Lobotomy

Open your mind and imagine what it would be like to be in a Mental Hospital. Did you imagine rash behaviors from the patients and the staff? How about the invasive treatments and the cot like beds with thin blankets you would have had to sleep with? Before the 1940’s, the stories that most people have heard coming out of Mental Hospitals were very brutal. However, in recent years, Mental Hospitals have changed in many helpful ways. This can be seen in the ways patients are treated and the way…

pain. However, scientists reported that some lobotomy patients reverted to childlike behavior and were incapable of self-care. This was a legitimate option for a few patients in the overcrowded asylums but when Freeman started performing these procedures nonchalantly things took a turn for the worst. Patients with perfectly normal brains not suffering from mental illness and cases where the side effects outweighed the benefits were given lobotomies causing the butchering of perfectly normal,…

leucotomy to lobotomy. By the 1940s, Freeman became a successful doctor and he was famous for his lobotomies. He married and together they had a total of six kids. Around the same time, a new Italian surgeon tried to refine the prefrontal lobotomy, by entering the eyes sockets. In 1946, Freeman conducted America’s first transorbital lobotomy, where he used an ice pick to drill the skull. With the success of another surgery, Freeman began doing lobotomies in his office. By the 1950, the…

patients first became known in the 1880s by Swiss physician Gottlieb Burkhardt ("Lobotomy"). It was not until the 1930s when Egas Moniz, a Portuguese doctor had theorized mental illnesses become apparent in the frontal lobe when there is a problem with neurons. When this information came to America, American neurologist Walter J. Freeman II modified the procedure ("Lobotomy"). American neurosurgeons were against the lobotomy, but Freeman managed to publicize only his success stories when it came…

From electroconvulsive therapy (ECT), insulin shock therapy and frontal lobotomy. Because these treatments made a “noticeable effect” on patients, it was supposed to be a good option. Electroconvulsive therapy is also known as electric shock, where seizures are electrically induced in anesthetized patients for therapeutic effect…

People with disabilities have been discriminated, not only in the 1930s, but throughout the sum of time. Many people of the mentally ill community were taken advantage of and were the “test monkeys” for some inhumane treatments. From before, after and during the 1930s, they were thought of as a burden to society. In John Steinbeck’s Of Mice And Men, Lennie Small, one of the main characters, suffers from an intellectual disability. Although he is not the brightest, he is big and strong but does…

Today a mental illness is defined as a chemical imbalance in the brain which causes person to act differently. In the Past psychiatrists did not have medication to treat mental illnesses. Instead they relied on physical methods such as lobotomies, shock therapy, asylums, exorcism, trephining and many more. It is important to become aware of past treatments to better understand the reason for current treatments, it also provides us better information to move forward and create better, more…

disregarded due to the outcome of the procedure, being more controllable schizophrenic patients (Foerschner). Though, if multiple sessions were not effective, patients would instead undergo different forms of psychosurgery, of which included the lobotomy (Foerschner). Drugs and treatments that obviously caused harmful results were not seen as harmful, because they also could detain patients (Healy…

“I am invisible, understand because people refuse to see me” (Ellison 3). An untouchable protagonist finds himself stuck in the shadows of the ever looming times of Jim Crow in Ralph Ellison’s book Invisible Man (1952). He does so through a sense of philosophically concise rhetoric. He acknowledges his invisibility as a byproduct of other’s choices and not his outward appearance nor his place within the futile caste system distraught by the Great Migration. Throughout Invisible Man, the nameless…

One can find out if Insane Asylums helped or hurt mental illnesses through the patient’s illnesses, the practices, and the experienced outcomes. Ever since the first insane asylums in the 1800’s, a huge problem was how incredibly easy it was for someone to be deemed insane and admitted. Photograph Reasons for Admission (Reasons) lists laziness, mental excitement, novel reading, asthma, and grief as a few of many absurd reasons that an individual would be ruled mentally ill and then immediately…