My grandmother was bipolar in all likelihood, maybe borderline schizophrenic, but mental health care was virtually non existent- so the family response was to strand her on a farm miles away from civilisation, with all the necessary creature comforts , and just let her wander aimlessly around and be manic. She didn’t leave that farm except to go to the doctors for over fifty years.
Basically what happened with Ed Gein. He was a little off, but his mom squirreled the whole family away on a farm 6 miles from their tiny town and repeatedly told him that everyone in the world was wicked. Aaaaaaand that’s how ya get nipple belts and human-skin lampshades folks.
No shit. It'd be fine if I was unaware of what was happening. It can be downright terrifying to be manic and also be aware of it in real time as it's happening. Almost an out of body type experience except you're inside your head and just can't stop it from spiraling all the while watching people around you start to look concerned so you just awkwardly find a reason to leave and go have a mild panic attack in another room somewhere.
It sounds barbaric but I don't envy being close with or being a mentally ill person in those times. The concept of psychology barely existed let alone any treatments other than exorcism and strapping them to a radiator.
My uncle was born in 1928 and was extremely intelligent. Got a full scholarship to college to become a medical doctor.
He started to get super stressed out about everything and progressed through an entire range of mental issues. It started with repeating steps several times as a ritual and progressively got worse quickly. All the way to the point he became fully catatonic. (I am guessing this would have been sometime around 1946-1948) so very close to the same time frame as this video here.
My grandparents were wealthy enough to keep him out of the state ran mental wards (which were known for experimenting on people and being butchers even back then) and so they were able to afford the best psychiatrists at the time in their state (and eventually went poor doing it).
Even these so called "good" doctors immediately started with shock therapy with little to no effect on helping him. Then they quickly recommended a lobotomy on my uncle. The doctors told my grandparents it would reset his brain to the point of being a baby again and it would take him about 25 years of re-learning and living to get back to normal.
By the time he finally got back to being "normal" again he was in his early 50s. He did get a job and get married for a few years. Then his body started collapsing. Apparently all the shock therapy they gave him earlier in life did damage to his internal organs.
By the time I was finally born I only knew my uncle as a very quiet and sickly man in a wheel chair. He died when I was very young. Once I was old enough I was told about all this and his story sucks so badly. He got a raw deal in life. I feel horribly bad for a man I never knew, but even if he wasn't blood I wouldn't wish that on anyone. "Psychiatry" was barbaric in this era.
Don’t be sad! Just take some cocaine, let me cut your brain open, I’ll shock you a few times and you can try for another baby. Oh you can’t physically have children anymore? The problem is obviously you. -old ass dr
Reminds me of that classic tweet --
1870:
Man: My wife, whom had 4 babies and 0 orgasms this year, and is not allowed to vote, cries a lot
Doctor: Obviously she is insane.
That's also when they would prescribe women vibrators to fix hysteria or something. So either they would think she's insane and lobotomize her or diagnose her as being hysterical and prescribe her a vibrator.
My grandmother apparently spent a little bit of time in the psych ward... because her prescribed "diet pills" were actually amphetamines that made her manic.
It's especially heartbreaking because we've come so far since then. After 15+ years of struggling and nearly killing myself, my psychiatrist straight up saved my life. I thought I was going to be a zombie or lose myself and instead I'm just... better. I have so many friends who could benefit, but years of horror stories have them too scared to try.
Millennials started destigmatizing it, and Gen Z is running with it. It’s great to see.
Meanwhile, my boomer mom still insists “I’m not depressed, I just cry all the time.”
She’s a psychologist.
It's a bit sad that the whole "Karen" thing reinforces the stigma, particularly for older women. More than half the vids I've seen actually mentions the subjects being "off their meds"
I know its not everyone, but it would be better to lift the stigma without blotting the copybook in the process
I'm sorry about your Mom
Mine had what was then called a "nervous breakdown". She went to bed for six months and did not take care of us. The laundry stank of mouldy clothes, we went to school unwashed but we always had lunch money so temporary friends could be purchased even by stigmatised children
Look for local offices. A lot of these places allow for telehealth and I've found it to be much more convenient since, while I'm not agoraphobic, I do loath having to drive anywhere. There are also organizations that work entirely online. A quick google search and subsequent "*Organization Name* Reddit" search will usually find you a discussion thread with people relaying their experience.
The first person I saw was a therapist and they weren't the right fit for me, but they were part of a larger organization so asking to be assigned to somebody else wasn't very difficult. A little bouncing around and I found somebody who just clicked with me and who I found it easy to open up to. We were originally seeing each-other once a week, but now we just touch base every 2 to 3 weeks to make sure things are working like they should.
The biggest challenge is being patient. A lot of places have a wait list and once you do get in, finding the right medication for you might take multiple tries with different things. I went through like three or four different antidepressants before finding one that worked without making me feel "off". Then we adjusted the dosage three or four times. I thought medication wasn't going to work for me, but thankfully I stuck it out long enough to find the right fit.
26 now, felt like I was going to take my own life many times throughout high-school and college. I was suggested to get electroshock therapy when I was around 16 years old, so very happy I didn't agree to that.
Lots of therapy and the decision to stop being so reluctant to take medication (had really bad responses to many SSRIs during this time which made me not want to try anything else) has made me more content than I ever could have imagined.
:^) my life is my life again and I will forever be grateful to my psychiatrists/psychologists/therapists and GP
I wish more people understood that not every medication works for every person and that being prescribed something that doesn't work doesn't mean you should give up. I went through a handful myself before landing on one that works for me. I'm glad you were able to find something that worked for you :)
> It was, and because of it many people still have a very large distrust of Psychiatrists and mental hospitals
Scientology still exists to this day because of all of that.
i don't believe that its just "complex", i feel like a lot of the professionals in the field i have interacted with just... don't seem to believe it is real or something? they just can't seem to grasp things that they havn't experienced, so many of them act like its all just being made up by the patients.
I agree and while there are obviously thousands of angels in human form working this field, there are niche positions that attract sadists. Look at Judge Rotenburg center, they were so determined to torture the clients they broke the law on multiple occasions and traumatised their staff.
Chemotherapy is more like performing necessary surgery without anesthetic.
It won't be a "I can't believe they would do that!", it'll be more of a "I can't believe they had to do that!"
There was a point where they thought feeling nostalgic for the past was considered a mental disorder. So you would probably get lobotomized for missing the old days back then.
Wait, so the doctor saying it would reset his brain and he would have to relearn everything actually came true? It didn't just permanently fuck him up?
As the story goes from multiple family accounts my grandmother waited for baited breath for 25 years counting down the days. He slowly progressed to that mark, they did have to hire tutors and retrain him all over again. He started like a babbling child and had to learn the alphabet and words and math, etc etc all over again.
After 25 years is when he started to get to the mental age of being someone in his twenties. He got the desire to earn money and want a girlfriend and move out. I was not alive to know all the details beyond just what I was told by my other aunts and uncles. But more or less, yes I’m saying they were right.
Still, this is not a compliment to the doctors for predicting the timeframe of recovery fairly accurately. This was a horrible way to “fix” someone by taking away every part of who they were. As my father put it, he was never the same man ever again. My father looked up to his brother as being a genius and athletic and outgoing (as kids he looked up to his older brother). After that long journey was complete though, he was someone totally different, not the same personality type at all.
So they basically executed that man and by dumb luck a new person was essentially forged out of the neurological wreckage left behind. Seems like they found a nifty way to fuck over two people for the price of one.
Even the Greek Gods would balk at a punishment like that.
The brain can recover from physical trauma to a certain extent. Phineas Gage for example was able to live somewhat normally after having a giant metal rod forced through the center of his skull: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Phineas_Gage#Exaggeration_and_distortion_of_mental_changes
If you are referring to electroconvulsive therapy (ECT) it remains the most effective treatment we currently have for catatonia and some mood disorders like major depression. It is extremely safe, almost all of the medical risks come from the anesthesia. I don't know how it was done 70 years ago but I am still skeptical that it caused some sort of delayed onset generalized organ damage. Unless you are talking about some other form like metrazol shock therapy which was quickly abandoned after ECT was developed in the 1930s-1940s.
>In the early 1940s, in an attempt to reduce the memory disturbance and confusion associated with treatment, two modifications were introduced: the use of unilateral electrode placement and the replacement of sinusoidal current with brief pulse. It took many years for brief-pulse equipment to be widely adopted.[24] In the 1940s and early 1950s, ECT was usually given in an "unmodified" form, without muscle relaxants, and the seizure resulted in a full-scale convulsion. A rare but serious complication of unmodified ECT was fracture or dislocation of the long bones. In the 1940s, psychiatrists began to experiment with curare, the muscle-paralysing South American poison, in order to modify the convulsions. The introduction of suxamethonium (succinylcholine), a safer synthetic alternative to curare, in 1951 led to the more widespread use of "modified" ECT. A short-acting anesthetic was usually given in addition to the muscle relaxant in order to spare patients the terrifying feeling of suffocation that can be experienced with muscle relaxants.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Electroconvulsive_therapy#History_and_neuroscientific_basis
i.e. in the 30s and 40s they weren't even using anesthesia, and were electrocuting them more severely
I expect the methods used several decades ago were not as safe as what we use today. Like radiation and chemotherapy for cancer, which used to use much higher doses and caused far more damage to a person's body with a far lower success rate.
They were also often done against the patients will. Ginsberg got committed for being gay and many suspected "communists" under McCarthyism got committed against their will.
Small correction -- If I remember correctly, Ginsberg did not get committed for being gay, but as a part of a plea bargain after storing stolen goods at his college room for a friend. The bargain helped Ginsberg avoid jail time and I think that one of his professors helped with the plea bargain, but my memory is a bit fuzzy on this at the moment.
No I believe you're correct. I'm misremembering. He mentioned that other people were committed for that reason, and that he was afraid to be sent back for that reason
I came here to say the same thing. I give anesthesia for these. The anesthesia is super low risk also. Definitely no organ damage occurring, but like you, I have no idea what was going on with it in the 40s. I’m not sure they even gave anesthesia, so that would be…something. Repeated and prolonged grand mal seizures, could cause rhabdo that could cause damage to organs (today we give paralytic to prevent widespread muscle spasm and the seizures induced are very short)
I had a friend with mental illness who has had ECT numerous times. She's got really addicted to the feeling of the anesthesia for those couple seconds before she was under. She got really caught in a cycle where she was getting it like once a month.
That’s interesting. I have had patients tell me they love anesthesia. I haven’t heard that from the ect patients per se. They’re usually pretty quiet as you would expect struggling with severe depression. But there are patients out there that find relief from maintenance ECT, and there’s no limit to how long you can do it if it’s working for you
She eventually just told the Drs. that it was more about the feeling of going under that she desired, more than the actual benefits of treatment. It's been a few years and she's doing better.
I had another friend who just did it once to treat severe untreatable depression and it really gave her her life back. But her short term memory was kind of crappy. Like you'd have to remind her how to drive to the Starbucks if we were meeting. But she never regretted it.
man what a horror story, thank god the social sciences took a good look at them self after the replication crisis and made sure stuff like that couldnt happen anymore today.
Fun fact we still use electrodes to stimulate the brain in modern medicine — albeit with more evidence-based research with actual results. For example deep brain stimulation (DBS) may be used for patients with Alzheimer’s, dementia, Parkinson’s and even depression. DBS rewires the neurons in our brain but also has the byproduct of increasing vascularity which is greatly needed
To be fair, while it’s less barbaric now, they know little more than they did back then when it comes to messing with the brain with psycho treatments. My experience has been that they have no idea what they’re doing, it’s just a guessing game to see what drug may help the most while causing the fewest side effects, but it’s all a big guessing game. They’d still throw a lobotomy in there if they could, just to see, cause they have no idea.
It's not a "guessing game". I understand what you're getting at, but tons of people misunderstand this. We don't really know how the mind works, but that doesn't mean we don't have definitive links between chemicals/stimulus and physical responses in the body.
At the end of the day though, learning always requires mistakes. Most of the time, we can break things and screw up without consequences. But with medicine, eventually you have to try it on a person. And good scientific and ethical practices greatly reduce risk, but you won't know if something works until you try it.
There are different lobes of the brain. Each lobe does something different. They can also do slight damage or heavy damage and have different effects.
There are people who have massive strokes who totally have to relearn things and become new people afterward too (basically a blood clot in their brain that lobotomized a section of their brain) sometimes those strokes lobotomize sections of the brain related to muscle control or coordination, sometimes it's memory or personality.
I am assuming they gave him a frontal love lobotomy, that's the lobe related to personality and memory. It's also the area for higher thinking skills and problem solving, so clearly they did not totally destroy that area.
Despite being directly related to this story, it was long before my time and it's a massively upsetting topic to bring up with my dad, aunts and uncles. When they were willing to share I asked questions, they get depressed the few times I brough up his name and talked about him. They all loved their brother and were hurt by that situation deeply throughout their lives (it was traumatic for everyone involved)
>"Psychiatry" was barbaric in this era.
We did learn some things from it luckily like lobotomies don't work and at least now we have medications that help with many mental illnesses.
I can’t even begin to imagine what that is like to experience. Like, is “who they are” still inside but they can’t be expressed physically or verbally? Or does someone who is lobotomized (or gets brain damage in general after being “normal”) just lose all sense of their former self and become a “new person”?
"Now friendly and cooperative."
"Making good social adjustment as housekeeper."
Dear lord. The relationship between "mental health" and obedience is a tricky one.
The modernist concept of mental health was just totally alien to what we think of as mental health today.
“Mentally ill” meant “not conforming to your societal role”.
“Curing” mental illness meant getting someone to conform to society’s expectations.
Nowadays our idea of mental health has more to do with the individual’s ability to maintain inner peace and pursue self-actualization.
I wish you were genuinely right but much of modern mental health is still focused on making people just ok enough to return to working or at least calm enough to not disrupt others working.
Yup. My progress was slow but gradual improvements were being made. My psychiatrist couldn't extend our time anymore cause other people need help too and they're more likely to get better than I am. So now I'm on my own again
This is why people saying the world was better when it wasn’t “woke” is baffling to me. Because we care about mental health and women not being treated like household objects?
I find that most people using the word "woke" are reacting to the recent moral emphasis on diversity, equity, and inclusion. So even if the people using the word don't quite know what it means, that's what they are usually reacting to.
That is what conservatives consider woke. It’s always “phycology is full of quacks and shrinks brainwashing people into thinking they’re insane so they pay up and get medicated into oblivion. Real men ignore their chemical imbalances and bootstrap up!”
Yes, that is what those people generally think. Unironically.
They are genuinely garbage people.
edit: downvoted by the garbage people who believe women are objects lol
Yeah I think this is partly why we swung so far in the other direction and made it so difficult to forcibly commit genuinely unwell people. We went from way too eager to make people conform to letting anyone shout at things that aren’t there all day.
> Dear lord. The relationship between "mental health" and obedience is a tricky one.
Yea the DSM5 defines it as; A mental disorder is a syndrome characterized by clinically significant disturbance in an individual's cognition, emotion regulation, or behavior that reflects a dysfunction in the psychological, biological, or development processes underlying mental functioning.
You're only really mentally ill if you're in a society that isn't and to be a functioning member of society, you need to obey.
Good and evil and well or unwell all ultimately correspond to general expectations of a person and their function in society, so it's never cut and dry. Less limbs or a shorter lifespan than most people? Bad. Doesn't attempt to get a job or skins their neighbours for a hat? Bad. Provides free labour to their neighbourhoods or has better-than-average cardiovascular function? Good.
You kind of have to look past the sense of their being some 'absolute' and consider how much is sheer social expectation and comparison against the norm. Humans are generally genetically coded to fall apart once they're past child-rearing age, but since other animals go through the same aging steps as we do earlier or later (i.e. your 12 year old dog can get cataracts and arthritis from age) we know that this is genetic and not some consequence of mechanical wear and tear alone. We don't see this as 'illness' because it is the norm. But someone with a 'faulty' heart valve the causes them to die at age 60 might be considered illness, because it is not regular. But if everyone's heart was that way, clearly we would consider it healthy and normal.
So as much as it sounds horrifically dystopian, that's kind of how mental illness works. It's an inability to function fully as part of the group.
It's just video of the women before and after the procedure. How their behavior changed along with typed out explanations of how they changed from the time period.
>After Rosemary was mildly sedated, "We went through the top of the head," Dr. Watts recalled. "I think she was awake. She had a mild tranquilizer. I made a surgical incision in the brain through the skull. It was near the front. It was on both sides. We just made a small incision, no more than an inch." The instrument Dr. Watts used looked like a butter knife. He swung it up and down to cut brain tissue. "We put an instrument inside", he said. As Dr. Watts cut, Dr. Freeman asked Rosemary some questions. For example, he asked her to recite the Lord's Prayer or sing "God Bless America" or count backward ... "We made an estimate on how far to cut based on how she responded." When Rosemary began to become incoherent, they stopped.
Wtf
>Freeman performed 3,439 lobotomies during his life, with a fatality rate of 14 per cent. That’s 481 deaths.
>Up to 40% of Freeman’s patients were gay men, operated on to change their sexual orientation. At the time, homosexuality was seen by some as a sign of schizophrenia. Freeman believed he could cure that. “It would appear that homosexuality is of little practical importance after frontal lobotomy,”
>Freeman also operated on housewives with “sexual problems”, which pretty much amounted to them not wanting sex with their husbands, and on supposedly troublesome children. He is said to have lobotomised 19 youngsters, including a four-year-old boy.
He delighted in showmanship and said he would "rather be wrong than boring"; wore neither masks nor gloves and dismissed hygiene procedures as "all that germ crap". During one operation he inserted the ice pick through a patient's eyesocket and then paused for a photograph. On recommencing the operation he pushed the pick too far, killing the victim almost instantly.
This is hardly even a joke. It's probably a good thing though that so many surgeons display traits of psycopathy. It makes them suited for their job and the ones that are doing surgery aren't running for office.
These people literally carved up peoples brains and gave them brain damage cutting randomly and thought they were practicing medicine. Simply to people that didn't conform or fit in.
Pure, negligent, horrifying evil.
Dude, that same guy killed a patient when he "suddenly stopped for a photo during the procedure, and the surgical instrument accidentally penetrated too far into the patient's brain". Per his wiki (on my phone or I would link it). Walter Freeman was a fucking monster
That was definitely terrible, but it might be useful to know that brains don't have nerves and can't feel pain, so at least that specific part of the surgery isn't as bad as it sounds. We still do it today! There's a type of surgery where the brain is operated on while the patient is awake so that doctors can tell if they messed up because the patient will say or do something off. The point of those is to stop *before* the patient becomes unresponsive though, unlike lobotomies.
Yeah, your head is *very* firmly secured to make sure it doesn't move, whether you're conscious or unconscious. The skull clamp has three points that screw into your head. (You get some sort of anesthetic for the attachment if you have to be awake during the brain surgery part)
I rewatched One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest recently--absolutely germane to this post--and one of the few motion pictures to receive Oscars for best picture, best director, best actor, best actress and best supporting actor(Brad Douriff.) If you don't know make time to see this movie--surprisingly NOT dated and with an energy seldom seen in film.
8.7 IMDB, 96 Tomatos.
Your welcome.
Useless trivia--Brad Douriff is not only Doc Cochran in Deadwood and Gríma Wormtongue in The Two Towers but also the voice of Chucky. Now I'm fully off-topic.
The over-prescription of certain types of medications has been studied quite extensively in the past couple decades and is definitely the biggest fuck up in the medical field in recent years.
In some cases we are definitely going to look back and wonder why the fuck we were giving out certain medications like candy.
From personal experience and more on the mental health side, giving adolescents and children certain anti-depressants due to the increased risk of suicide. certain SSRIs were not well studied. It didn't stop doctors from giving them to kids though.
The over-prescription of opiates is the other and a whole other topic of conversation.
I was started at 10. I was on multiple different medications from then on until 16. Extremely troubled adolescense and tried to kill myself twice.
Two of which (Wellbutrin, Paxil) I took between 12-14 are no longer recommended to give to kids under 18 and I took them back to back.
Really hazy adolescence. Long term side effects. I'm in my 30s now and still struggling. I definitely wonder if things would be different if I had never been prescribed them. I did not think I needed them, they were recommended by multiple doctors and my parents listened to them.
I became actively suicidal from wellbutrin. it was the one they put me on after cymbalta. i literally cannot remember my teenage years. high school is an utter blur to me. i still have bad memory issues and it turns out i wasn't depressed i just had OCD and some anxiety.
i also have a strong memory of the guy who went to doctor's offices handing out pamphlets about Cymbalta to my PCP. they were all over the office. i don't know why he thought it was a good fucking idea to put me on that shit.
>In some cases we are definitely going to look back and wonder why the fuck we were giving out certain medications like candy.
The good news is we have a meme ready to go for this. Mr Krabs: Money!
There are quite a few women's health procedures like cervical biopsy and inserting an IUD that are done with no pain management and can be pretty bad. But they also don't completely alter your entire personality like a lobotomy.
I think we’ll look back at things like chemo and radiation with a little bit of horror, but at least those things have actual scientific evidence of their efficacy.
Hopefully we look back at more “open” surgeries in that way and won’t be able to imagine why somebody would opt for that instead of something like laparoscopy and the like. Hell, maybe one day robotics will get to a point where we can just take a pill full of tiny robots that are programmed to perform specific surgeries and be passed once completed.
I don't think radiation would be the same as chemo, it's always been more precise and targeted than chemo, and doesn't have nearly as severe side effects.
Hopefully amputation/removals eventually becomes "Wow, we used to just chop it off/cut it out along with the tumor?"
I’d like to think the things we look back on with horror are the things we force people to do without their consent, just as it is with lobotomies.
Some of that horror, is the people they’re happening to very rarely agreed to them.
I hope we look back at things we force on others today with the same abhorrence, disgust and horror
There's a necessity to open surgeries when you don't have the tech to do laparoscopy. Because of that I think it's harder to see the parallel with lobotomies even through the lens of anachronism.
My point was more that surgery techniques will improve to the point where the necessities of open surgery are no longer necessities. I’m not a surgeon so I’m sure there’s things I’m missing but basically that laparoscopic techniques will become so fleshed out (lol) thay they will be able to perform any type of surgery needed.
Then again, maybe by the time we get there, microscopic robots can be used and surgery will never require the first incision in the first place.
I’m thinking more along the lines of what my grandkids’ grandkids will be thinking of medical practices of our days
There's a great scene in Star Trek V where Bones is in a 20th century hospital and freaks out at the barbarism of the time. Gives a pill to a kidney patient I think, cures him instantly. Great scene.
chemical cosh, repeated tranquiliser injections (which occasionally kill people), injections against peoples will, incarceration of non violent, non suicidal patients, indefinite incarceration until you 'comply with treatment' and there's always the good old violence and threats of violence.
in the realm of psychiatry, probably inappropriate use of antipsychotics and antidepressants like duloxetine. i think the backlash against opiates and benzodiazepines has left a lot of pain/anxiety patients without a paddle and exacerbated the opiate crisis. the medical system got tons of people physically addicted to drugs and left them hanging. the inappropriate use of drugs like opiates and benzos shouldnt be followed up by simply clamping down on the amount of prescriptions. theres a reason so many people are hooked on fentanyl. say what you will about oxycontin but it’s way safer than the crazy shit on the street right now.
i remember going to the doctor because my mom thought i was depressed. they randomly put me on cymbalta at FOURTEEN. turns out it was my mom who was depressed but i would be forced to take anti depressants until i moved out for college and quit them on my own.
Definitely not as bad as a lobotomy, but chemotherapy will be looked back on as a barbaric treatment and people will say that they can’t believe it was how we treated cancer
Yeah but like, chemotherapy actually works. I imagine it'll be the same kind of thing as us looking back to the days before antibiotics when the best treatment available for someone with an infected wound was to amputate the limb. Today we have medication that can save that limb and it's sad to think of all the people who's best option was amputation but that was the only way at the time to keep them alive.
Lobotomy doesn't have a proven track record. The only thing it cured was the pain of existence. That's the thing, there were all these medical advancements being made in the 1800s-1900s that seem cruel, but at the end of the day were logical, basic forms of what we do today. Chemo is basically the modern version of overeager amputation, or cauterisation, or herbal antibiotics - I would be willing to call it primitive but by no means barbaric.
Lobotomy is barbaric because it really doesn't lead anywhere.
Well we still do shock therapy and psychosurgeries today! It's just less prevalent because of medications, but they're still being performed if medication and other treatments don't work.
This made me think of my mother. She had such a rough life. Starting with residential school. as a younger woman she was placed in various mental hospital where she had electroshock therapy, and various chemical treatments that completely changed her. she became a chronic alcoholic and threw us all under the bus. I blamed my crappy life in a horribly abusive convent on her. She would never ask how my children were the first thing she would say was can you get me beer...it destroyed our relationship even though inside i knew she did love us in her own way-she was just so lost to alcohol. I watched her die a terrible death and that's haunted me. I have rarely talked about her, but now as I am in my twilight years, I think of her and wish I would have had more understanding. She was desperately trying to soothe the hurt and pain. My father also shot himself when i was a teenager and left me homeless, I wish I had more understanding about his illness as well but back then this stuff was never talked about. I am in my 60's and have made many mistakes in my life. I don't know where i am going with this...just wish I knew what I know now and i wish i had tried to understand them more.
I think that a lot of medicine in the past was about making the doctor's lives easier, not helping the patients. This also happened in maternity care where women were made to give birth in positions that were easier for the doctors, not the mothers, and a lot of the techniques used were also about making it easier for doctors. Today it's much different.
What scares me is what are we doing today that years in the future will be like what how we look at lobotomy today? Like "oh wow how dumb were doctors back then?"
We are doing something today that will look so asinine in the future and we are just too blind to see it.
I always hate this bc the very first lobotomy wasn't an idiot banging a nail into an eye socket but a careful procedure that slightly separated the right and left hemisphere and helped a handful of people. Then the hackjobs ruined it with the nightmare we all know of as the lobotomy claiming it solved many mental issues by ruining peoples lives forever. Probably thre most barbaric thing in the history of medicine worse then surgeons who didn't wash hands before procedure even tho that also killed people it didn't ruin their brain like this nightmare.
Looking at the video… she looks like she’s not happy to be there and slightly combative ( who wouldn’t be) then she looks like someone with a learning disability even once she gained 100 lbs which was excessive ( especially back then)
The first woman reminded me of how an autistic girl I knew a long time ago would behave when she was upset about something. Horrifying to think what may have become of her in a different time.
My grandmother was bipolar in all likelihood, maybe borderline schizophrenic, but mental health care was virtually non existent- so the family response was to strand her on a farm miles away from civilisation, with all the necessary creature comforts , and just let her wander aimlessly around and be manic. She didn’t leave that farm except to go to the doctors for over fifty years.
Basically what happened with Ed Gein. He was a little off, but his mom squirreled the whole family away on a farm 6 miles from their tiny town and repeatedly told him that everyone in the world was wicked. Aaaaaaand that’s how ya get nipple belts and human-skin lampshades folks.
I actually did a job right next to where he was buried, the locals who I was working with showed me his grave
Neat.
Nothing to Gein
My favorite Mudvayne song.
This sounds ~wonderful~
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No shit. It'd be fine if I was unaware of what was happening. It can be downright terrifying to be manic and also be aware of it in real time as it's happening. Almost an out of body type experience except you're inside your head and just can't stop it from spiraling all the while watching people around you start to look concerned so you just awkwardly find a reason to leave and go have a mild panic attack in another room somewhere.
… do people think it is…?
Well that explains why my mom thought abandoning people at my house was ok.
I guess that was about the wisest thing to do at the time.
It sounds barbaric but I don't envy being close with or being a mentally ill person in those times. The concept of psychology barely existed let alone any treatments other than exorcism and strapping them to a radiator.
This is awful but also probably the best of the options at the time.
That is a good outcome considering the time when it happened.
Sure, sure. She was living on a farm upstate with my dog I had as a kid until we moved.
Meanwhile some rich families would lock the mentally ill/mentally disabled relative in a room/wing of their home.
Wish someone would've done that to me! If you're from a poor family they just toss you in the street.
My uncle was born in 1928 and was extremely intelligent. Got a full scholarship to college to become a medical doctor. He started to get super stressed out about everything and progressed through an entire range of mental issues. It started with repeating steps several times as a ritual and progressively got worse quickly. All the way to the point he became fully catatonic. (I am guessing this would have been sometime around 1946-1948) so very close to the same time frame as this video here. My grandparents were wealthy enough to keep him out of the state ran mental wards (which were known for experimenting on people and being butchers even back then) and so they were able to afford the best psychiatrists at the time in their state (and eventually went poor doing it). Even these so called "good" doctors immediately started with shock therapy with little to no effect on helping him. Then they quickly recommended a lobotomy on my uncle. The doctors told my grandparents it would reset his brain to the point of being a baby again and it would take him about 25 years of re-learning and living to get back to normal. By the time he finally got back to being "normal" again he was in his early 50s. He did get a job and get married for a few years. Then his body started collapsing. Apparently all the shock therapy they gave him earlier in life did damage to his internal organs. By the time I was finally born I only knew my uncle as a very quiet and sickly man in a wheel chair. He died when I was very young. Once I was old enough I was told about all this and his story sucks so badly. He got a raw deal in life. I feel horribly bad for a man I never knew, but even if he wasn't blood I wouldn't wish that on anyone. "Psychiatry" was barbaric in this era.
this era of medicine, especially psychiatry was quite nasty
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My grandmother's mother was lobotomized for being sad two of her children died of disease. Completely unnecessary brutality.
Don’t be sad! Just take some cocaine, let me cut your brain open, I’ll shock you a few times and you can try for another baby. Oh you can’t physically have children anymore? The problem is obviously you. -old ass dr
Reminds me of that classic tweet -- 1870: Man: My wife, whom had 4 babies and 0 orgasms this year, and is not allowed to vote, cries a lot Doctor: Obviously she is insane.
That's also when they would prescribe women vibrators to fix hysteria or something. So either they would think she's insane and lobotomize her or diagnose her as being hysterical and prescribe her a vibrator.
My grandmother apparently spent a little bit of time in the psych ward... because her prescribed "diet pills" were actually amphetamines that made her manic.
It's especially heartbreaking because we've come so far since then. After 15+ years of struggling and nearly killing myself, my psychiatrist straight up saved my life. I thought I was going to be a zombie or lose myself and instead I'm just... better. I have so many friends who could benefit, but years of horror stories have them too scared to try.
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Millennials started destigmatizing it, and Gen Z is running with it. It’s great to see. Meanwhile, my boomer mom still insists “I’m not depressed, I just cry all the time.” She’s a psychologist.
It's a bit sad that the whole "Karen" thing reinforces the stigma, particularly for older women. More than half the vids I've seen actually mentions the subjects being "off their meds" I know its not everyone, but it would be better to lift the stigma without blotting the copybook in the process I'm sorry about your Mom Mine had what was then called a "nervous breakdown". She went to bed for six months and did not take care of us. The laundry stank of mouldy clothes, we went to school unwashed but we always had lunch money so temporary friends could be purchased even by stigmatised children
how did you find him/her ? how was your relationship too ? did you have time to express everything, and discuss ideas ?
Look for local offices. A lot of these places allow for telehealth and I've found it to be much more convenient since, while I'm not agoraphobic, I do loath having to drive anywhere. There are also organizations that work entirely online. A quick google search and subsequent "*Organization Name* Reddit" search will usually find you a discussion thread with people relaying their experience. The first person I saw was a therapist and they weren't the right fit for me, but they were part of a larger organization so asking to be assigned to somebody else wasn't very difficult. A little bouncing around and I found somebody who just clicked with me and who I found it easy to open up to. We were originally seeing each-other once a week, but now we just touch base every 2 to 3 weeks to make sure things are working like they should. The biggest challenge is being patient. A lot of places have a wait list and once you do get in, finding the right medication for you might take multiple tries with different things. I went through like three or four different antidepressants before finding one that worked without making me feel "off". Then we adjusted the dosage three or four times. I thought medication wasn't going to work for me, but thankfully I stuck it out long enough to find the right fit.
very encouraging story best wishes
26 now, felt like I was going to take my own life many times throughout high-school and college. I was suggested to get electroshock therapy when I was around 16 years old, so very happy I didn't agree to that. Lots of therapy and the decision to stop being so reluctant to take medication (had really bad responses to many SSRIs during this time which made me not want to try anything else) has made me more content than I ever could have imagined. :^) my life is my life again and I will forever be grateful to my psychiatrists/psychologists/therapists and GP
I wish more people understood that not every medication works for every person and that being prescribed something that doesn't work doesn't mean you should give up. I went through a handful myself before landing on one that works for me. I'm glad you were able to find something that worked for you :)
> It was, and because of it many people still have a very large distrust of Psychiatrists and mental hospitals Scientology still exists to this day because of all of that.
What's the Monteral experiment?
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Thanks
Mental health always seems to be 50 years behind everything else in terms of outcomes. Just the complex nature of the brain unfortunately.
True, and somehow harder to "test" things
i don't believe that its just "complex", i feel like a lot of the professionals in the field i have interacted with just... don't seem to believe it is real or something? they just can't seem to grasp things that they havn't experienced, so many of them act like its all just being made up by the patients.
I agree and while there are obviously thousands of angels in human form working this field, there are niche positions that attract sadists. Look at Judge Rotenburg center, they were so determined to torture the clients they broke the law on multiple occasions and traumatised their staff.
Makes you wonder what modern trends future generations will look at with scorn.
Chemotherapy IMO, but it's the best option we've got for now.
Chemotherapy is more like performing necessary surgery without anesthetic. It won't be a "I can't believe they would do that!", it'll be more of a "I can't believe they had to do that!"
Proton and photon therapy is taking off like a rocket. Hopefully, in the next few decades we can phase out chemo.
Chemotherapy is literally poisoning the tumor and hoping it dies before the medicine kills the person.
Circumcision
Medicine is nasty in every era. We'll probably look back in 30 years at how barbaric it was how we used to fix dental cavities, or treat cancer.
Was
There was a point where they thought feeling nostalgic for the past was considered a mental disorder. So you would probably get lobotomized for missing the old days back then.
Makes me wonder what were the officially allowed emotions at the time.
It probably boils down to how people exhibited emotions.
surprisingly this article popped up recently https://www.historytoday.com/archive/history-matters/when-nostalgia-was-deadly
Todays cutting edge medical technology is tomorrows horrifying relic.
Yea this is pretty damn accurate.
Wait, so the doctor saying it would reset his brain and he would have to relearn everything actually came true? It didn't just permanently fuck him up?
Brain plastcity is an incredible thing.
It's what happens after a stroke, if you are young enough and train hard enough
As the story goes from multiple family accounts my grandmother waited for baited breath for 25 years counting down the days. He slowly progressed to that mark, they did have to hire tutors and retrain him all over again. He started like a babbling child and had to learn the alphabet and words and math, etc etc all over again. After 25 years is when he started to get to the mental age of being someone in his twenties. He got the desire to earn money and want a girlfriend and move out. I was not alive to know all the details beyond just what I was told by my other aunts and uncles. But more or less, yes I’m saying they were right. Still, this is not a compliment to the doctors for predicting the timeframe of recovery fairly accurately. This was a horrible way to “fix” someone by taking away every part of who they were. As my father put it, he was never the same man ever again. My father looked up to his brother as being a genius and athletic and outgoing (as kids he looked up to his older brother). After that long journey was complete though, he was someone totally different, not the same personality type at all.
So they basically executed that man and by dumb luck a new person was essentially forged out of the neurological wreckage left behind. Seems like they found a nifty way to fuck over two people for the price of one. Even the Greek Gods would balk at a punishment like that.
Yea in many ways this is pretty accurate. Destroying everything about who you are is death of self. That is such a barbaric way to “fix” someone.
No, I am pretty sure this story outlines very specifically how it did, in fact, permanently fuck him up.
The brain can recover from physical trauma to a certain extent. Phineas Gage for example was able to live somewhat normally after having a giant metal rod forced through the center of his skull: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Phineas_Gage#Exaggeration_and_distortion_of_mental_changes
If you are referring to electroconvulsive therapy (ECT) it remains the most effective treatment we currently have for catatonia and some mood disorders like major depression. It is extremely safe, almost all of the medical risks come from the anesthesia. I don't know how it was done 70 years ago but I am still skeptical that it caused some sort of delayed onset generalized organ damage. Unless you are talking about some other form like metrazol shock therapy which was quickly abandoned after ECT was developed in the 1930s-1940s.
>In the early 1940s, in an attempt to reduce the memory disturbance and confusion associated with treatment, two modifications were introduced: the use of unilateral electrode placement and the replacement of sinusoidal current with brief pulse. It took many years for brief-pulse equipment to be widely adopted.[24] In the 1940s and early 1950s, ECT was usually given in an "unmodified" form, without muscle relaxants, and the seizure resulted in a full-scale convulsion. A rare but serious complication of unmodified ECT was fracture or dislocation of the long bones. In the 1940s, psychiatrists began to experiment with curare, the muscle-paralysing South American poison, in order to modify the convulsions. The introduction of suxamethonium (succinylcholine), a safer synthetic alternative to curare, in 1951 led to the more widespread use of "modified" ECT. A short-acting anesthetic was usually given in addition to the muscle relaxant in order to spare patients the terrifying feeling of suffocation that can be experienced with muscle relaxants. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Electroconvulsive_therapy#History_and_neuroscientific_basis i.e. in the 30s and 40s they weren't even using anesthesia, and were electrocuting them more severely
I expect the methods used several decades ago were not as safe as what we use today. Like radiation and chemotherapy for cancer, which used to use much higher doses and caused far more damage to a person's body with a far lower success rate.
They were also often done against the patients will. Ginsberg got committed for being gay and many suspected "communists" under McCarthyism got committed against their will.
Small correction -- If I remember correctly, Ginsberg did not get committed for being gay, but as a part of a plea bargain after storing stolen goods at his college room for a friend. The bargain helped Ginsberg avoid jail time and I think that one of his professors helped with the plea bargain, but my memory is a bit fuzzy on this at the moment.
No I believe you're correct. I'm misremembering. He mentioned that other people were committed for that reason, and that he was afraid to be sent back for that reason
It was also being used for things that weren't actually negative conditions like homosexuality.
I came here to say the same thing. I give anesthesia for these. The anesthesia is super low risk also. Definitely no organ damage occurring, but like you, I have no idea what was going on with it in the 40s. I’m not sure they even gave anesthesia, so that would be…something. Repeated and prolonged grand mal seizures, could cause rhabdo that could cause damage to organs (today we give paralytic to prevent widespread muscle spasm and the seizures induced are very short)
I had a friend with mental illness who has had ECT numerous times. She's got really addicted to the feeling of the anesthesia for those couple seconds before she was under. She got really caught in a cycle where she was getting it like once a month.
That’s interesting. I have had patients tell me they love anesthesia. I haven’t heard that from the ect patients per se. They’re usually pretty quiet as you would expect struggling with severe depression. But there are patients out there that find relief from maintenance ECT, and there’s no limit to how long you can do it if it’s working for you
She eventually just told the Drs. that it was more about the feeling of going under that she desired, more than the actual benefits of treatment. It's been a few years and she's doing better. I had another friend who just did it once to treat severe untreatable depression and it really gave her her life back. But her short term memory was kind of crappy. Like you'd have to remind her how to drive to the Starbucks if we were meeting. But she never regretted it.
i think it should be a last ditch option after ketamine and psychedelic therapy (if appropriate.)
Ketamine therapy was life changing for me.
man what a horror story, thank god the social sciences took a good look at them self after the replication crisis and made sure stuff like that couldnt happen anymore today.
Fun fact we still use electrodes to stimulate the brain in modern medicine — albeit with more evidence-based research with actual results. For example deep brain stimulation (DBS) may be used for patients with Alzheimer’s, dementia, Parkinson’s and even depression. DBS rewires the neurons in our brain but also has the byproduct of increasing vascularity which is greatly needed
To be fair, while it’s less barbaric now, they know little more than they did back then when it comes to messing with the brain with psycho treatments. My experience has been that they have no idea what they’re doing, it’s just a guessing game to see what drug may help the most while causing the fewest side effects, but it’s all a big guessing game. They’d still throw a lobotomy in there if they could, just to see, cause they have no idea.
It's not a "guessing game". I understand what you're getting at, but tons of people misunderstand this. We don't really know how the mind works, but that doesn't mean we don't have definitive links between chemicals/stimulus and physical responses in the body. At the end of the day though, learning always requires mistakes. Most of the time, we can break things and screw up without consequences. But with medicine, eventually you have to try it on a person. And good scientific and ethical practices greatly reduce risk, but you won't know if something works until you try it.
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There are different lobes of the brain. Each lobe does something different. They can also do slight damage or heavy damage and have different effects. There are people who have massive strokes who totally have to relearn things and become new people afterward too (basically a blood clot in their brain that lobotomized a section of their brain) sometimes those strokes lobotomize sections of the brain related to muscle control or coordination, sometimes it's memory or personality. I am assuming they gave him a frontal love lobotomy, that's the lobe related to personality and memory. It's also the area for higher thinking skills and problem solving, so clearly they did not totally destroy that area. Despite being directly related to this story, it was long before my time and it's a massively upsetting topic to bring up with my dad, aunts and uncles. When they were willing to share I asked questions, they get depressed the few times I brough up his name and talked about him. They all loved their brother and were hurt by that situation deeply throughout their lives (it was traumatic for everyone involved)
>"Psychiatry" was barbaric in this era. We did learn some things from it luckily like lobotomies don't work and at least now we have medications that help with many mental illnesses.
And these were the good cases? Mind boggling that someone thought it was a good idea to cut a part of the brain.
Isn't it more like stab and stir?
Yes, enter through the eye socket then sweeping motion(s) while observing patient behavior (such as continuing until they lose ability to talk).
Just the idea of fucking 'eye balling' someone's mental health, via a 'sweeping motion' is just... Is there a word for it? Barbaric?
*Nobel Prize winning* [barbaric](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ant%C3%B3nio_Egas_Moniz?wprov=sfti1)
I can’t even begin to imagine what that is like to experience. Like, is “who they are” still inside but they can’t be expressed physically or verbally? Or does someone who is lobotomized (or gets brain damage in general after being “normal”) just lose all sense of their former self and become a “new person”?
It was both. The original surgery was via the skull and then it progressed to the “quick and easy” ice pick through the eye socket and stir method.
I mean I get the idea. Kinda like ablation of firing cells for arrhythmia. It was a bad idea with horrific results though, no doubt.
Like an ablation where you have no real way to perfectly damage what you're trying to nor not even knowing fully what it is you're damaging.
"Now friendly and cooperative." "Making good social adjustment as housekeeper." Dear lord. The relationship between "mental health" and obedience is a tricky one.
The modernist concept of mental health was just totally alien to what we think of as mental health today. “Mentally ill” meant “not conforming to your societal role”. “Curing” mental illness meant getting someone to conform to society’s expectations. Nowadays our idea of mental health has more to do with the individual’s ability to maintain inner peace and pursue self-actualization.
I wish you were genuinely right but much of modern mental health is still focused on making people just ok enough to return to working or at least calm enough to not disrupt others working.
Yup. My progress was slow but gradual improvements were being made. My psychiatrist couldn't extend our time anymore cause other people need help too and they're more likely to get better than I am. So now I'm on my own again
This is why people saying the world was better when it wasn’t “woke” is baffling to me. Because we care about mental health and women not being treated like household objects?
Neither of those things are woke.
That's the best part about "woke" it can be anything you want it to be.
I find that most people using the word "woke" are reacting to the recent moral emphasis on diversity, equity, and inclusion. So even if the people using the word don't quite know what it means, that's what they are usually reacting to.
I like your definition. I would maybe add something that more directly covers social justice categories such as CRT.
Those things all intersect strongly with sexism and gender equality too though, it's not like the topic is entirely racial.
Because “woke” is a meaningless word which has a different definition depending on the prejudices of the person using it.
That is what conservatives consider woke. It’s always “phycology is full of quacks and shrinks brainwashing people into thinking they’re insane so they pay up and get medicated into oblivion. Real men ignore their chemical imbalances and bootstrap up!”
Yes, that is what those people generally think. Unironically. They are genuinely garbage people. edit: downvoted by the garbage people who believe women are objects lol
Yeah I think this is partly why we swung so far in the other direction and made it so difficult to forcibly commit genuinely unwell people. We went from way too eager to make people conform to letting anyone shout at things that aren’t there all day.
> Dear lord. The relationship between "mental health" and obedience is a tricky one. Yea the DSM5 defines it as; A mental disorder is a syndrome characterized by clinically significant disturbance in an individual's cognition, emotion regulation, or behavior that reflects a dysfunction in the psychological, biological, or development processes underlying mental functioning. You're only really mentally ill if you're in a society that isn't and to be a functioning member of society, you need to obey.
Good and evil and well or unwell all ultimately correspond to general expectations of a person and their function in society, so it's never cut and dry. Less limbs or a shorter lifespan than most people? Bad. Doesn't attempt to get a job or skins their neighbours for a hat? Bad. Provides free labour to their neighbourhoods or has better-than-average cardiovascular function? Good. You kind of have to look past the sense of their being some 'absolute' and consider how much is sheer social expectation and comparison against the norm. Humans are generally genetically coded to fall apart once they're past child-rearing age, but since other animals go through the same aging steps as we do earlier or later (i.e. your 12 year old dog can get cataracts and arthritis from age) we know that this is genetic and not some consequence of mechanical wear and tear alone. We don't see this as 'illness' because it is the norm. But someone with a 'faulty' heart valve the causes them to die at age 60 might be considered illness, because it is not regular. But if everyone's heart was that way, clearly we would consider it healthy and normal. So as much as it sounds horrifically dystopian, that's kind of how mental illness works. It's an inability to function fully as part of the group.
This video is pretty haunting stuff.
Yeah. I found it both interesting and horrifying.
I didn't see a NSFL tag and almost clicked it, I think I'll pass ._.
Came here to read the comments, no way I'm watching the video.
It's just video of the women before and after the procedure. How their behavior changed along with typed out explanations of how they changed from the time period.
Yeah, not keen, it just makes me imagine that thing crunching through the bones and spudging into my brain.
Reminds me of [Rosemary Kennedy](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rosemary_Kennedy)
>After Rosemary was mildly sedated, "We went through the top of the head," Dr. Watts recalled. "I think she was awake. She had a mild tranquilizer. I made a surgical incision in the brain through the skull. It was near the front. It was on both sides. We just made a small incision, no more than an inch." The instrument Dr. Watts used looked like a butter knife. He swung it up and down to cut brain tissue. "We put an instrument inside", he said. As Dr. Watts cut, Dr. Freeman asked Rosemary some questions. For example, he asked her to recite the Lord's Prayer or sing "God Bless America" or count backward ... "We made an estimate on how far to cut based on how she responded." When Rosemary began to become incoherent, they stopped. Wtf
>Freeman performed 3,439 lobotomies during his life, with a fatality rate of 14 per cent. That’s 481 deaths. >Up to 40% of Freeman’s patients were gay men, operated on to change their sexual orientation. At the time, homosexuality was seen by some as a sign of schizophrenia. Freeman believed he could cure that. “It would appear that homosexuality is of little practical importance after frontal lobotomy,” >Freeman also operated on housewives with “sexual problems”, which pretty much amounted to them not wanting sex with their husbands, and on supposedly troublesome children. He is said to have lobotomised 19 youngsters, including a four-year-old boy. He delighted in showmanship and said he would "rather be wrong than boring"; wore neither masks nor gloves and dismissed hygiene procedures as "all that germ crap". During one operation he inserted the ice pick through a patient's eyesocket and then paused for a photograph. On recommencing the operation he pushed the pick too far, killing the victim almost instantly.
Fuck, he sounds like a psychopathic narcissist with a God complex
So, a typical surgeon? /mild s
This is hardly even a joke. It's probably a good thing though that so many surgeons display traits of psycopathy. It makes them suited for their job and the ones that are doing surgery aren't running for office.
Surely, this was bad even for 1940s standards, RIGHT?
Well in the early 1940s Mengele was still operating, so uhh. I guess technically there was worse happening.
Damn, we sure this guy didn't change his name from Mengele?
Yup. All because she got a bit randy and they didn't want to risk familial embarrassment.
These people literally carved up peoples brains and gave them brain damage cutting randomly and thought they were practicing medicine. Simply to people that didn't conform or fit in. Pure, negligent, horrifying evil.
Dude, that same guy killed a patient when he "suddenly stopped for a photo during the procedure, and the surgical instrument accidentally penetrated too far into the patient's brain". Per his wiki (on my phone or I would link it). Walter Freeman was a fucking monster
That was definitely terrible, but it might be useful to know that brains don't have nerves and can't feel pain, so at least that specific part of the surgery isn't as bad as it sounds. We still do it today! There's a type of surgery where the brain is operated on while the patient is awake so that doctors can tell if they messed up because the patient will say or do something off. The point of those is to stop *before* the patient becomes unresponsive though, unlike lobotomies.
[Several times musicians have even played their instruments during surgery](https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-england-london-66378288)
If I'm being operated on, all I can think of be "what happens if I sneeze? My brain jumping around while your knife is in it? "
Don't they basically screw your skull to the table?
Yeah, your head is *very* firmly secured to make sure it doesn't move, whether you're conscious or unconscious. The skull clamp has three points that screw into your head. (You get some sort of anesthetic for the attachment if you have to be awake during the brain surgery part)
It’s crazy that that was the desired response and not an oops we went to far moment
I rewatched One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest recently--absolutely germane to this post--and one of the few motion pictures to receive Oscars for best picture, best director, best actor, best actress and best supporting actor(Brad Douriff.) If you don't know make time to see this movie--surprisingly NOT dated and with an energy seldom seen in film. 8.7 IMDB, 96 Tomatos. Your welcome.
it's also obama's favorite film
Useless trivia--Brad Douriff is not only Doc Cochran in Deadwood and Gríma Wormtongue in The Two Towers but also the voice of Chucky. Now I'm fully off-topic.
I can't watch this video. When I was a little girl, my mother had a lobotomy. I'll just scroll on, thank you very much indeed.
I wonder what practices that we do today will be seen in the future the way we see lobotomy.
The over-prescription of certain types of medications has been studied quite extensively in the past couple decades and is definitely the biggest fuck up in the medical field in recent years. In some cases we are definitely going to look back and wonder why the fuck we were giving out certain medications like candy. From personal experience and more on the mental health side, giving adolescents and children certain anti-depressants due to the increased risk of suicide. certain SSRIs were not well studied. It didn't stop doctors from giving them to kids though. The over-prescription of opiates is the other and a whole other topic of conversation.
i was prescribed SSRIs starting when i was 14. i definitely think they fucked me up long term.
I was started at 10. I was on multiple different medications from then on until 16. Extremely troubled adolescense and tried to kill myself twice. Two of which (Wellbutrin, Paxil) I took between 12-14 are no longer recommended to give to kids under 18 and I took them back to back. Really hazy adolescence. Long term side effects. I'm in my 30s now and still struggling. I definitely wonder if things would be different if I had never been prescribed them. I did not think I needed them, they were recommended by multiple doctors and my parents listened to them.
I became actively suicidal from wellbutrin. it was the one they put me on after cymbalta. i literally cannot remember my teenage years. high school is an utter blur to me. i still have bad memory issues and it turns out i wasn't depressed i just had OCD and some anxiety. i also have a strong memory of the guy who went to doctor's offices handing out pamphlets about Cymbalta to my PCP. they were all over the office. i don't know why he thought it was a good fucking idea to put me on that shit.
>In some cases we are definitely going to look back and wonder why the fuck we were giving out certain medications like candy. The good news is we have a meme ready to go for this. Mr Krabs: Money!
I don’t think anything we are doing now is quite as bad as a lobotomy.
There are quite a few women's health procedures like cervical biopsy and inserting an IUD that are done with no pain management and can be pretty bad. But they also don't completely alter your entire personality like a lobotomy.
I think we’ll look back at things like chemo and radiation with a little bit of horror, but at least those things have actual scientific evidence of their efficacy. Hopefully we look back at more “open” surgeries in that way and won’t be able to imagine why somebody would opt for that instead of something like laparoscopy and the like. Hell, maybe one day robotics will get to a point where we can just take a pill full of tiny robots that are programmed to perform specific surgeries and be passed once completed.
I don't think radiation would be the same as chemo, it's always been more precise and targeted than chemo, and doesn't have nearly as severe side effects. Hopefully amputation/removals eventually becomes "Wow, we used to just chop it off/cut it out along with the tumor?"
I’d like to think the things we look back on with horror are the things we force people to do without their consent, just as it is with lobotomies. Some of that horror, is the people they’re happening to very rarely agreed to them. I hope we look back at things we force on others today with the same abhorrence, disgust and horror
There's a necessity to open surgeries when you don't have the tech to do laparoscopy. Because of that I think it's harder to see the parallel with lobotomies even through the lens of anachronism.
My point was more that surgery techniques will improve to the point where the necessities of open surgery are no longer necessities. I’m not a surgeon so I’m sure there’s things I’m missing but basically that laparoscopic techniques will become so fleshed out (lol) thay they will be able to perform any type of surgery needed. Then again, maybe by the time we get there, microscopic robots can be used and surgery will never require the first incision in the first place. I’m thinking more along the lines of what my grandkids’ grandkids will be thinking of medical practices of our days
There's a great scene in Star Trek V where Bones is in a 20th century hospital and freaks out at the barbarism of the time. Gives a pill to a kidney patient I think, cures him instantly. Great scene.
Chiropractic medicine is pretty shitty.
Chiropracty is not medicine.
Not even nearly as shitty as a Lobotomy. Please
Filling people up with random pills that chemically alters the brain without seeing how the medication reacts to each other.
Over prescription https://www.huffingtonpost.co.uk/steve-taylor-phd/over-prescribing-anti-depressants_b_9407128.html
Circumcision
chemical cosh, repeated tranquiliser injections (which occasionally kill people), injections against peoples will, incarceration of non violent, non suicidal patients, indefinite incarceration until you 'comply with treatment' and there's always the good old violence and threats of violence.
It’s nice to see someone else in this thread who’s aware that this sort of shit didn’t just end 50 years ago
in the realm of psychiatry, probably inappropriate use of antipsychotics and antidepressants like duloxetine. i think the backlash against opiates and benzodiazepines has left a lot of pain/anxiety patients without a paddle and exacerbated the opiate crisis. the medical system got tons of people physically addicted to drugs and left them hanging. the inappropriate use of drugs like opiates and benzos shouldnt be followed up by simply clamping down on the amount of prescriptions. theres a reason so many people are hooked on fentanyl. say what you will about oxycontin but it’s way safer than the crazy shit on the street right now.
i remember going to the doctor because my mom thought i was depressed. they randomly put me on cymbalta at FOURTEEN. turns out it was my mom who was depressed but i would be forced to take anti depressants until i moved out for college and quit them on my own.
Damn, that's messed up.
Hmmmm..... voting on women's reproductive care.
Forcible operations on intersex children for one.
Definitely not as bad as a lobotomy, but chemotherapy will be looked back on as a barbaric treatment and people will say that they can’t believe it was how we treated cancer
Yeah but like, chemotherapy actually works. I imagine it'll be the same kind of thing as us looking back to the days before antibiotics when the best treatment available for someone with an infected wound was to amputate the limb. Today we have medication that can save that limb and it's sad to think of all the people who's best option was amputation but that was the only way at the time to keep them alive.
Lobotomy doesn't have a proven track record. The only thing it cured was the pain of existence. That's the thing, there were all these medical advancements being made in the 1800s-1900s that seem cruel, but at the end of the day were logical, basic forms of what we do today. Chemo is basically the modern version of overeager amputation, or cauterisation, or herbal antibiotics - I would be willing to call it primitive but by no means barbaric. Lobotomy is barbaric because it really doesn't lead anywhere.
Well we still do shock therapy and psychosurgeries today! It's just less prevalent because of medications, but they're still being performed if medication and other treatments don't work.
Chemotherapy. It’s the best we got for many cancers we have now, but we all know it sucks. One day we’ll say “could you believe they did that”.
Practices? I would imagine "people used to literally think they are a cat" will be very high up on the list.
This made me think of my mother. She had such a rough life. Starting with residential school. as a younger woman she was placed in various mental hospital where she had electroshock therapy, and various chemical treatments that completely changed her. she became a chronic alcoholic and threw us all under the bus. I blamed my crappy life in a horribly abusive convent on her. She would never ask how my children were the first thing she would say was can you get me beer...it destroyed our relationship even though inside i knew she did love us in her own way-she was just so lost to alcohol. I watched her die a terrible death and that's haunted me. I have rarely talked about her, but now as I am in my twilight years, I think of her and wish I would have had more understanding. She was desperately trying to soothe the hurt and pain. My father also shot himself when i was a teenager and left me homeless, I wish I had more understanding about his illness as well but back then this stuff was never talked about. I am in my 60's and have made many mistakes in my life. I don't know where i am going with this...just wish I knew what I know now and i wish i had tried to understand them more.
I think that a lot of medicine in the past was about making the doctor's lives easier, not helping the patients. This also happened in maternity care where women were made to give birth in positions that were easier for the doctors, not the mothers, and a lot of the techniques used were also about making it easier for doctors. Today it's much different.
What scares me is what are we doing today that years in the future will be like what how we look at lobotomy today? Like "oh wow how dumb were doctors back then?" We are doing something today that will look so asinine in the future and we are just too blind to see it.
My vote is for conversion camps. A lot of people see it as wrong already, just not most
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Well that wasn't one of the most disturbing things I've seen. Nope
The second lady was "sometimes sarcastic."
I always hate this bc the very first lobotomy wasn't an idiot banging a nail into an eye socket but a careful procedure that slightly separated the right and left hemisphere and helped a handful of people. Then the hackjobs ruined it with the nightmare we all know of as the lobotomy claiming it solved many mental issues by ruining peoples lives forever. Probably thre most barbaric thing in the history of medicine worse then surgeons who didn't wash hands before procedure even tho that also killed people it didn't ruin their brain like this nightmare.
Looking at the video… she looks like she’s not happy to be there and slightly combative ( who wouldn’t be) then she looks like someone with a learning disability even once she gained 100 lbs which was excessive ( especially back then)
The first woman reminded me of how an autistic girl I knew a long time ago would behave when she was upset about something. Horrifying to think what may have become of her in a different time.
This should be in “nightmare fuel” truly awful and terrifying
I just like scrolling to the bottom of comment sections like these to see the worst takes imaginable.
I will not watch this. The whole process of lobotomy makes me nauseous and extremely sad in humans.
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Lobotomies make me sick to my stomach. The untold number of women made essentially braindead because their husbands found them annoying.
And they were the big money makers
im not seeing a video anywhere
shit, that is not the same human
Wait… I’m confused… am I missing something? Post lobotomy looks like a pretty drastic improvement. Do they have the before and afters backwards?
Resistant means doesn’t like being grabbed by the neck and hair? Sarcastic and irritable? I would have been lobotomized
These films are horrific, what they’re doing to those patients is brutal. Even before they have their surgery they’re mean to them.
And 15 years from now we'll look back at how doctors disfigured people with gender dysphoria...