Parallels with Lobotomy

Finally, one should beware the tendency to rely on an individual piece of anecdotal evidence (or even a handful of such examples) when assessing whether a treatment "works." Lobotomy was a mutilating and irreversible operation that possessed little or no scientific warrant, and was used in remarkably careless ways on patients who either had no say in the matter, or who were gulled by ruthless enthusiasts like Walter Freeman, who fed them grossly inaccurate information about what was being done to them. Many operations were done on people whose problems were relatively minor and transient, and these less disturbed individuals undoubtedly provided the majority of Freeman's successes.
by Andrew Scull

Answered by Barak Goodman:
The quantitative analysis of lobotomy was meager. The obstacles to a good study of lobotomy were numerous: the patients were often abandoned in mental hospitals and therefore hard to access; controlled studies were of course impossible; and no two patients got the same operation (Freeman's operation was truly "a stab in the dark"). The stigma attached to the operation made it a less than desirable area of research and study. Perhaps the most thorough analysis was done by Freeman himself, who kept in touch with hundreds of his patients and tried to assemble data to support lobotomy's efficacy. I think we have to regard that data as suspect.

Occasionally, after the fact, lawsuits are launched attempting to secure damages for the victims. This occurred in Canada, for instance, after the death of Ewen Cameron, former president of the American, Canadian, and World Psychiatric Associations, and a member of the Nuremberg medical tribunal which had investigated Nazi doctors. Cameron, practicing at McGill University, had experimented with "depatterning" and "psychic driving," extraordinary experiments where, inter alia, he wiped out patients' memories with repeated electroshocks designed to reduce those subjected to them to the status of helpless, incontinent "infants," whose psyches he then purported to rebuild. Cameron at his death was a highly respected figure in his profession. Only after it emerged that much of this work had been secretly supported by the CIA were lawsuits brought, some of which were successful in securing monetary damages for his victims and/or their families. Whether money could ever adequately compensate for what has been done, for suicides and ruined lives, is very doubtful, as I'm sure you would agree. But the legal acknowledgement of the depth of the wrong that has been wrought is, of course, worth something.

Andrew Scull

My father was aiming to disconnect the thalamus from the frontal cortex

The positive(sic!) consequences of cutting between thalamus and frontal cortex were loss of fear and anxiety. The negative consequences of cutting were loss of social inhibition (loss of guilt, shame, fear of disapproval) and loss of the ability to think ahead (no ambition, eating to excess, inability to read the minds of others).

" People who start taking Prozac, Miltown, or other tranquilizers no longer suffer anxiety and fear of the future, but they lose ambition, libido, and the capacity for deep feelings. That is the cost of treatment. Neither surgery nor drugs cure the mental illness. They only relieve the suffering, and the cost is high.

Most patients who are not suffering too much prefer to continue to suffer than to accept the loss. Other patients suffer so intensely that they kill themselves rather than continue living.

Walter Freeman III

http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/amex/lobotomist/forum/day2.html