In 1935, Portuguese doctor Egas Moniz learned of an experiment where removing the frontal lobes of two chimpanzees resulted in reduced violent behavior, making them more compliant. Those results triggered the doctor to try the experiment with humans.
Shortly after performing this procedure on unsuspecting patients suffering from mental illnesses, he published a paper demonstrating a method he believed to be an innovative way to treat such illnesses as schizophrenia and psychosis. Today, Moniz is remembered for starting one of the most shameful and tragic procedures in medicine.
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Yes because it’s always a good idea to put a small child alone in a cage in the dark basement with no human interaction and kindness.
There still isn't adequate help available for parents with violently unstable children. Sometimes the worst choice is the only one left. Just because he was in a cage, does not mean he was neglected. He was confined for the safety of the rest of the family. From experience, my mother is the sweetest, kindest woman, until she is psychotic. Thankfully, there is usually some sort of help for adults, although that is often inadequate as well.
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Makes me sick to my stomach. How sure were they that it is the right diagnosis back then?
That's all they knew, they thought it was, and they did what they thought was right. Now we know more, but we'll have the same scenario in 100 years. Remember it was the only option back then, either a lobotomy or no treatment.
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every single one of these photos has been flipped , you dont understand when you cut the front lob, you are emotionless, you are not there, its a sick sick world we live in an its only getting sicker
Look how happy and healthy he looks in the second picture! Clearly lobotomies are safe and effective even for children, and doctors would never lie to us or use children and young people for experimentation even though there are other treatments!
I cannot tell if you are serious, but if so they disabled his hypothalamus (a region of the forebrain below the thalamus which coordinates both the autonomic nervous system and the activity of the pituitary, controlling body temperature, thirst, hunger, and other homeostatic systems, and involved in sleep and emotional activity.)
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He looks like he's ready to be a serial killer because the frontal lobe is responsible for higher cognitive functions such as memory, emotions, impulse control, problem solving, social interaction, and motor function. Damage to the neurons or tissue of the frontal lobe can lead to personality changes, difficulty concentrating or planning, and impulsivity.
Am I the only one thinking that these pics are with changed places?
That thought entered my mind at first, but don't you see the somewhat vacant, simple mis-engagement of the facial-expression-to-eye focus?
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Yep, they did to kids as young as 4 years old!! If you watch on YouTube a channel called “Plainly Difficult”, he did a bunch of episodes called “The dark side of science”, & one of the episodes is called “The lobotomy, the worst surgery in history”…it’s very informative & tells of other shocking details that went on during that time period. Even tho this article is an old one, I know ppl will still read this so if anybody does, I highly recommend watching “Plainly Difficult”. He’s also made a bunch of other videos on shocking & historic subjects. Cheers 🥂
Hi sorry, I don't understand what the lobotomy is and if anyone can explain that would be super helpful thanks x
It does not help, its a gruesome practice. A piece of brain is either removed or its poked with an ice pick to make the victim compliant and calm, nowadays thats called getting braindamaged.
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these pictures are flipped, wake up people, this is how they presented it to the brain dead masses back then, theyll do it before they will do it again the medical field isnt far off from the government
They're not flipped. I look better on my meds too, but only if by better you mean "smiling away with no concept of wasted life". The things that make me angry go away on the meds but at the same time I'll never be able to achieve a permanent fix to any of those things while I'm all fogged up and stupid. It's just giving up. Skipping to the end because trying is too hard or your behaviour is inconvenient to polite society. Problem is, you can know that full well but still have to comply regardless because it's the only way you pay your bills. No one's been asleep mate, it's just been out of our control. You sound hysterical, arrogant and patronising as hell spouting off that noise.
Load More Replies...When Was the Last Lobotomy Performed?
From the year 1945 to 1947, there were around 2,000 lobotomies performed. However, the numbers skyrocketed to 18,000 after Moniz was awarded the Nobel Prize for Medicine for his discovery in 1949.
The development of antipsychotic medications has been the salvation of patients who were next in line for more lobotomy before and after results. The final recorded lobotomy in the United States was performed by Dr. Walter Freeman in 1967, tragically resulting in the death of the patient.
Honestly with these photos you can really tell that the doctors only cared about the patients appearances in the end... they didn't bother noting down the side effects or any behavior afterwards
What Did Lobotomies Do?
There were many factors why this surgery was deemed acceptable by mental institutions back in the day, mainly because there was no medication or therapy effective enough to treat people who suffered from various mental illnesses. And with electroshock therapy being already in use, this invasive operation didn’t shock people. However, the misinformation and active campaigning for the effectiveness of lobotomy had a significant impact, too.
Walter Freeman helped popularize this procedure in the US, becoming one of the most hated doctors. With no surgical training, Freeman decided to change the operation, and instead of drilling holes in the skull, he stabbed the patient’s brain with an icepick through the eye socket.
Walter Freeman’s lobotomy was an updated method to the point where it only took him 12 minutes to perform it. He traveled around the country in a van called the Lobotomobile and had no problem performing it in non-sterile environments.
However, he and other doctors who performed this procedure often overlooked the gruesome side effects lobotomies caused, mainly focusing on the appearance of the patients and relieving the discomfort the illnesses had caused to their family members.
This attitude is highlighted in the lobotomy pictures that Freeman took of his patients. He used these before and after lobotomy photos as an argument in favor of the procedure. Scroll below to see the disturbing images.
This breaks my heart. Imagine living in these times. When you just need support. 💔
I want to upvote every picture but it is hard. It feels wrong to up vote - but I will because they deserve to be seen simply for the horror they endured.
In 1940, struggling economy, job anxiety. Poke your eye with an ice pick. Tah Dah!
How do they even do a second lobotomy? You only have two halves to your brain. :(
Oh look! She learned how to smile! No practice needed. Just a little poke here and there, it's really no big deal at all!
We now know how to fix underweight people. A hammer and an ice pick.
"... household pet ..." Over 50 % of the victims were women with no mental disorder but improper behaviour.
@Maria: Report John Smith. His comment to you was out of line.
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I just read about how Joe Kennedy, Sr. had this done to his daughter Rosemary. It was said that she was mentally slow; she wasn't as smart as her siblings. She may have had a learning disability. But the truth was she was willful and disobeyed her father. Rosemary liked a good time, Joe told her to knock it off, and she wouldn't. He was afraid she'd get "a bad reputation" that would tarnish the family's public image and future prospects. Joe went behind his wife Rose's back and had the procedure done to Rosemary. It succeeded in actually disabling her, though that wasn't the intention. She was put in an institution and hardly mentioned of again. Finally, Joe's sons could all run for public office as they grew older with no stain on the family name. Never mind Joe's bootlegging, cheating on Rose with numerous actresses, and stock market manipulation, and John's messing around with a spy while he was at college. All of THAT was fine, apparently. ::eyeroll::
Well seems that the Life took back pretty much from the patriarch Joe Sr....2 sons
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That comment about "household pet" really bothers me... it's all sorts of wrong.
Obviously this procedure is going to turm many people into "zombies". It may have helped a very few. But was "hit and miss". Turning someone from violent and agressive into a compliant and harmless household pet isnt exactly a cure.
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there could never be a more aberrated, immoral, inhumane, cruel, completely stupid way to treat mental illnesses.
Wait'll you read about good ole' Doctor Henry Cotton. Look it up, you'll have some rage-fun for a while.
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Unpopular opinion here... I do think this procedure is barbaric, but that's because we look at it through todays lenses with the knowledge we now know. I don't think they used this method with malice. They did what they thought was best with the knowledge they had at the time. I work at a cancer hospital. In 20 years time we will look back at the methods we use for treating cancer today as barbaric and inhumane. To explain it as to a child, we use radiation to poison someone. We just hope that it kills the cancer, before it kills the patient. But it's what we had at the time. We didn't have many other options up until very recently. I don't think history will look to kindly on us willfully poisoning people.
I know what you mean and maybe it really helped some very ill and suffering people. Feeling nothing was probably better than being depressed, agitated or schizophrenic all your life. Still this method was used on a lot of people who simply showed inappropriate behaviour. That's what makes it even more babaric.
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Oh yay. 20 years before chlorpromazine. Patients with serious mental illness had not any other chance. This surgery really could "help" somehow, but when it goes wrong, results were much more worse. Our frontal lobe is very complex and it is practically impossible to hit the right neural tracts.
You mean an ice pick shoved into an opaque skull cavity isn't a precision instrument? I'm happy you point out that we can't look at it through today's eyes because today there are many more options. It's all types of f****d up, but it wasn't done with evil intents, as is thought today.
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Granted this is terrible but I have a feeling that in seventy years people will look back on our present treatments with similar horror.
I hope so, actually. It would only mean medicine would have improved. That's an optimistic point of view, if you ask me.
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Today I saw this gallery and few days ago I finished one computer game, "The Town of Light", which takes place in mental asylum in 1940. Nevermind, how many times I read and look at things which happened in these times, I am terrified and sorry. I understand - there were no real cures for mental illnesses in these times. They were doing what they could to help. Still, most of these things seems so wrong and dehumanizing. I am glad that psychiatry has developed. It is still far from perfection but at least now people with mental illness have chance for relatively normal life.
My eldest aunt was born in the early 1940s and suffered from depression her entire life. The "treatment" in the 1950s that she received was electro-shock therapy. If she had been born earlier, like the poor souls in these photos, she likely would have been lobotomized...sad, but true.
my neighbour was "treated" with electroshock in the '80s.
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Labotomies weren't used as a cure but rather to 'calm' the patient down. In the 30's Egas Moniz 'invented' and back then patients were imprisoned in mental institutes and this was seen as a better life. Only a third of patients' symptoms improved, many ended up in a vegetative state. I am glad that today we work with people to help them cope with their mental health. My mum worked in a psych ward at a hospital and one woman heard voices. She believed it was people from beyond the grave talking to her. No one stopped her from thinking that because she was able to deal with what was happening to her.
There is an episode of Lore (in Prime Video) that was all about the doctor that performed the lobotomy, in case you want to learn more about it. It's so sad how these people were so desperate to feel better that ended in the hands of such a monster. The mere line of "household pet"... what was wrong with them??
Lobotomies were a game of luck - the surgeon never knew for what result was going to come of it. It was just, "here's a stick, lets poke here, cut here, and hope it doesn't kill them." Utterly barbaric - and especially some of the captions under the pictures really bothered me.
Who'da thunk that using an ice pick as a mini blender for one of the thinky parts of the brain could have negative side effects? Seems like the precision would be incredible, what with it being a totally sight-unseen operation with no real way to measure it or know exactly what you're doing at the time to the most complex organism known to mankind.
I think it would be worse too give someone with debilitating chronic fatigue syndrome not naught enough sodium pentathol, was ghost pheasants I said the ward requesterd ore an Austin healy yum! And btw orthostatic beets awl! With no I.N.S. Or an N b4 and no in flight dinner of course
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I wonder what people will say, 100 years from now, about our present cancer treatments.
Dear BP: Lobotomies don't REMOVE the frontal lobes, they cut some of the connections. Big difference. You're cutting some of the wiring that's misfiring, not removing entire portions of the motherboard.
No you're damaging the circuit board. They didn't know wtf they were doing. There's a reason many countries banned the "procedure".
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A tragic period in medicine. A good documentary https://www.pbs.org/wgbh/americanexperience/films/lobotomist/
Why not use that on our very violent offenders!! Save on the cost of a jail.
As treatment for murderers, pedophiles and rapists
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Epilepsy was a very bad disorder to have during these times. Exorcism, lobotomy, sanitarium, or tie up in the basement? Great choices.
How do we know for sure that these are true before and after photos. Is it not possible for the sake of peforming/practicing Lobotomies and its success, that the B after photos could have actually been before the lobotomies were performed. The (A) photos look so more realistic of what someone post lobotomy would look like. Its been founded that documentations back in the days were doctored simply for research and funding. Humans used for experimentation as guinea pigs. Just a thought. Remember Dr Death during Hitlers regime.
I thought the very same thing. Somethings "off" about these photos.
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I can't even make it through this list... I feel for all the patients suffering from their disorder, as I, myself, suffer from depression. It really sucks, and surgery can't change it...
Transing kids, putting them on puberty blockers, giving them life-altering and damaging surgeries to remove healthy organs and making them life-long medical patients to keep feeding big pharma is the next generation of the “lobotomy.” If people can’t see this, than you’re just as bad as the husband that allowed his “unruly” wife to get part of her brain removed. Actually, you’re worse because you’re allowing your child to make decisions they are not capable of making, and allowing docs to remove parts of their bodies for no other reason but for a mental health issue that has nothing to do with being born in “the wrong body.” This is such propaganda, and this whole phenomena that has blown up in the west in only a few short years is EXACTLY what propaganda does to an already mentally I’ll society. We are headed down a much more dangerous path and outcome than lobotomies, folks. Time to wake up and put an end to the mutilation of our youth before it is too late.
Saying that a lobotomized schizophrenic would make a wonderful house pet, is really messed up.
Many times this surgery was done on women to cure "hysteria". Especially after WWI and WWII after women (many mothers) suffered the loss of their sons or husbands or brothers. They didnt understand PTSD or simple grief. Especially in the wealthy families because "god forbid" their women folk should show emotion
Household pet...how dehumanising can you get. These poor people were abused. The 50s were appalling in some ways.
I agree that lobotomies, like ECT, were barbaric and wrong. But if the photos were the other way round, and said they were about drugs, people would be saying 'oh, look how drugs have made these people psychotic'. The after photos do look happier, morepeaceful. We'd have to see them moving and talking to see the real effects of an icepick to the brain.
Electric Shock Therapy is used mainly for severe and intractable depression. The treatment uses a much, much, much smaller dose than was previously used. It no longer sends patients into convulsions.
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It's not scary. It's been modernized a lot, and it helps a lot of people who needs more help than what conventional therapy and medication can offer.
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I recently reread "One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest," which is quite an eye-opener on this subject. And let's not forget Rosemary Kennedy.
This article takes many of the images and takes them out of context or posts images that aren't actually "before and afters" or that have been modified.
Often patients were still shocked in order to induce a seizure and leave them in a coma like state in which freeman would then conduct his operation. Freeman originally had a partenership with a neurosurgeon but when he developed the transorbital lobotomy watts (the neurosurgeon) was disgusted by it and broke off their partenership.
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My great gramma,Babanne,was depressed all the time and had to have electroshock therapy and was an in and out asylum patience till she died. My other great gramma died when my Grandma was small.She was severely depressed.She died from mixing gin with her meds.No one knows if it was a suicide or not.Before she died,when she was pregnant with my Grandma,she had a miscarriage and lost a baby but miraculously not my Gran. My dad suffers from bipolabipolarbipolar disorder. My enfamily is riddled with mental illness.I suffer from anxiety and depression. Mental illness is not in common and we should stop skirting around it. This ha been my talkddddisorder bags didisorder
Sorry my phone went funny :) The last phrase of my comment was:"This has been my talk"
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What the hell? This is like a mad scientist on the loose over here. I'm scared. I know it happened years ago, that doesn't make it okay or less scary.
It makes me shudder to think of the truly dreadful treatment of mental distress. A close relative was sent the Maudsley and given electric shock treatment. It was awful. He was desperately unhappy and distressed. He said that it felt like a million needles. It achieved a sort of effect by causing memory loss. The best treatment was to move house and change everything. That sort of helped but sending a person to a Victorian gloomy institution and forcing them to undergo what felt like torture was meant to cure thid dreadful illness.
This is disgusting, there's a special place in hell for people who have this done to others
Read the book My Lobotomy. It will make you anger and sad. And happy for the boy/man and his strength.
Not to trivialize this, but did anyone else read the doctor's notes in the voice of a 1940s newsreel?
Ugh, and people wonder why I'm afraid of doctors. If I ever get this bad just shoot me to put me out of my misery instead of letting doctors "help" me by torturing me.
From age of 5 until 42 I had a normal life ,then I took Ill going through repressed memories ,my brain started processing first five years of my childhood ,abused by five men from I was a baby ,given to chapel ,lived in convent ,treated bad by nuns ,made to wash floors on hands n knees ,peel potatoes ,do laundry ,put in a coffin buried alive ,found back home ,realized my mum hated me ,I witnessed my dog being violently hurt ,aunts uncles found out ,I was taken hypnotized by my father's cousin to make me forget what happened ,I realized one day my dad and sister were looking after me ,realized my sister was my mother ,deeply depressed ,then heard she was leaving home ,feeling abandoned and being left with these people,I went to stab her but her mum stepped in to protect her,she got stabbed ,I ended up in a hospital for a year ,severely Ill,electric shock treatment ,and eventually lobotomized then I went through transition period to normal ,,on recovery we had to do chores ,or no food.
horrible to think that back then, THIS was considered progress! i hope that in 75 yrs, nothing we do now will be deemed as barbaric as this.
Once we have economically feasible lab grown meat, factory farms will probably be seen in this light in 75 years. Hell putting people in prison for having mental illnesses might be considered barbaric and we do it constantly today (serial killers, pedophiles etc).
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"... household pet ..." Over 50 % of the victims were women with no mental disorder but improper behaviour.
@Maria: Report John Smith. His comment to you was out of line.
Load More Replies... I just read about how Joe Kennedy, Sr. had this done to his daughter Rosemary. It was said that she was mentally slow; she wasn't as smart as her siblings. She may have had a learning disability. But the truth was she was willful and disobeyed her father. Rosemary liked a good time, Joe told her to knock it off, and she wouldn't. He was afraid she'd get "a bad reputation" that would tarnish the family's public image and future prospects. Joe went behind his wife Rose's back and had the procedure done to Rosemary. It succeeded in actually disabling her, though that wasn't the intention. She was put in an institution and hardly mentioned of again. Finally, Joe's sons could all run for public office as they grew older with no stain on the family name. Never mind Joe's bootlegging, cheating on Rose with numerous actresses, and stock market manipulation, and John's messing around with a spy while he was at college. All of THAT was fine, apparently. ::eyeroll::
Well seems that the Life took back pretty much from the patriarch Joe Sr....2 sons
Load More Replies... That comment about "household pet" really bothers me... it's all sorts of wrong.
Obviously this procedure is going to turm many people into "zombies". It may have helped a very few. But was "hit and miss". Turning someone from violent and agressive into a compliant and harmless household pet isnt exactly a cure.
Load More Replies... there could never be a more aberrated, immoral, inhumane, cruel, completely stupid way to treat mental illnesses.
Wait'll you read about good ole' Doctor Henry Cotton. Look it up, you'll have some rage-fun for a while.
Load More Replies... Unpopular opinion here... I do think this procedure is barbaric, but that's because we look at it through todays lenses with the knowledge we now know. I don't think they used this method with malice. They did what they thought was best with the knowledge they had at the time. I work at a cancer hospital. In 20 years time we will look back at the methods we use for treating cancer today as barbaric and inhumane. To explain it as to a child, we use radiation to poison someone. We just hope that it kills the cancer, before it kills the patient. But it's what we had at the time. We didn't have many other options up until very recently. I don't think history will look to kindly on us willfully poisoning people.
I know what you mean and maybe it really helped some very ill and suffering people. Feeling nothing was probably better than being depressed, agitated or schizophrenic all your life. Still this method was used on a lot of people who simply showed inappropriate behaviour. That's what makes it even more babaric.
Load More Replies... Oh yay. 20 years before chlorpromazine. Patients with serious mental illness had not any other chance. This surgery really could "help" somehow, but when it goes wrong, results were much more worse. Our frontal lobe is very complex and it is practically impossible to hit the right neural tracts.
You mean an ice pick shoved into an opaque skull cavity isn't a precision instrument? I'm happy you point out that we can't look at it through today's eyes because today there are many more options. It's all types of f****d up, but it wasn't done with evil intents, as is thought today.
Load More Replies... Granted this is terrible but I have a feeling that in seventy years people will look back on our present treatments with similar horror.
I hope so, actually. It would only mean medicine would have improved. That's an optimistic point of view, if you ask me.
Load More Replies... Today I saw this gallery and few days ago I finished one computer game, "The Town of Light", which takes place in mental asylum in 1940. Nevermind, how many times I read and look at things which happened in these times, I am terrified and sorry. I understand - there were no real cures for mental illnesses in these times. They were doing what they could to help. Still, most of these things seems so wrong and dehumanizing. I am glad that psychiatry has developed. It is still far from perfection but at least now people with mental illness have chance for relatively normal life.
My eldest aunt was born in the early 1940s and suffered from depression her entire life. The "treatment" in the 1950s that she received was electro-shock therapy. If she had been born earlier, like the poor souls in these photos, she likely would have been lobotomized...sad, but true.
my neighbour was "treated" with electroshock in the '80s.
Load More Replies... Labotomies weren't used as a cure but rather to 'calm' the patient down. In the 30's Egas Moniz 'invented' and back then patients were imprisoned in mental institutes and this was seen as a better life. Only a third of patients' symptoms improved, many ended up in a vegetative state. I am glad that today we work with people to help them cope with their mental health. My mum worked in a psych ward at a hospital and one woman heard voices. She believed it was people from beyond the grave talking to her. No one stopped her from thinking that because she was able to deal with what was happening to her.
There is an episode of Lore (in Prime Video) that was all about the doctor that performed the lobotomy, in case you want to learn more about it. It's so sad how these people were so desperate to feel better that ended in the hands of such a monster. The mere line of "household pet"... what was wrong with them??
Lobotomies were a game of luck - the surgeon never knew for what result was going to come of it. It was just, "here's a stick, lets poke here, cut here, and hope it doesn't kill them." Utterly barbaric - and especially some of the captions under the pictures really bothered me.
Who'da thunk that using an ice pick as a mini blender for one of the thinky parts of the brain could have negative side effects? Seems like the precision would be incredible, what with it being a totally sight-unseen operation with no real way to measure it or know exactly what you're doing at the time to the most complex organism known to mankind.
I think it would be worse too give someone with debilitating chronic fatigue syndrome not naught enough sodium pentathol, was ghost pheasants I said the ward requesterd ore an Austin healy yum! And btw orthostatic beets awl! With no I.N.S. Or an N b4 and no in flight dinner of course
Load More Replies... I wonder what people will say, 100 years from now, about our present cancer treatments.
Dear BP: Lobotomies don't REMOVE the frontal lobes, they cut some of the connections. Big difference. You're cutting some of the wiring that's misfiring, not removing entire portions of the motherboard.
No you're damaging the circuit board. They didn't know wtf they were doing. There's a reason many countries banned the "procedure".
Load More Replies... A tragic period in medicine. A good documentary https://www.pbs.org/wgbh/americanexperience/films/lobotomist/
Why not use that on our very violent offenders!! Save on the cost of a jail.
As treatment for murderers, pedophiles and rapists
Load More Replies... Epilepsy was a very bad disorder to have during these times. Exorcism, lobotomy, sanitarium, or tie up in the basement? Great choices.
How do we know for sure that these are true before and after photos. Is it not possible for the sake of peforming/practicing Lobotomies and its success, that the B after photos could have actually been before the lobotomies were performed. The (A) photos look so more realistic of what someone post lobotomy would look like. Its been founded that documentations back in the days were doctored simply for research and funding. Humans used for experimentation as guinea pigs. Just a thought. Remember Dr Death during Hitlers regime.
I thought the very same thing. Somethings "off" about these photos.
Load More Replies... I can't even make it through this list... I feel for all the patients suffering from their disorder, as I, myself, suffer from depression. It really sucks, and surgery can't change it...
Transing kids, putting them on puberty blockers, giving them life-altering and damaging surgeries to remove healthy organs and making them life-long medical patients to keep feeding big pharma is the next generation of the “lobotomy.” If people can’t see this, than you’re just as bad as the husband that allowed his “unruly” wife to get part of her brain removed. Actually, you’re worse because you’re allowing your child to make decisions they are not capable of making, and allowing docs to remove parts of their bodies for no other reason but for a mental health issue that has nothing to do with being born in “the wrong body.” This is such propaganda, and this whole phenomena that has blown up in the west in only a few short years is EXACTLY what propaganda does to an already mentally I’ll society. We are headed down a much more dangerous path and outcome than lobotomies, folks. Time to wake up and put an end to the mutilation of our youth before it is too late.
Saying that a lobotomized schizophrenic would make a wonderful house pet, is really messed up.
Many times this surgery was done on women to cure "hysteria". Especially after WWI and WWII after women (many mothers) suffered the loss of their sons or husbands or brothers. They didnt understand PTSD or simple grief. Especially in the wealthy families because "god forbid" their women folk should show emotion
Household pet...how dehumanising can you get. These poor people were abused. The 50s were appalling in some ways.
I agree that lobotomies, like ECT, were barbaric and wrong. But if the photos were the other way round, and said they were about drugs, people would be saying 'oh, look how drugs have made these people psychotic'. The after photos do look happier, morepeaceful. We'd have to see them moving and talking to see the real effects of an icepick to the brain.
Electric Shock Therapy is used mainly for severe and intractable depression. The treatment uses a much, much, much smaller dose than was previously used. It no longer sends patients into convulsions.
Load More Replies... It's not scary. It's been modernized a lot, and it helps a lot of people who needs more help than what conventional therapy and medication can offer.
Load More Replies... I recently reread "One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest," which is quite an eye-opener on this subject. And let's not forget Rosemary Kennedy.
This article takes many of the images and takes them out of context or posts images that aren't actually "before and afters" or that have been modified.
Often patients were still shocked in order to induce a seizure and leave them in a coma like state in which freeman would then conduct his operation. Freeman originally had a partenership with a neurosurgeon but when he developed the transorbital lobotomy watts (the neurosurgeon) was disgusted by it and broke off their partenership.
Load More Replies... My great gramma,Babanne,was depressed all the time and had to have electroshock therapy and was an in and out asylum patience till she died. My other great gramma died when my Grandma was small.She was severely depressed.She died from mixing gin with her meds.No one knows if it was a suicide or not.Before she died,when she was pregnant with my Grandma,she had a miscarriage and lost a baby but miraculously not my Gran. My dad suffers from bipolabipolarbipolar disorder. My enfamily is riddled with mental illness.I suffer from anxiety and depression. Mental illness is not in common and we should stop skirting around it. This ha been my talkddddisorder bags didisorder
Sorry my phone went funny :) The last phrase of my comment was:"This has been my talk"
Load More Replies... What the hell? This is like a mad scientist on the loose over here. I'm scared. I know it happened years ago, that doesn't make it okay or less scary.
It makes me shudder to think of the truly dreadful treatment of mental distress. A close relative was sent the Maudsley and given electric shock treatment. It was awful. He was desperately unhappy and distressed. He said that it felt like a million needles. It achieved a sort of effect by causing memory loss. The best treatment was to move house and change everything. That sort of helped but sending a person to a Victorian gloomy institution and forcing them to undergo what felt like torture was meant to cure thid dreadful illness.
This is disgusting, there's a special place in hell for people who have this done to others
Read the book My Lobotomy. It will make you anger and sad. And happy for the boy/man and his strength.
Not to trivialize this, but did anyone else read the doctor's notes in the voice of a 1940s newsreel?
Ugh, and people wonder why I'm afraid of doctors. If I ever get this bad just shoot me to put me out of my misery instead of letting doctors "help" me by torturing me.
From age of 5 until 42 I had a normal life ,then I took Ill going through repressed memories ,my brain started processing first five years of my childhood ,abused by five men from I was a baby ,given to chapel ,lived in convent ,treated bad by nuns ,made to wash floors on hands n knees ,peel potatoes ,do laundry ,put in a coffin buried alive ,found back home ,realized my mum hated me ,I witnessed my dog being violently hurt ,aunts uncles found out ,I was taken hypnotized by my father's cousin to make me forget what happened ,I realized one day my dad and sister were looking after me ,realized my sister was my mother ,deeply depressed ,then heard she was leaving home ,feeling abandoned and being left with these people,I went to stab her but her mum stepped in to protect her,she got stabbed ,I ended up in a hospital for a year ,severely Ill,electric shock treatment ,and eventually lobotomized then I went through transition period to normal ,,on recovery we had to do chores ,or no food.
horrible to think that back then, THIS was considered progress! i hope that in 75 yrs, nothing we do now will be deemed as barbaric as this.
Once we have economically feasible lab grown meat, factory farms will probably be seen in this light in 75 years. Hell putting people in prison for having mental illnesses might be considered barbaric and we do it constantly today (serial killers, pedophiles etc).
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