Status Updates From My Lobotomy: A Memoir

“If Freeman had performed the same lobotomy on me as an adult, they said, I would have been a vegetable. That’s how badly damaged my brain was. I wouldn’t have been able to survive outside of an institution. I would have stayed at Agnews forever.

But my brain, when Freeman got to it, was young. It was still growing. After the surgery, it adapted to the lobotomy and found ways to compensate for it....”

“Many times I have wondered, Where were the authorities? Freeman wasn’t a licensed psychiatrist. How could he determine on the basis of a couple of short office visits with me that I had been schizophrenic since the age of four? And why would anyone accept his diagnosis anyway without insisting that I be seen by someone with the proper training?”

Wait what

‘“Does it hurt you to see those ice picks in his eyes?”

That question made my dad angry. “Do you want me in the hospital—sick, lame, or lazy?” he barked. “Because what you’re doing is asking me to dwell on something unpleasant and painful. And why should I? Looking at it will do what?”’

Jesus

“In other words, he poked these knitting needles into my skull, through my eye sockets, and then swirled them around until he felt he had scrambled things up enough. Then he took a picture of me with the needles in, and that was that.”

Wtf

“It had taken less than two months, and four visits from Lou, and four visits with me, to convince Dr. Freeman that a transorbital lobotomy was the only answer to our family’s problems. That’s how easily the decision was made.”

“Finally, she said that she’s being plagued by dreams of Howard. In one of these, which keeps recurring, she wants to spank him but finds that she has no right arm, that it’s just a weak little nub, and she interprets this as meaning that she’ll never be able to spank him. Another time a dream recurred twice that she had her teeth all set to sink in to him and woke to find herself biting the pillow.”

“The surgeries sometimes went badly. A Washington, D.C., police officer hemorrhaged after his lobotomy and became a vegetable. Leucotomes broke off in patients’ heads. One patient died on the operating table when Freeman stopped, mid-surgery, to take a photograph.”

‘He often visited patients after their surgeries and pronounced them “cured” or “improved” because their worst symptoms had disappeared. But he made these visits four or five days after the surgery, when they were still barely conscious. Many of them would experience a complete return of their anxiety, or their hysteria, or their depression...’

‘He returned to Lisbon, and in late 1935 began performing similar frontal lobe experiments on human beings. Moniz called the process “psychosurgery.” He drilled holes in his patients’ heads, and made cuts in their frontal lobes, using a tool he called a “leucotome.” He called the procedure itself a “leucotomy.”

Moniz believed this was a promising treatment for mental illness....’

“But all six of the psychiatrists, I found out later, said my behavior was normal. Four of them even said the problem in the house was with her. They said she was the one who could benefit from treatment....”

Talk about an evil stepmom. Good LORD

“Not until an autopsy was performed did her doctors realize she had cancer of the colon. [...]

Some family members would remember later that she had complained to her doctor repeatedly that she didn’t feel well, that she had pains. The doctor had chalked it up to morning sickness, and paid no attention to it.”

Typical

‘...Dr. Walter Freeman, the father of the American lobotomy, told me he was going to do some “tests.”

It took ten minutes and cost two hundred dollars. The surgery damaged me in many ways. But it didn’t “fix” me, or turn me into a robot. So my family put me into an institution.’

Jesus

y'all just do me a favor and don't ask