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Feb 8, 2024 · Discover the disturbing history of lobotomy with before-and-after images. Take a look at this old mental health treatment that once was deemed revolutionary.
- Overview
- What is a lobotomy?
- Do doctors still perform lobotomies?
- History of lobotomies
- Uses of the lobotomy
- Lobotomy procedure
- What do lobotomies do to people?
- Risks and long-term impact of the lobotomy
- Summary
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A lobotomy is a type of brain surgery that involves severing the connection between the frontal lobe and other parts of the brain. Lobotomies became popular in the 1930s as a treatment for certain mental health conditions.
Doctors performed this procedure on people with conditions such as schizophrenia and depression. At the time, there were no effective or widely available treatments for these conditions.
However, lobotomies are dangerous. They carry several serious risks, including seizures and death. Due to the impact of this procedure on people who were lobotomized and their families, it fell out of use in the 1950s, according to 2013 research.
Keep reading to learn more about the history, procedure, and uses of lobotomies, as well as the effects and risks.
The word “lobotomy” refers to several brain surgeries that break connections between the frontal lobe and different parts of the brain. The frontal lobe is involved in many brain processes, including language, voluntary motion, and many cognitive abilities.
The different types of lobotomy include:
•topectomy, in which a surgeon removes parts of the frontal lobe
•leucotomy or leukotomy, in which a surgeon severs connections between the frontal lobe and the thalamus
According to 2017 research, lobotomies are rare today. Although the techniques have advanced and improved, most doctors consider the surgery obsolete.
However, lobotomies are still legal in some places. A 2019 study reports that after lobotomies became unpopular, most states enacted laws to regulate the use of surgery for mental illness. However, despite this effort, the laws across the United States are inconsistent.
Doctors developed the lobotomy in the late 19th and early 20th centuries, at a time when there were no drug therapies for mental health disorders, and psychotherapy was still in its early stages.
As there were no standardized or effective treatments, people with severe symptoms often lived in psychiatric hospitals and asylums. In Europe, many of these facilities were overcrowded, which led doctors to look for a solution.
The main use of the lobotomy was to treat mental health conditions or reduce their symptoms. Burckhardt used it to reduce aggression in people with schizophrenia, believing that the frontal lobe was responsible for this symptom.
When Moniz and Lima revived the lobotomy in the 1930s, it was with the explicit goal of changing the disposition of people with mental health conditions. Often, the procedure made people quiet and docile, which they interpreted as a sign of success.
However, what doctors consider a mental health disorder has changed over time. Prejudice and biases also played a role in how doctors used the procedure.
In addition to people who meet current definitions for mental illness, practitioners also performed lobotomies on people:
•with intellectual disabilities
•who were gay
There was a range of approaches to performing lobotomies. The first lobotomies involved open brain surgery. When the procedure regained popularity in the 1930s, neurologists refined the technique to make it less invasive.
In the U.S., Watts promoted a technique that involved drilling or cutting a hole in the skull to sever the connection between the frontal lobe and the thalamus. This involved the participation of a surgeon and surgical assistants.
Later, Freeman altered the procedure. Instead of drilling a hole, he used an instrument similar to an ice pick to enter the skull through the eye socket and pierce the brain. This is known as the transorbital lobotomy.
Freeman claimed this method did not require surgical assistants, sterile operating rooms, or scrubs. According to him, doctors could perform lobotomies anywhere with very little equipment.
Proponents of lobotomies thought that the procedure could address the root cause of mental health symptoms by cutting off the part of the brain they believed was responsible for them.
For example, Freeman theorized that psychosis stemmed from excessive self-reflection. He felt this was due to thoughts that circled repeatedly in the brain. In his view, lobotomies provided a literal way of cutting off these circling thoughts.
However, lobotomies do not treat the causes of mental health conditions. Instead, they reduce the functionality of the frontal lobe, resulting in:
•apathy
•distractibility
•lack of initiative
Many people who underwent lobotomies experienced severe side effects and complications, such as:
•chronic headaches
•seizures
•intracranial hemorrhages, or bleeding inside the skull
•dementia, a condition that causes memory decline and personality changes
•brain abscesses
A lobotomy is a surgical procedure that doctors developed as a treatment for mental health conditions in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. It involves breaking the connection between the frontal lobe and the thalamus.
While lobotomies caused some people with mental illnesses to become calmer, they also frequently caused significant changes in personality, such as apathy and social disinhibition. The procedure had very serious health risks, and doctors sometimes used it in ways that were unethical.
A lobotomy is a brain surgery that cuts the connection between the frontal lobe and other parts of the brain. Learn about the history, uses, and effects of this controversial treatment for mental health conditions.
Feb 26, 2024 · A frontal lobotomy is a psychosurgery that was used in the mid-1900s to treat mental and neurological illnesses, including schizophrenia, bipolar disorder, and epilepsy. It involves severing the nerve pathways from the frontal lobe—the largest section of the brain—from the other lobes.
- Peter Pressman, MD
May 13, 2024 · A lobotomy is a type of brain surgery that involves separating tissue in the prefrontal cortex. The goal was to treat people with mental health conditions. Learn more.
A lobotomy (from Greek λοβός (lobos) 'lobe' and τομή (tomē) 'cut, slice') or leucotomy is a discredited form of neurosurgical treatment for psychiatric disorder or neurological disorder (e.g. epilepsy, depression) that involves severing connections in the brain's prefrontal cortex. [ 1] The surgery causes most of the connections to ...
Lobotomy, surgical procedure in which the nerve pathways in a lobe or lobes of the brain are severed from those in other areas. The procedure was formerly used as a radical therapeutic measure to help patients with severe mental illness.
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Jan 30, 2020 · All in Their Heads: When Faces Made the Case for Lobotomy. If you were mentally ill back in the late 1930s to late 1950s, doctors might have tried to cure you by drilling a hole in your brain and disconnecting the thalamus from the frontal lobe.
