IMPORTANT FACTS

1. The side effects of psychosurgery —loss of bowel and bladder control, epileptic seizures and brain infections—have been well known since the late 1940s.

2. Psychosurgery attempts to control and brutally alter the person and behavior by destroying perfectly healthy brain tissue.

3. Psychosurgery has as much as a 10% death rate. Suicide following psychosurgery has been considered by some psychiatrists to be a “successful” outcome.

4. “Deep-brain stimulation” (DBS), “transcranial magnetic stimulation” (TMS) and the like are psychiatry’s latest experiments in treatment of the “mentally ill.”

CHAPTER THREE Human Butchery Still in Use

Unlike medical brain surgery that alleviates actual physical conditions, psychosurgery attempts to brutally alter behavior by destroying perfectly healthy brain tissue.

The most notorious psychosurgery procedure is lobotomy. It was developed by Egas Moniz of Lisbon, Portugal, in 1935, but it was U.S. psychiatrist Walter J. Freeman who became its leading proponent. He performed his first lobotomy using electroshock as an anesthetic. He inserted an ice pick beneath the eye socket bone and drove it into the brain with a surgical mallet. Movement of the ice pick then severed the fibers of the frontal brain lobes. This caused irreversible brain damage. Freeman claimed, however, that the procedure would remove the emotional component from a person’s “mental illness.” He later conceded that lobotomy did produce a zombie-like state in one out of every four persons treated. Twenty-five per- cent of the lobotomized patients could be “considered as adjusting at the level of a domestic invalid or household pet,” he said.

Between 1946 and 1949, the number of lobotomies increased tenfold. Freeman himself performed or supervised 3,500 procedures. He traveled across the country in a camper van that he called his “lobotomobile,” promoting lobotomy as a miracle procedure and performing the procedure in theatrical fashion for all to see. The media dubbed his circus tour “Operation Ice Pick.”

During that time, the psychiatric community successfully convinced state governments that psychosurgery could reduce their mental health budgets. The superintendent at Delaware State Hospital, for example, was so taken in by the propa- ganda that he hoped to reduce the number of mental patients by 60% and save $351,000. By the late 1940s, the crippling and lethal effects of psychosurgery were becoming a matter of public record and smashed its false image as a miracle cure. Alarm bells were being rung due to the following signs of harm:

A death and suicide mortality rate of up to 20%

Infections leading to cerebral abscesses Meningitis (serious infectious disease in the brain)

Osteomyelitis (infectious inflammatory bone disease) of the skull

Cerebral hemorrhages

Weight gain, loss of bowel and bladder control

Epileptic seizures in more than 50% of recipients

Deleterious changes in personality

Despite the lethal and damaging effects of the operation, psychiatrists continue to advocate its use.

Psychosurgery attempts to brutally alter behavior by destroying perfectly healthy brain tissue. Psychosurgeon Walter J. Freeman concededthat 25% of the lobotomized patients could be “considered as adjusting at the level of a domestic invalid or household pet.”

In a 1996 London Times article on psychosurgery, British psychiatrist Paul Bridges, who had helped oversee some 1,200 psychosurgery operations at the Geoffrey Knight Institute at Maudsley Hospital in South London, defended the procedure: “The problem is prejudice. … People just don’t seem to like the idea of psychosurgery because it sounds brutal.” Ironically, in 2000, Bridges was convicted of charges concerning a pedophile ring and indecent assault on two boys, ages 15 and 16, one of them in 1996.

No such prejudice existed at the St. Petersburg Institute of the Human Brain in Russia. There, Dr. Sviatoslav Medvedev supervised over 100 psychosurgery procedures between 1997 and 1999, given mainly to teenagers to “cure” them of drug addiction. “I think the West is too cautious about neurosurgery because of the obsession with human rights,” he said. The doctor chillingly explained his methods, “Addiction is a kind of obsession. There’s a kind of circle in the brain which has to be cut out. That’s our task. We take out a cubic millimeter from one hemisphere and another cubic millimeter from the other hemisphere, and that stops the addiction.”

Alexander Lusikian, who successfully sued the Institute in 2002, disagrees: “They drilled my head without any anesthetic. They kept drilling and cauterizing [burning] exposed areas of my brain … blood was everywhere … During the three or four days after the operation … the pain in my head was so terrible—it was as if it had been beaten with a baseball bat. And when the pain passed a little, I still felt the desire to take drugs.” Within two months, Alexander reverted to drugs.

Next

Back to Contents