OPERATIONS TO CURE THE INSANE

Wanganui Chronicle, Volume 90, Issue 93, 23 April 1946, Page 5

OPERATIONS TO CURE THE INSANE

COMMENT BY N.Z. SPECIALIST <P-A.) Wellington, April 23. Serious doubt whether the brain operation reported in the cable from Los Angeles, published on Saturday, as giving hope for curing the hitherto hopelessly insane, was really new, was expressed by Dr. T. Gray, DirectorGeneral of Mental Hospitals, when he was asked to-night to comment on the announcement.

Dr. Gray said there had been no reference in recent issues of psychiatric journals to new developments. He doubted whether any could have taken place beyond the operation known as pre-frontal lobotomy, which had been well known in the profession for several years. The operation had been performed in hundreds of cases in Europe and America. It was performed on two patients at Porirua Mental Hospital several years ago. Since then other patients had received treatment. Altogether, the operation had been performed in New Zealand about eight times.

The object of the operation is to sever the fibres in the brain which are supposed to co-relate emotions with intellect.

Pre-frontal lobotomy was not really a cure, said. Dr. Gray, but. it stabilised the patient’s condition at a lower level than normal. It would be performed only oh patients of whom all hope of a cure by other means had been abandoned. Comparatively new shock treatments were giving such good results that recovery was occurring in cases for which previously no hope had been held. He had refused permission for surgical operations to be performed on several patients, for whom it had been suggested, because he had not been satisfied that all other treatments had been tried. The operation was not particularly dangerous to the patient’s life. There was no reason why it should be, if carried out properly, but patients on whom the operation had been performed in other countries had subsequently died from other causes. Post-mortem examinations had shown, in some of those cases, that the surgeon had, by mistake, severed fibres he had not intended to sever, yet the effect of lhe operation had been such that it had been regarded as successful. Those discoveries had thrown doubt on the theory on which pre-frontal lobotomy had been based.