I just finished a good book about a young man given a lobotomy (Howard Dully). Since then I have looked around on the Internet and I’m astonished on how a procedure so condemned today seemed to have no validity now.
I so far have found only one a French Canadian singer Alys Robi, who had a lobotomy and is on record of saying it helped her.
I realized through hindsight a lot of people, who I’ve read condemned the procedure, may not have felt that way back when it was done. I mean it’s easy for a guy to write in 1960 what an awful thing it was, but who knows if this guy wasn’t for it in the 30s.
So the question is was there any favourable results to a lobotomy? I find with all the people writing how bad it was, and they claim they were saying it in the 30s and 40s, how 60,000 Americans wound up with a lobotomy.
I mean Walter Freeman the doctor that popularized the procedure, at least what I’ve read about him, comes off so horrible now, it’s hard to believe he was respected. Though I have found back archives of the New York Times which at the time praised him.
I’ve worked clinically with some people who were helped by lobotomy in that at the time there were no alternatives and they were violent and delusional in an ongoing way to the point that the alternative was 4-point restraints forever. However, those folks were in the minority, and Freeman “popularized” the lobotomy by generalizing it to all sorts of problems for which it had even less positive effect than it did for schizophrenia.
These days, the only surgery that’s done in the US that’s at all like lobotomy is gamma knife surgery for severe OCD.
For what it’s worth, my impression after reading Dully’s book is that his step mother was way out of line, Freeman wasn’t doing enough screening to be ethical, AND Dully was not a psychologically normal kid, though what his problems were has been lost in the ensuing bad behavior.
ETA: There were a lot of professionals at the time who spoke out against Freeman and questioned the utility of the procedure.