User Reviews

I cannot stress strongly enough that this documentary from "The American Experience" is VERY hard to watch!!! Not only is the topic very disturbing, but actual photos of lobotomies are shown and you WILL see folks with ice pick-like rods shoved through their eye sockets into their brains!! Do NOT watch this is you are highly sensitive and do NOT show this to kids!! This film is about the amazing proliferation of lobotomies that was championed by Dr. Walter Freeman. While it's not exactly a biography of Freeman, it does follow much of his life and discusses his crusade to popularize this seemingly barbaric operation. It discusses his successes, but it also discusses his many failures--including some patients who died or were permanently disabled due to this brain surgery.

Like a typical episode of "The American Experience", this one is made up of photos, interviews and the like. What makes it a little different is that two of Freeman's sons participated as well--making this a highly unusual film and offering unusual insights into the motivations of the man. Well worth seeing and very compelling--thank God this sort of treatment is, for the most part, no longer done as better and far more human procedures are now available.

It would be interesting to see a film like this about Electro-Convulsive Therapy (ECT)--especially since the way it's done and its long-term side effects have changed dramatically over the years.

Meet Dr. Walter Freeman, America's pioneer Lobotomist. With his trusty ice-pick firmly in hand (and the promise of a "quick fix"), Freeman arrogantly sought to solve all of the daunting problems of mental illness (throughout the 1940's and 1950's) with but a simple tap of his little hammer.

Throughout his 30+ years as a Lobotomist, Freeman (travelling far & wide) performed his miracle "4-minute" operation on a staggering number of mental patients. This was an era in medical history when (like the witch hunts of the 17th Century and being burned at the stake) a person could be lobotomized (against their adamant protests) for showing even the slightest aberration from "normal" behaviour.

This riveting and often unsettling documentary from PBS is a truly fascinating and first-rate production that gives the viewer a close-up look at a very disturbing Neuro-Surgical procedure that prevailed all across America (for, literally, decades) and often led to tragic results.

*Note* - This documentary is not for the squeamish.

This is the story of the man - Dr. Walter Freeman - as much as it is about the procedure he championed - the frontal lobotomy. It was a standard of care for mental patients from 1936 until 1955.

This episode of American Experience is somewhat like a horror film. You have this complex character, Freeman, who at age 28 in 1924 was the youngest director at the laboratory of St. Elizabeth's Mental Hospital to date. Freeman's grandfather had been both a pioneering surgeon and a showman, having been the first person to successfully remove a brain tumor from a living patient who was still living at the end of the operation. Freeman very much wanted to walk in his footsteps.

Freeman's area of research was neurology, and in 1936 he read some research on another doctor who had removed cores from the frontal lobes of patients with 40% of the patients no longer subject to chronic ravings. Freeman immediately set out to refine this procedure with the help of a surgeon since Freeman was not a surgeon himself.

Now the background of Freeman's work was this. At the time Freeman was working, there were only crude ways to treat mental illness. Electroshock therapy calmed patients for awhile, but then the mania or depression or both returned. There were no drugs, and mental hospitals were often dumping grounds for people who were chronically mentally ill. Studies from WWI showed soldiers who had their frontal lobes damaged in battle did not die, but there was a great decrease in their anxiety levels.

So you have Dr. Freeman starting out with the lobotomy as a surgical procedure that was a "last resort" in the treatment of the mentally ill. But he gets more ambitious with time and turns the procedure into basically an outpatient procedure in which the surgeon is no longer needed because he uses an icepick - the first one was literally from his own kitchen - to go through the eye of the patient, in such a way that their vision is spared, and into the brain. It also goes from a last resort procedure to something he would do almost on a whim and even on an assembly line basis.

The patients would almost all be instantly better as far as severe mental illness was concerned. However the total results were mixed. Some patients were severely mentally and physically disabled, some lost all drive, some lost all self control and overate compulsively, and most fell into some middle range where they could handle the mental deficits they received as a result and do responsible work.

SInce there were no laws or advocacy for the mentally ill at the time, the popularity of this procedure went unabated until two things happened. One was the results of long term studies on the procedure that began appearing in the mid 1950s. The other was the invention of the drug thorazine, the very first of the anti-psychotics in 1954. These two events made the lobotomy and thus Dr. Freeman lose popularity and influence since he refused to let go of the procedure.

Interspersed with the story of Freeman's professional career and the cautionary tale of the hazards of obsession are stories of many of the patients that he treated. And the stories are quite mixed. Some people felt like they got a loved one back that had been 24/7 ranting. The relatives of less extreme cases noted the sometimes disastrous side effects. There was one particularly sad tale with the lobotomized person speaking for himself. He was age 60 at the time and had been lobotomized in 1960 at age 12 by Dr. Freeman himself for "acting up", today the kind of thing you would take a child to therapy for, not brain surgery.

What is interesting about this episode is that it was even handed enough of a portrait that Freeman's sons were interviewed for it. So in the end - was Freeman someone who couldn't see past his own professional success and observe his uneven results, a man unwilling to part with his obsession with lobotomy even when the times and science proved him wrong, or was he a man who merely tried to do something about the suffering of the mentally ill when everybody else could do nothing?

An interesting episode and an interesting question to ponder.