-sized holes in his skull. “I remember the sound of the drill, but no pain, just a little pressure. Then I remember the doctor going, ‘How many fingers?’ It felt like I was only there 15 minutes. I was in and out.”

read the rest

Moniz Lobotomy Stamp

This is an actual Portuguese stamp.

Letter to the Editor of the OC Register

A psychiatric no-brainer

The article, "Lobotomy foes seek to revoke Nobel Prize" [News, July 14], about Portuguese neurologist Egas Moniz's Nobel prize for devising lobotomy as a purported solution to human problems, shows again how psychiatry has betrayed the trust of people in need. As with other cruel psychiatric methods, such as electric shock therapy, forced mind-altering drugging, etc., psychiatrists "twist the knife" once it is firmly imbedded in the body of a too-trusting victim while picking the pocket of the taxpayer for ill-gotten appropriations.

Pat Mattison
Tustin
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Thank you Pat!
link

Editorial from the Lufkin Daily News

EDITORIAL: Nobel Foundation should revoke prize given to doctor who began lobotomiesThe Lufkin Daily News
Thursday, July 14, 2005

It seemed like a good idea at the time.

Egas Moniz in 1936 came up with the idea of cutting through nerve fibers connecting the brain's frontal lobe — which controls thinking — with other parts of the brain, with the hope mental illnesses would go away once the new nerve connections were formed.
Lobotomy hasn't been used since the 1970s, but now some relatives of people who underwent the procedure are trying to get Moniz's 1949 Nobel Prize revoked because of modern views about how barbaric the procedure was, according to an Associated Press story.

It seems pointless to take away the medal now, considering Moniz has been dead for 50 years. Except for one thing: “How can anyone trust the Nobel Committee when they won't admit to such a terrible mistake?”

That's a question posed to the AP by Christine Johnson of Levittown, N.Y., whose grandmother was lobotomized in 1954 after other treatments for her delusional behavior were unsuccessful. Johnson, a medical librarian, started a campaign to have Moniz's prize revoked.
Truth be told, there's not much chance the Nobel Foundation will act on the request. Its charter includes no provision for appealing a prize that has been awarded, and the foundation traditionally ignores criticism of its awards — such as in the case of Palestinian leader Yasser Arafat's Peace Prize, according to Nobel Foundation executive director Michael Sohlman.

We think now's a good time to come up with an addition to the Nobel Foundation's charter that lets it correct the committee's occasional error in judgment. Then it could take away the 1949 prize, or at least admit the committee was wrong to award it — for integrity's sake, as Johnson suggested.

Thankfully, there are medicines and procedures today that help people cope with mental illness more effectively, in much more humane ways. It's unfortunate that the Nobel Foundation still has a prize on record for the horrible treatment that was lobotomy.
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Thank you Lufkin Daily News!
http://tinyurl.com/buq8n

Abuses are not in the Past

Report Criticizes Calif. Mental Hospital

SAN FRANCISCO - Patients at a state mental hospital overdosed on illegal drugs, were improperly restrained for hours on end and were forced to spend 12 hours in soiled diapers, according to a scathing report issued by the U.S. Justice Department.

The report said the problems were among "widespread and systematic deficiencies" at Napa State Hospital, including suicide and inadequate medical care. Some patients were bathed only every two to four weeks, the report said.
...
The Justice Department investigation began in January 2004. The California Department of Mental Health has refused to cooperate, repeatedly preventing access to the facility, said the letter from Bradley J. Schlozman, acting assistant attorney general. A Justice Department spokesman did not immediately return a call seeking comment.
...
Restraints and seclusion also are overused at Napa, according to the Justice Department. The report cited one patient who was restrained for 369 consecutive hours.

link

Words of Wisdom

"Historical records fail to explain some astounding errors of judgment. Witness the 1949 prize in physiology or medicine, shared by neuroscientist Antonio Egas Moniz for his development in 1935 of the prefrontal lobotomy. The jury failed to appreciate how widely discredited the procedure had become by the time it tapped Moniz. It was a terrible mistake that caused permanent damage to thousands of patients," says 1981 physiology or medicine laureate Torsten Wiesel of Rockefeller University in New York City."

http://tinyurl.com/bqdfr

Read an excellent article about this here

Let the promiscous suffer!

Sue K. sent this to me:
--------------------------------
This comes from a book called "Surgery of the Mind" by Eric A Turner published in 1982, Carmen Press, Birmingham.

Turner was a neurosurgeon who carried out psychosurgical operations in Birmingham and the book is about the 342 people he operated on in the 1960s and 1970s, but that included some people who were operated on for epilepsy not psychiatric symptoms.

"A decline in moral standards was not a significant feature in post-operative cases. Where promiscuity, or prostitution or moral delinquincy was known before illness, the case would not be considered for frontal operations, and the psychiatrists were seldom caught out on this score. Certain inoffensive attitudes that did not impinge on any serious moral principles were not a bar. A number of women patients were, or became, barmaids." p 64

"There had been stories of women taking to prostitution after lobotomy, so sexual laxity was considered a contra-indication to surgery. These decisions were taken in an epoch when sexual moral standards were narrower than they are today, so the decision appeared at that time easier than it would be now. Promiscuity was sufficient to preclude operation, in the belief it would be unacceptably vigorous afterwards." p 71

10 percent were helped

I see the headline that the U.S. media has now seized is that lobotomy "helped 10% of all patients". Of course I don't agree that even 10% were helped, but let's humor them for a moment. If that number is to be believed then conversely 90% of all of the lobotomies were a failure.

I wonder how many would have consented if they knew that lobotomy had an estimated 90% failure rate?

Lobotomy impact lingers

This is from today's Newsday:

Lobotomy impact lingersGranddaughter of LI woman who had the procedure in the 1950s is pressing the Nobel committee to rescind its prize to the inventor

BY JAMIE TALAN

When Christine Johnson was a little girl and learned her grandmother was "crazy" and that a lobotomy had left her "childlike," she pulled out her Barbies so Grandma Beulah could play."No, dear, I'm too old for that," her grandmother said.

Now, more than two decades later, Johnson, 32, has pored over hundreds of pages of her grandmother's medical and psychiatric files from her time as a patient at Pilgrim State Psychiatric Center in Brentwood from 1952 to 1972.

She has attempted to understand why doctors performed the procedure, which involved drilling holes into her brain and swiping at the frontal lobes. It was thought to be a cure for psychosis.

Johnson, of Levittown, also is challenging the 1949 Nobel Prize awarded to Portuguese Dr. Egas Moniz, who invented the lobotomy procedure. Moniz died in 1955, and soon after, the procedure began to be discredited.

continued

WVTS - Jerry Waters

Tomorrow at 11:00 AM Eastern Time Jack El Hai and I will be on the Jerry Waters show on the West Virginia radio station WVTS.

New England Journal of Medicine

Hey, we're mentioned in the New England Journal of Medicine. You'll need a subscription to see the full-text article.

Last-Ditch Medical Therapy — Revisiting Lobotomy

Desperate times call for desperate measures. So thought Walter J. Freeman, a neurologist who became the United States's staunchest advocate of the lobotomy between the 1930s and the 1970s. A new book, The Lobotomist, by journalist Jack El-Hai,1 chronicles Freeman's advocacy of a procedure that was viewed by many, and continues to be viewed, as barbaric. In exploring the ways in which lobotomy became part of common medical practice, El-Hai raises questions not only about how we should judge the procedure in retrospect, but also about what lobotomy teaches us about last-ditch medical interventions.

Struggle for Justice

Psychosurgery.org is deeply gratified by the overwhelming positive response to the Associated Press article. If you are as shocked as we are by the Nobel Foundation's snarky attitude, and as upset by the way they are dodging responsibility in this matter, please write them at comments@nobel.se and tell them that the only decent thing to do is REVOKE Egas Moniz's Nobel Prize.

To any Nobel Laureates that are reading this - please contact Christine at christine@psychosurgery.org and tell us what you think of this situation. We think that the Nobel Prize for lobotomy sullies all of the other Prizes. You should not have to be associated with a human rights violation like psychosurgery. We hope that you will support us in our struggle for justice. We need your help.

Thank you to all the kind people out there ...

Rest in Peace Mr. Shaw

I'm posting this because the man in the story was a lobotomy victim:

A HUMAN skeleton found in the field in Holywell had to be identified by scars on the bones on the remains.

Mystery will forever surround the death of Ronald Shaw, 71, who disappeared from his home in Ellesmere Port on July 28 last year.

Mr Shaw (pictured), an ex-serviceman, was a diagnosed schizophrenic and was commonly known as a wanderer.

...

Mr Raymond Shaw described his brother as very fastidious and had a particular peculiarity in that he would keep a running diary of his daily events. A vital piece of evidence in identifying the body was the scarring on the skull from a lucotomy (lobotomy) operation Mr Shaw had undergone as a child.

read the rest

I Can't Help but Smile

Thank you Tom Cruise - I have thoroughly enjoyed watching all the hoopla surrounding your stand against psychiatry. People are talking. They are thinking. It's very exciting.

I take back saying that I wish you'd be quiet about it. I hope you never shut up about it.

Salon went all twitchy in today's edition. It is quite a hatchet job that is heavy on invective (the scientology anti-drug program is described as having "infiltrated" the area schools) and short on actual discussion. For example, they claim that scientology has opportunistically jumped on the anti-Ritalin bandwagon, but they don't address the fact that many people who would never dream of joining an alternate religion legitimately feel that Ritalin is seriously over prescribed. In other words, you don't have to be a scientologist to be deeply suspicious of psychiatry.

Brooke Shields came out with a response in the New York Times today too. She wrote:

In a strange way, it was comforting to me when my obstetrician told me that my feelings of extreme despair and my suicidal thoughts were directly tied to a biochemical shift in my body.

Brooke - the cause of post partum depression and psychosis has not been proved no matter what your shrink told you. Under the heading "Causes, incidence, and risk factors" of postpartum depression the National Library of Medicine lists the following:

You have a higher chance of post-partum depression if:

• You had mood or anxiety disorders prior to pregnancy, including depression with a previous pregnancy
• You have a close family member who has had depression or anxiety
• Anything particularly stressful happened to you during the pregnancy, including illness, death or illness of a loved one, a difficult or emergency delivery, premature delivery, or illness or abnormality in the baby
• You are in your teens or over age 30
• The pregnancy is unwanted or unplanned
• You currently abuse alcohol, take illegal substances, or smoke -- these are also serious medical health risks for the baby

Nary a word about serotonin. In fact, most of the listings are emotional factors. Interesting.

Cruise vs. the American Psychiatric Association

The leadership of the American Psychiatric Association is quite arrogant. They are so certain that they are right about the biological model of mental illness, even though it's not been proved, that they issue this statement in response to Tom Cruise's comments:

"Rigorous, published, peer-reviewed research clearly demonstrates that treatment (of mental illness) works," the APA statement said. "It is unfortunate that in the face of this remarkable scientific and clinical progress that a small number of individuals and groups persist in questioning its legitimacy."

First, I guess they forgot about the study that found that placebos work as well as anti-depressants. Second here are citations gathered right from the scientific literature that showing that this issue is far from decided (as compiled by mindfreedom.org):

Mental Health: A Report of the Surgeon General (1999) is explicit about the absence of any findings of specific pathophysiology:

p. 44: "The diagnosis of mental disorders is often believed to be more difficult than diagnosis of somatic, or general medical, disorders, since there is no definitive lesion, laboratory test, or abnormality in brain tissue that can identify the illness."
p. 48: "It is not always easy to establish a threshold for a mental disorder, particularly in light of how common symptoms of mental distress are and the lack of objective, physical symptoms."

p. 49: "The precise causes (etiology) of mental disorders are not known."

p. 51: "All too frequently a biological change in the brain (a lesion) is purported to be the 'cause' of a mental disorder ... [but] The fact is that any simple association -- or correlation -- cannot and does not, by itself, mean causation."

p. 102: "Few lesions or physiologic abnormalities define the mental disorders, and for the most part their causes remain unknown."

In the third edition of Textbook of Clinical Psychiatry (1999), we find similar statements:

p. 43: "Although reliable criteria have been constructed for many psychiatric disorders, validation of the diagnostic categories as specific entities has not been established."

p. 51: Most of these [genetic studies] examine candidate genes in the serotonergic pathways, and have not found convincing evidence of an association."

In Andreasen and Black's (2001) Introductory Textbook of Psychiatry, we find, in the chapter on schizophrenia:

p. 23. "In the areas of pathophysiology and etiology, psychiatry has more uncharted territory than the rest of medicine...Much of the current investigative research in psychiatry is directed toward the goal of identifying the pathophysiology and etiology of major mental illnesses, but this goal has been achieved for only a few disorders (Alzheimer's disease, multi-infarct dementia, Huntington's disease, and substance-induced syndromes such as amphetamine-related psychosis or Wernicke-Korsakoff syndrome)."

p. 231: "In the absence of visible lesions and known pathogens, investigators have turned to the exploration of models that could explain the diversity of symptoms through a single cognitive mechanism."

p. 450: "Many candidate regions [of the brain] have been explored [for schizophrenia] but none have been confirmed."

The ironic thing is that I actually believe that medicine helps people under the right circumstances, it's forcing it on them that I object to. But this obnoxious, childish arrogance makes me doubt the APA more than I would otherwise. They are a professional organization, not a kid in the schoolyard. If they were confident of the past and their present, they wouldn't feel the need to speak in such a way. I think it's the ghosts of both Walter Freeman and Henry Cotton that makes the American Psychiatric Association so nervous.