This article originally appeared in the March 11, 1972 issue of the Boston Phoenix.
The brain mutilators are on the attack again and a courageous Washington psychiatrist has begun what is, so far, a one-man crusade against them.
Dr. Peter Breggin says lobotomy and other forms of psychosurgery which involved the destruction of portions of the human brain by surgery, irradiation, burning, and exposure to ultra-sonic waves, long thought to be out of fashion in the age of psychotherapeutic drugs, are once more being promoted by segments of the medical profession. It is meant to cure a wide variety of ills including anxiety neurosis, obsessive neurosis and reactive depression. Breggin’s lengthy documentation of his charge was inserted into the Congressional Record Feb. 24 by Rep. Cornelius Gallagher, (D, NY). Breggin calls the practice a “crime against humanity.”
Dr. Breggin knows first hand about lobotomy and psychosurgery and what they mean in human terms. The former consultant to the National Institute of Mental Health, now on the faculty of the Washington School of Psychiatry, he worked in a hospital volunteer program after graduating from Harvard. He was horrified by what had been done to patients during the first wave of lobotomy in the 40s and 50s.
Approximately 50,000 people, mostly indigent female patients in state mental hospitals, had their brains mutilated to make them “more manageable.” Working with patients suffering from the same disorders for which lobomies had been prescribed, Breggin led a highly successful volunteer program at Metropolitan State Hospital, Waltham, which became a model for rehabilitation, cited by the President’s Joint Committee on Mental Health and Illness in 1961. On his graduation from medical school at Case Western Reserve, Breggin was again witness to the vacant stares and emptiness of the lobotomy victims, as an intern at New York Upstate Medical Center and the Mass Mental Health Center.
Recently, Breggin came across the following headline in Psychiatric News: “Psychosurgery Said to Help in Certain Neurosis” (April 7, 1971). Alarmed, he began an extensive search of professional literature only to discover that the practice he thought abandoned was on the rise again.
Breggin found at least 40 lobotomists are currently at work in the United States, operating on 600 brains a year. In fact, the practice has increased to the point where the International Association of Psychosurgery was formed in the summer of 1970. That same year the Second International Conference of Psychosurgeons convened in Copenhagen. Increasingly, too, pro-lobotomy articles have appeared in medical trade journals — Medical World News, Psychiatric News, the Journal of the American Medical Association, the American Journal of Psychiatry… even in Newsweek. The technique is now frequently mentioned in recently published psychiatric texts.
“These guys are speaking out again,” he says, referring to its advocates. Breggin himself is preparing to confront them directly at their conference March 9-11 at the University of Texas Medical School, Houston.
Cutting out deviation
Dr. Breggin is a man who does not give the impression of being easily ruffled. What disturbs him about the upsurge of psychosurgery is an indication that there will be more victims this time than last. Before they were the institutionalized; lobotomists are now after the neurotic who is ambulatory, who may even hold a job. Increasingly, they are turning their scalpels on middle-aged women and some practitioners are claiming lobotomy cures hyperactivity in children and young people. Other advocates want to use the technique on sex deviates, drug addicts and “incorrigible prisoners.” The patient, legally, must agree to the lobotomy; but often the consent is wrested from the patient who may not realize what he/ she is doing.
The second wave of lobotomies is being promoted by relatively few doctors, but they appear to have knives in a great many brains. The three most active psychosurgeons, Petter Linstrom, M. Hunter Brown, and Thomas Balentine, Jr., between them have done 500 operations since 1965. Dr. William Scoville of Yale University has operated for anxiety and depressions—especially on older people – schizophrenia, obsessive compulsions and drug addictions. He has done at least 1000 lobotomies.
A Tulane professor of Neurology and Psychiatry, Dr. Robert Heath, has implanted electrodes in the brains of at least 60 patients, using up to 125 electrodes. His patients sometimes walk around for years with the devices in their skulls. *One of Heath’s patients, a narcoleptic, was equipped with a device so that whenever he falls asleep, a fellow ward patient can arouse him.
What is the rationale for all this brain mutilation?
Breggin insists that there is no sound theoretical basis for it. While it is generally accepted that the frontal lobes of the brain and the limbic system control the higher mental functions including insight, foresight, empathy, imagination, creativity, abstract reasoning and emotional responsiveness, and it has been shown that lobotomy has a dulling effect on these functions, it has not been demonstrated that it is effective in alleviating the symptoms of mental illness.
It is, however, widely accepted, that lobotomy promotes docility and tameness, loss of affect, spontaneity, and fantasy life.
