During the first rash of lobotomies, the U.S. Public Health Service in 1948 concluded, “Lobotomy was often hastily done without adequate precious study.” As is the case today, it found evidence of “considerable aggressive propagandizing,” exaggerated claims and blatant disregard for the side effects. Lobotomy specifically destroys several human functions… that separate us from other animals,” the Service warned. It quoted another study which said, “Patients are shallow and show no depth of feeling: in fact, their relatives frequently state… ‘He has lost his soul.’” As a result of lobotomy, people lose their values, their interest in everyday life, their feelings for themselves and others, the report concluded.
A pro-lobotomy study by Drs. G.C. Tooth and M.P. Newton in 1961 reported only 44 per cent of the women and 36 per cent of the men “greatly improved.” By surgery, but noted all require “financial support and some supervision.” In fact, the study, which did not include a control group, admitted that “many never leave a hospital.”
Yet these are not the only dangers. Even if, by some stretch of the imagination, making patients more manageable in hospitals and housewives more manageable at home can be considered a plus, there are still certain undeniable negative aspects. Because the lobotomized feel little pain, they have a high mortality rate. Ten per cent die within one to five years after the operation from such normally detected ills as fractures, coronary occlusions and perforated ulcers. And, among a long list of side effects, the operation can leave surgical lesions which lead to psychosis and memory loss.
In one such situation, reported in the Journal of Mental Disorders, 1970, a woman with a particularly long and difficult psychiatric history was operated on at Boston City Hospital. After surgery, she got worse. She was mutilated again, but later became enraged at her psychiatrist and the neurosurgeon and refused to deal with them. Although the electrodes were removed, her rage was dismissed as paranoid. When her mood apparently improved and she was in “high spirits,” she was allowed to leave the hospital to go shopping. She went straight to a phone booth, called her mother to say goodbye, took poison and died. In spite of this, Drs. Vernon Mark and Frank Ervin would have us believe the operation was a success. Somehow the suicide was interpreted as a sign that the patient was getting over her depression.
Breggin says his interpretation is “based upon the simplistic notion sometimes taught to beginning psychiatric residents, that the occasionally observed phenomenon of suicide in the midst of an apparent recovery can be explained by the hydraulic conceptualization of increasing energy, permitting the patient to commit suicide before the depression is fully over.” This interpretation overlooks the dynamics of the case, Breggin insists. What the doctors seem to be saying is that the operation was a success but the patient died.”
Middle-aged women, frequently depressed and abandoned, are often the first target for the latest medical fad, according to Breggin. Dr. Petter Lindstrom at Children’s Hospital, San Francisco, uses the ultrasonics to treat patients; 72 per cent of his psychotics and 80 per cent of his neurotics are women. Drs. R.F. Hetherington, P. Haden and W. Craig of Kinsington, Ontario Psychiatric Hospital, admitted the hospital would not allow them to operate on men, but they were allowed to operate on the brains of 17 women instead. Women are in demand for this cure because, Breggin suggests, “Men couldn’t support a family, after a lobotomy, but a woman can do housework.” In fact, the dean of lobotomists, Dr. Freeman, reports that lobotomized women made excellent housekeepers.
