The Patients' Attitudes to Leucotomy and its Effects

• Published in: British journal of psychiatry 1952-07, Vol.98 (412), p.382-388
• Main Author: Stengel, E
• Format: Article
• Language: English
• Subjects: Attitude; Old Medline; Psychosurgery
• ISSN: 0007-1250; 0368-315X; 1472-1465; 2514-9946
• DOI: 10.1192/bjp.98.412.382

It is perhaps not surprising that there have been no studies on the leucotomized patients' attitudes to the operation and its effects. There has been no practical reason for giving that problem special attention. Leucotomized patients have not spontaneously voiced complaints about the operation, even when the result was unsatisfactory. It seems that their apparent silence has been taken so much for granted that psychiatrists have failed to realize that it is an astonishing phenomenon. Here is a group of patients who have been subjected to an operation of which the pros and cons have been widely discussed in public. Many have left hospital free from symptoms but socially handicapped by the side-effects of the operation. Yet there has been, as far as this writer is aware, no instance of litigation in connection with the surgical treatment of mental illness. Part of the explanation for what seems to be a collective indifference to, if not general approval of, the operation and its effects may be found in the type of mental disorder for which this treatment has been most frequently applied: among the patients thus treated there have been many schizophrenics who even after the operation remained out of touch with reality, but that explanation does not apply to the numerous patients who were operated on for affective illnesses and neuroses.