Tag: lobotomy

History shows us that the mentally ill are extraordinarily vulnerable to therapeutic experimentation, some particularly brutal and extreme, which continues to the present day.

The basic assumptions behind unethical practices like lobotomies and insulin shock therapy are still the foundation on which psychiatry’s main treatments are built today.

We have persistently failed in trying to influence psychiatry with scientific argument because we view the brain as normal and they think it is a cancer. Imagine how weird it must seem to them: We are talking about an organ inside our heads that we treasure, and they are peering at it the way a surgeon studies a neuroblastoma.

When we force people to take psychiatric drugs, or lie to get them to take the drugs, we are not only harming the organ of their body called the brain—we are harming their capacity to think and to feel and to know themselves. We are limiting their personality and identity, and the expression of their soul.

Many mental health advocates promote ending a perceived stigma surrounding treatment. I wonder if a Mental Health Awareness Month campaign in 1940 would have led to greater humanization of mentally ill people, or if it would have just paved the way for more lobotomies?

In a First Opinion featured story for STAT, Mona Gable tells the story of her mother, who had a lobotomy at age 33 as...