Page 81 - Winter2014

All Thumbs Book Reviews

picks into both eyes at once and then sode of the television series Royal Pains showed Dr. Hank recommending
step behind the patient and pull up on ECT to a troubled housewife and her total recovery afterwards.
both icepicks at the same time. Instead ECT was invented by an Italian psychiatrist who first experimented
of anesthesia he would knock patients on vagrants. It was introduced into the U.S. in the 1940s. Electrodes were
out with electroshock beforehand which placed at the patient’s temples, which induced spasms accompanied by
"saved time." He dispensed with the use memory loss, reduced cognitive function and permanent impairment of
of any sterile precautions (p 133-134). learning capacity. The procedure was repeated many times on the same
patient “to induce therapeutic confusion,” which would somehow cure
Antonio Egas Moniz, the psychiatrist who the patient. Patients often became incontinent and walked around naked.
originated the lobotomy procedure and shared a Children were also subjected to shock therapy. In an experiment on twenty
Nobel Prize in Medicine in 1949, claimed that children who were shocked twice per day for twenty days, many later
emotional disorders became fixed in the frontal became extremely violent and disturbed.
lobes and destruction of the cellular connections Patients who received the therapy speak of the extreme pain it caused:
would cure patients. After many surgeries he the broken bones and shattered teeth. Those who tried to escape were
determined that lobotomy failed in the case of dragged screaming into the treatment room. Most patients, once shocked,
schizophrenia, but Freeman reported that they became so difficult to manage when they heard about another pending
could indeed be helped by the procedure. treatment that psychiatrists began to shock them without their consent.
Freeman performed the procedure, which The opinion of the American “electroshock doctors” was that they had the
took from ten to twenty minutes, at state mental right to act in the patient’s best interest, even over his or her screaming
hospitals and on an outpatient basis hundreds protests.
of times, perhaps thousands. One of Freeman’s ECT was a common practice for two decades to frighten, control,
youngest patients, Howard Dully, was loboto- and punish difficult patients in state facilities. To quiet wards, doctors
mized at age twelve. His parents considered and nurses set up a schedule for shocking rows of patients, going up and
him a difficult child and handed him over to down the aisle with the equipment. Nurses at one Georgia asylum regularly
Freeman's quick icepick. Dully documented his threatened difficult patients with “a Georgia power cocktail.”
experiences in his book My Lobotomy. The Rockefeller Institute is at least partially responsible for the rise
In the 1950s state mental hospitals were of psychiatry in America. It provided sixteen million dollars over twenty
gradually dismantled due to the crippling costs years to develop new techniques and new departments of psychiatry and
to state budgets, and a large captive group of neurosurgery at medical schools and for the experiments which led to the
patients were no longer available for such pro- development of lobotomy and electroshock.
cedures. Lobotomy was gradually abandoned Even though psychiatrists knew the outcomes of electroshock and
around the same time, after reports of similar realized that the treatment caused permanent brain damage and disability,
surgeries in Nazi Germany revolted and shocked the procedure became commonplace. Whitaker states that these gruesome
the American general public. and inhuman treatments survived and were practiced by so many profes-
After lobotomy, electroshock therapy (ECT) sionals because of the “storytelling partnership.” One doctor told the story
was one of the most cruel and disabling treat- in a medical journal and at medical conferences that his treatment was
ments doled out by medical professionals of the successful. This story was told by another doctor, then another. With time,
last century. It continues to be used today despite the treatment was discussed in major newspapers as the treatment of the
its abysmal failure rate at relieving mental illness, hour. Doctors practicing these “therapies” became famous and rich.
especially depression. Before lobotomy, asylum medicine and asylum doctors were consid-
In the recent film, Blue Jasmine, Cate ered the lowest on the medical totem pole. After the bells and whistles of
Blanchett, whose character is named Jasmine, lobotomy and electroshock, psychiatrists took over the treatment of the
talks about receiving a dose of “Edison’s medi- mentally ill.
cine” because she was depressed. A recent epi- Continued on page 78.
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