Given my own checkered history, a story like this one in the current New Yorker is just too juicy to pass up. Got issues? Read on if you dare.
Freud acknowledged the fact “that the case histories I write should read like short stories and that, as one might say, they lack the serious stamp of science.”
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The most notorious mid-century surgical intervention was the lobotomy. It was pioneered in the thirties by Egas Moniz whose work later won him the Nobel Prize. The treatment reached a grotesque apogee in America with Walter Freeman’s popularization of the transorbital lobotomy. This involved severing connections near the prefrontal cortex with an icepick-like instrument inserted through the eye sockets. Freeman crisscrossed the country — a trip he called Operation Icepick — proselytizing for the technique in state mental hospitals.
“Just as a cake recipe requires you to use flour, sugar, and baking powder in the right amounts, your brain needs a fine chemical balance.” – Promotional material for Paxil from GlaxoSmithKline.
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Words can alter, for better or worse, the chemical transmitters and circuits of our brain. Just as drugs or electro-convulsive therapy can. We still don’t fully understand how this occurs. But we do know that all these treatments are given with a common purpose based on hope, a feeling that surely has its own therapeutic biology. — Jerome Groopman, MD.
Loved the article’s last line… ““Brain anatomists had failed so miserably because they focused on the brain at the expense of the mind.”
And even though I quit drinking, I’d still rather have a bottle in front of me than a frontal lobotomy!