A-Infos (en) Playing with your brain.

["esperanto" <lingvoj@mailhost.lds.co.uk>]

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Peronally I'd prefer a bottle in front of me to a frontal
lobotomy but apparently now the state would prefer to make
that choice for me. Here's a chilling article from Donald
Rooum from the current edition of FREEDOM


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PRE-FRONTAL LOBOTOMY WITHOUT PATIENT'S CONSENT


It has been announced that the Scottish Health Secretary
will sign an order permitting doctors in Scotland to
perform the pre-frontal lobotomy operation on
non-consenting patients, with the consent of a sheriff.
This is to implement a recommendation made in 1996 by an
expert advisory panel, the GPGN (Good Practice Group in
Neurosurgery).


Pre-frontal lobotomy, or neurosurgery for mental disorder
(NMD), was discovered by Phileas Gage, an American quarry
worker, when he was tamping dynamite into a hole when it
accidentally exploded, blowing his ram through his forehead
and destroying a bit of the front of his brain. 


He recovered completely, but with a changed personality.
Before the accident he was remarkble for his puritanical
abstemiousness. 

After, he was remarkable for his irresponsible rowdiness.
The case attracted the attention of a psychiatrist and
neurosurgeon, who tried inflicting similar brain injuries
on a patient suffering from psychotic, suicidal
abstemiousness, and the patient was cured. Nobody knew
exactly how it worked, but medicine is empirical: if a
treatment works, use it. 

Psychiatrists were excited to learn of a cure for psychosis
as previously they had only been able to contain patients.
NMD was applied on various different psychoses, but was
only successful on depression and manic depressives. It is
now largely superseded by electric shock treatment (which
may soon be replaced in turn by magnetic treatment). But it
is still sometimes used where other treatments fail. 

L. Ron Hubbard, the inventor of Dianetics and Scientology,
convinced many that the sole purpose of pre-frontal
lobotomy is to make the patient tractable, a contention
which is plainly untrue. Phileas Gage became less
tractable, and so does every depressive who becomes
self-assertive. 

But all treatments are capable of abuse, being applied for
the convenience of medical staff and not for the patient's
benefit. The GPGN reports that 'psychosurgery has been used
in the past to treat patients with deviant behaviour". 

Presumably to prevent such abuses, the current Mental
Health Act allows NMD only with the informed consent of the
patient, and the GPGN proposal requires the consent of a
sheriff when the patient is too ill to make a decision. 

Although some arguments for opposition to NMD are
misinformed, good arguments also exist. Alison Cobb, the
chairman of MIND, told a Big Issue reporter: "The
irreversible destruction of healthy brain tissue is no
answer to mental disorder", and the psychiatrist Sashi
Sashidaran said much the same. 

And there is the ethical question, especially for
anarchists, whether anything should be done to anybody
without their consent, even if they are suffering terribly
and the people doing things to them are honestly trying to
make them better. 

DR 

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