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psychosurgery: lobotomies again
Dr. Peter Breggin, a practicing psychiatrist in Washington, D.C. and a faculty member of the Washington School for Psychiatry, gave a talk on psychosurgery sponsored by the Medical Committee for Human Rights. The Washington Post announced it and about 100 people showed up at George Washington University to listen for free. His enormous self-pride at being the first to publicly fight psychosurgery drove one of my companions out the door and even though we'd been warned that Breggin was no feminist supporter, I lost my second companion when he started talking about how he makes his women-housewife patients aware of their oppression. But his message is more important than his personality and his message is clear: "psychosurgery is a crime against humanity"; he thinks it is unethical, scientifically unsound and should be completely outlawed. His lecture and two articles printed in the Congressional Record explain why.
definition
In defining psychosurgery, Breggin uses big, ugly words like mutilation, destruction and atrocity and describes patients who have had psychosurgery as emotionally blunted and behaviorally controlled. Breggin says "psychosurgery is any surgery which mutilates or destroys brain tissue to control the emotions or behavior without treating a known brain disease. In 99% of the cases, the brain surgery will actually attack normal tissue. In a few cases, some brain disease will be present, but in these instances, the brain disease will have nothing in particular to do with the symptoms which the surgery is attacking...it is simply a mutilating operation whose effect is to destroy the individual's ability to respond emotionally."
There are many different kinds of psychosurgical operations and techniques. The most well known is the lobotomy which attacks the frontal lobes (see diagram). It is assumed that the frontal lobes are responsible for people's creativity, empathy, foresight and abstract reasoning abilities. A cingulotomy is "the creation of precisely placed lesions (cuts) in the cingulum of the frontal lobe." Also being attacked are the lower structures of the limbic system--the hypothalamus, the thalamus and the amygdala-which are supposedly the seat of the emotions. Amygdalatomies are beginning to replace lobotomies because there is apparently less damage to one's intellectual capacities. However, as Breggin points out, the brain operates as a whole so that even...