What is Lobotomy?

A rare surgical operation to cut the white matter from the front of the brain, disconnecting the thalamus from the frontal lobe of the brain, a lobotomy or leucotomy is the only brain operation to treat a psychiatric condition rather than a physical disease.

The essential aim of the operation is to improve symptoms and psychiatric states of profound agitation, distress, depression or worry, or overwhelming compulsions or intractable pains. The conditions that are occasionally treated by lobotomy include chronic obsession neurosis, chronic tension, chronic anxiety, and chronic depression and schizophrenia.

Surgeries are considered only in carefully selected cases and only after tranquilizers and shock therapy have failed to improve the condition. The main criteria for selection are that the patient was successfully adjusted to life before the onset of symptoms and that he has been seriously incapacitated by his mental condition for at least five years.

Success rate

During the past 50 years, many retrospective studies have been carried out to establish which patients benefit the most. The conclusions from these studies are that about one third of the patients become socially adjusted and have no symptoms of their previous condition, one third improved, and the remainder shows no improvement. It is possible for a patient who is overactive, excitable, destructive, restless, and antisocial or depressed, to improve to become quite and sociable, free, cheerful, relaxed, interested in events around him and able to converse normally.

Rehabilitation

Lobotomy may be used for a variety of psychotic disorders such as schizophrenia, manic depressive psychosis, agitated depressive illness, and for the severe obsessive compulsive reactions of psychoneurosis. The immediate effect of the operation is that the patient is more relaxed and may be in a stupor for about a week. Also a lobotomy destroys the memory of social habits such As feeding, dressing, and coping with the personal toilet, and these have to be relearn. With this aim the patient undergoes intensive active rehabilitation with specific instruction on all aspects of social behavior.

The operation and the rehabilitation program can be effective, but in cases in which there is loss of social behavior but no improvement in other symptoms, the effect can be devastating. It is because of this possibility that the operation is seldom used.

Source:

Elliot Valenstein History of Lobotomy

About Lobotomy