The Lobotomist

There's a new PBS American Experience called "The Lobotomist" out. It's about Walter Freeman who is considered the father of the lobotomy. For those of you who don't know what a lobotomy is, it's basically a barbaric practice with very serious side effects in which the "doctor" (I'm sorry, but I can't bring myself to call someone a doctor who does this) takes an ice-pick like instrument and a mallet, and after knocking the victim out - usually by using electroshock treatment - inserts the ice-pick through the bone of your eye and slashes the lobes of the front of your brain. It's really disgusting and it's actually making my stomach turn just writing about it. Anyway, the PBS special is very interesting, check it out if you have the stomach for it.

Psychiatrists still use ECT

Did you know that psychiatrists still use Electric Convulsive Shock Therapy - also known as ECT? This is where a psychiatrist puts an enormous amount of electrical current through the brain of a human being, thereby "curing" the patient. First of all, hasn't your mother ever told you not to stick your finger in an electrical socket? How would it make sense that this would differ for the insane, or even for the depressed?
Second of all, this treatment actually causes irreversable damage to the brain, memory loss, and sometimes death - either by suicide or by shock. The general result of such a treatment is that the patient is made into a vegatable, while psychiatrists rake in an estimated $3 billion annually in the United States alone.

The brilliant writer and Nobel Prize winner, Mr. Ernest Hemmingway, was given electric shock treatment. He told his friend, “Well, what is the sense of ruining my head and erasing my memory, which is my capital, and putting me out of business? It was a brilliant cure but we lost the patient....” and indeed we did, Mr. Hemmingway committed suicide shortly afterward in 1961.

For more information on this terrible and deadly "treatment", check out this link.