Drugs (Kids) & Lobotomies (PBS Monday Night)

[Guest guest]

The below letters are in response to the article entitled States Sue

Over Costly Drug Program - Florida Undecided: http://tinyurl.com/2t76sr

http://www.news-journalonline.com/NewsJournalOnline/Opinion/LettersToThe

Editor/letLET012008.htm

Daytona Beach News Journal

Letters to the Editor for Jan. 20, 2008

Drugging not way to go

As a former remedial teacher in private schools in Florida, I think all

criticism leveled against psychiatric programs escalating and expanding

the drugging of babies, toddlers, kids and teens is justified This is

not the way to go. I worked with grammar school kids who had difficulty

in class. I had great success using a variety of techniques, including

the great Montessori techniques for teaching.

Then, I had a cousin who couldn't sleep. He was in his late 20s. He had

other physical problems, not yet determined. This had been going on for

quite a while, and though he was suffering, he was living with it. His

family physician prescribed antidepressants. A week, or less, later, he

was found dead in his room (in bed).

Babies and kids, just like all of us, have moods. Kids have trouble

learning, just like all of us. Kids -- especially boys -- are active.

This is a good thing, not " bad. " Moods are not " wrong, " they are not

" illness " or " disorders. " Moods are responses and indicators of

something, be it school, other kids, teachers, possible physical

illnesses, etc. To determine the problem and solve it is the correct

action. Drugging the kid so he doesn't feel that emotion is like playing

God. It's arrogant and wrong and has backfired and will backfire.

We're losing our new generation to psychiatry's critical view of the

world: " Kids should be seen, not heard " ; " Religion is just a crutch " ;

" We should control all emotions and behaviors. " These are dangerous

views, and we should not be supporting them with unthinking agreement or

with our tax money. I cringe to think that my tax dollars are going to

drug foster kids, prisoners and soldiers. And yet that's precisely where

they are going!

JOANNE CALI, Southborough, Mass.

Must examine behavior

The drugs in most cases create side effects that are worse than what the

child was first medicated for. These drugs also create a dependency. We

have children who will grow into adults with a dependency on drugs.

Many times the root of the child's behavior is not investigated. A sugar

high from an improper diet? Lack of parental skills? Other classroom

children creating a problem for the child? Medication is not the answer

for a child's behavior until all areas of the child's life have been

explored.

Florida needs to join the other states in the lawsuits against use of

anti-psychotic drugs in children. We have a world in which whatever

makes the money is more important than the human.

CAROL J. BEECHER, R.N., Monticello, Ind.

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2008/01/14/AR200801

1401484.html

Walter J. Freeman performs a lobotomy in 1949

'Lobotomist' Serves as a Warning

Documentary Shows Damage Done When Medicine Goes Awry

By G. Boodman

Washington Post Staff Writer

January 15, 2008

One of the most horrifying medical treatments of the 20th century was

carried out not clandestinely, but with the approval of the medical

establishment, the media and the public. Known as the transorbital or

" ice pick " lobotomy, the crude and destructive brain-scrambling

operation performed on thousands of psychiatric patients between the

1930s and 1960s was touted as a cure for mental illness.

Its prosaic name comes from the instrument initially used to perform it:

an ice pick plucked from the kitchen drawer of the procedure's tireless

proselytizer, Walter J. Freeman, who pioneered the operation in 1936

while at Washington University Hospital.

The story of how Freeman sold his procedure to credulous colleagues,

assiduously courted the press and convinced desperate families that

sticking an ice pick through a patient's upper eye sockets and twirling

it like a swizzle stick through brain matter would cure psychosis,

depression or troublesome behavior is the ultimate in cautionary medical

tales.

As the riveting hour-long " American Experience " documentary " The

Lobotomist " (scheduled to air Jan. 21 at 9 p.m. on WETA and other PBS

stations) makes clear, Freeman's operation reflected the neurologist's

peculiar combination of zealotry, talent, hubris and, as one of his

trainees noted, craziness. Sometimes Freeman, who relished putting on a

show, used a carpenter's mallet instead of a surgical hammer during

demonstrations of his operation. At other times, he would operate

left-handed rather than right-handed.

Based in part on the much-praised 2005 biography " The Lobotomist " by

medical writer Jack El-Hai, who appears in the film and served as a

consultant, the film by Barak Goodman and Maggio features chilling

black-and-white home movies as well as haunting photographs of patients

before and sometimes after their lobotomies. Many of the movies are

narrated by a gravel-voiced Freeman demonstrating the procedure he

performed on more than 2,900 people, the youngest of whom was 4.

State hospitals were teeming, squalid warehouses that had become

permanent homes to thousands who had little hope of ever leaving. One of

the most notorious was Washington's St. s Hospital, where

Freeman began his career in the 1920s and was struck by the sight of

5,000 patients " whose lives were going nowhere, would go nowhere, " in

the words of El-Hai.

The solution, Freeman believed, lay in a radical experimental procedure

invented by a Portuguese neurologist who in 1949 would win the Nobel

Prize in medicine. He claimed the drastic brain operation had cured a

substantial number of people with mental illness.

The scion of a distinguished Philadelphia medical family who had a

burning desire for fame, Freeman began experimenting and developed the

ice pick procedure. His operation severed the frontal lobe from the

thalamus, the repository of emotions and the site where Freeman believed

mental illness originated.

A few patients and their families claimed lobotomy was beneficial,

especially in reducing agitation, which was Freeman's measure of

success. But others died on the table or were left irreparably damaged:

childlike, docile, vacant and incontinent. Among them was Rosemary

Kennedy, the 23-year-old mildly retarded sister of F. Kennedy, who

spent 56 years of her life in an institution after Freeman operated on

her in 1941.

Undaunted by his failures, Freeman's pitch that lobotomy cured mental

illness was seized on by the press -- the Washington Star called it

among " the greatest innovations of this generation, " and the New York

Times pronounced it " history-making. " Many doctors embraced it as a

10-minute operation that promised to empty mental hospitals and return

patients to their families. Opponents, mostly psychiatrists who

practiced Freudian talk therapy, didn't matter much: In those days

public criticism of a doctor by his peers was regarded as unethical.

By the early 1960s lobotomy had fallen out of favor, in part because of

its low success rate and the disastrous harm it inflicted on many

patients.

Freeman, who died in 1972, performed his last lobotomy in 1967; his

privileges at Herrick Hospital in Berkeley, Calif., were revoked after

the patient died.

While several of his relatives appear on camera, one of the most

affecting interviews is with Berkeley bus driver Dully, who was

lobotomized by Freeman at age 12 after his stepmother complained he was

difficult.

The issue at the heart of this powerful and unsettling film is not, as

one writer puts it, " how a man could go off the rails, but how science

could go off the rails. "

It's a question well worth pondering

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