31 Of The Most Bizarre Trends Of The 50s And 60s

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Getting a lobotomy to deal with mental health problems

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Incredible as it may seem, there was a time when the transorbital lobotomy—a type of psychosurgery that involved severing connections in the brain’s prefrontal lobe—was the go-to fix for mental health issues. Pioneered by Portuguese neurologist Egas Moniz in 1949 and popularized in America Dr. Walter Jackson Freeman shortly thereafter, the procedure was nothing short of dreadful. Using an ice pick-type instrument inserted into a patient’s eyeball, through the eye orbit, the doctor would access the frontal cortex of the brain and move the pick back and forth to sever the connections in that area of the brain. Then, the process would be repeated on the other side of the head. The barbaric procedure was used to treat a wide range of real and perceived mental disorders and psychoses, including melancholy (which we now know as depression), suicidal ideations, anger management issues, schizophrenia, borderline personality disorders, and even vague “issues” like sexual inclinations and homosexual tendencies. The treatment typically resulted in stupor, confusion, a loss of sense and self, loss of intellectual capacity and emotional range, and, often, seizures. Disturbingly, the procedure was performed mostly on women (many of whom were no more that discontented housewives), with the statistics being as high as 60% of female lobotomy patients in American hospitals in 1951.