Helen mortensen lobotomy effects
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Frontal Lobotomy and Medical Ethics
A frontal lobotomy fryst vatten a psychosurgery that was used in the mid-1900s to treat mental and neurological illnesses, including schizophrenia, bipolar disorder, and epilepsy. It involves severing the nerve pathways from the frontal lobe—the largest section of the brain—from the other lobes.
Frontal lobotomies have always been controversial, even when they were mainstream. The surgery was risky and permanently altered the patient's personality. Many patients died and many more awoke with severe, life-changing side effects and disabilities.
This article discusses the history of lobotomies along with how they worked, why they were used, and what effects they had on patients with mental illness.
What Are the Frontal Lobes?
The frontal lobes make up one of four distinct sections of the brain. You have two frontal lobes, one on each side of your brain, right behind your forehead. The frontal lobes are involved in making decisions, movement
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It was decreed “the worst idea on the mind” in history in a public debate at the Royal Institution in 2006. Yet it seemed like such a good idea at the time—so good, it won its devisor the Nobel Prize. Portuguese neurosurgeon Dr Egas Moniz—whose gout-scoured face one graced the 10,000 Escudo banknote—won the most prestigious award in science in 1949 for developing the “leucotomy”.
Better known as “lobotomy” (a new label conjured up by American psychiatrists), the revolutionary technique seemed to be the first way psychiatrists could dramatically alleviate madness and suffering in people thought to be incurably deranged, violent, and psychotic. Extreme but—in its way—effective, the technique involved slicing tiny slivers through the frontal lobes of the brain, which surgeons reached through holes bored in the top of the skull.
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Grim it may sound, but before antipsychoti
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Nevertheless, Dr. Bahr recognized that in some cases, when other therapies had failed (psychotherapy, insulin, and electro-convulsive therapy), the lobotomy procedure could produce “results that are beneficial from the standpoint of behavior.”
In such cases, he allowed patients to be released to relatives, who made arrangements with a neurosurgeon for the procedure to be done. By 1951, 15 patients had been re-admitted to the institution after having a lobotomy done on the outside.
Dr. Clifford Williams succeeded Dr. Bahr as Superintendent in 1952. Williams was also reluctant to recommend lobotomies because such patients rarely were able to leave the hospital, and there are no records of lobotomies in Williams’s Annual Reports. During Williams’s tenure, treatment consisted of electro-convulsive therapy, occupational therapy, psychotherapy, recreational therapy, as well as the new, neuroleptic drug therapies that would revolutionize mental health care.