Yikes...

After talking in class about the conditions of mental health facilities during the 1950s and 60s, I noticed that the word “lobotomy” sprung up quite a bit in our discussions. Also, upon reading the first few chapters of the 1962 novel One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest, by Ken Kesey, the narrator makes references to “that filthy brain-murdering room,” and also mentions that “Sometimes a guy goes over for an installation, leaves the ward mean and mad and snapping at the whole world and comes back …with black-and-blue eyes…and he’s the sweetest, nicest…thing you ever saw” (16, 17). This got me wondering about what exactly happens in a lobotomy, and how it affects people. First of all, a lobotomy is a surgical procedure involving the removal or damage of parts of the frontal cortex. It consists of cutting the connections to and from the prefrontal cortex. When performed successfully, a lobotomy may result in significant behavioral changes in the patient. During the height of lobotomy procedures, lobotomies sometimes worked beneficially, calming the patient so that he or she could live a relatively normal life. However, lobotomies also posed a great deal of risk. Due to the fact that the brain is a fragile and complex organ, and that in the era in which lobotomies were performed (the early 1900s-1960s) people did not know much about the brain, there was the probable likelihood for the procedure to go wrong. At its worst, a lobotomy could cause death, but it could also cause serious brain damage that resulted in mental retardation in the patient. Patients could also enter comas and vegetative states after lobotomies. The method of lobotomies slowed down in the 1950s after the introduction of the drug Thorazine, which causes its own chemical lobotomy. Although lobotomies are not performed today to the extent that they were during the early 1900s, they still had a very deep impact on the lives of those in mental hospitals.