THE THIRD WORLD WAR

Two recent television programs available in Australia(1) had a great deal to say about the history of psychosurgery, neurosurgery and, specifically and especially, transorbital lobotomy, a surgical procedure that for a decade or so after WW2 looked like a solution to the immense health problem that was mental illness, institutionalized and non-institutionalized. My interest was peaked in these TV programs due to lobotomy’s association with and origins in the treatment of mental illness which I have suffered from since the discordant voices against lobotomies in the middle to late ’50s and the introduction of neuroleptic drugs like thorazine and some of the antidepressants were coming into psychiatry. In 1968, when I was first institutionalized in Ontario, I was given a massive dose of largactyl which could be compared to a chemical lobotomy. It seemed to produce the same kind of effects as a lobotomy and I only stayed on this medication for two or three weeks at the most although, after forty years and with no access to my medical records, I’m not sure of this time period.

I have had various symptoms of mental illness which I could variously diagnose retrospectively now in these years of my late adulthood with my old age pension—back to specific times over a period of fifty years to puberty(1957/8) and my adolescence. These symptoms included: psychosis in the form of paranoia and obsessive compulsive disorder, schizo-affective disorder, hypomania, explosive disorder, bipolar disorder and depression among a range of terms that I could list to label various behavioural abnormalities I exhibited during that half century from 1957/8 to 2007/8.

In the autumn of 1968 I was given a series of eight shock treatments or ECTs as they were called then and as they are called now. The ECT, electroconvulsive therapy, was the first stage of a lobotomy and, in my case, the ECT was a helpful treatment, or so I was then given to understand, although I will never be sure. -Ron Price with thanks to (1)The Lobotomist, SBS TV, 29 December 2008, 8:30-9:30 p.m. and Blood and Guts: A History of Surgery Into the Brain, SBS TV, 6 January 2009, 8:30-9:30 p.m.

Was there any collateral damage from
those ECTs administered in the autumn
of ’68? Thank the Lord for antipsychotic
and anti-depressive drugs in the 1950s and
1960s to protect me from the lobotomies!
It was still a nightmare in those buildings,
that great warehouse---snake--pit---after
that Great War, world-war 1, enormous
psychiatric hospitals, where transorbital
lobotomies, psychosurgery, neurosurgery,
the cutting of neural pathways to the soul,
ice-pick like, performed by the 1000s after
that second great war on the emotionally
and psychologically deformed millions---

And, me, from another war, the third great
war of the twentieth century, a war with no
name, sent me into more reformed-milder
snake-pits where I found Dr. Ghadirian, a
Baha’i psychiatrist and drugs like: largactyl
and thorazine, luvox and lithium, effexor &
sodium valproate put me back together in
revolutionary ways which transformed modern
psychiatry and the treatment of the mentally ill—
and me!

Ron Price
6 January 2009