Posted by LostBoyinNC46 on June 8, 2015, at 21:04:21
In reply to when did docs stop doing lobotomies?, posted by Christ_empowered on May 31, 2015, at 12:03:18
In the USA, I believe old fashioned style lobotomies were formally stopped in the early seventies. I believe the last one was done in 1973 in the USA.
In other countries, I dont know how long they were done. I have read classic lobotomies are still legal in Australia and to this day, a few are still done there a year. Ive also read Neurologists in China are doing them to Chinese mental patients today, just to make fast money.
I suppose if you wanted one bad enough and could cough up the $$$$, you could fly to Australia and consult some Australian psychiatrist about it. And for the right amount of $$$ they'd be more than glad to cut up your frontal lobes for ya to get you to shut up about your depression/anxiety problems.
In America, which is mainly what I know about, lobotomies were initially marketed by Freeman and a tiny group of Neurologists as a "treatment" for severe mental illness. That would actually cure the patient. The "cure" was to mainly turn the mentally ill patient into a zombie, like a walking dead person...basically a person that would just shut up and be docile and submissive and not complain about stuff.
In other words, old fashioned lobotomies were done for behavioral control reasons, not to actually really treat the illness for real and normalize the person.
ECT also used to be used in the same manner, to scare mental patients into submission, especially in old psychiatric hospitals. Get out of line and maybe get a little agitated? You might get shocked. Or if you really got out of line, you might get lobotomized. In other words, if you pissed off the psychiatry staff bad enough.
That is depicted well in the Jack Nicholson movie, "One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest," which depicted a sixties era VA psychiatric hospital, where ECT and lobotomies were done for purely behavioral control reasons. And usually not to criminally insane patients, but to patients who just were regular psych patients, but maybe agitated and a PITA for the hospital staff to deal with.
The objective was just to shut your stuff down, make you submissive, quiet, docile, obedient and not complain about things.
Lobotomies had absolutely nothing to do with actually fixing or treating severe mental illness in a way that really cured you.
Eric AKA "LostBoyinNC"
poster:LostBoyinNC46
thread:1079353
URL: http://www.dr-bob.org/babble/20150520/msgs/1079549.html