Briefly describe psychosurgery.

Question

What will be an ideal response?

Answer 1

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The answer should contain the following information:

A technique used exceedingly rarely today, psychosurgery-brain surgery in which the object is to reduce symptoms of mental disorder-was introduced as a "treatment of last resort" in the 1930s.

The first form of psychosurgery to be developed was the prefrontal lobotomy. Prefrontal lobotomy consists of surgically destroying or removing parts of a patient's frontal brain lobes, which surgeons thought controlled emotionality. In the 1930s and 1940s, surgeons performed the procedure on thousands of patients often with little precision. For example, in one common technique, surgeons jabbed an ice pick under a patient's eyeball and swiveled it back and forth; in other cases, they drilled into the patient's skull.

Psychosurgery often did improve a patient's behavior-but not without drastic side effects. Along with remission of the symptoms of the mental disorder, patients sometimes experienced personality changes and became bland, colorless, and unemotional. In other cases, patients became aggressive and unable to control their impulses. In the worst cases, treatment resulted in the patient's death.

With the introduction of effective drug treatments-and the obvious ethical questions regarding the appropriateness of forever altering someone's personality-psychosurgery became nearly obsolete. However, it is still used in very rare cases when all other procedures have failed and the patient's behavior presents a high risk to the patient and others.

For example, surgeons sometimes use a more precise form of psychosurgery called a cingulotomy in rare cases of obsessive-compulsive disorder in which they destroy tissue in the anterior cingulate area of the brain. In another technique, gamma knife surgery, beams of radiation are used to destroy areas of the brain. Finally, on rare occasions, dying patients with severe, uncontrollable pain also receive psychosurgery. Still, even these cases raise important ethical issues, and psychosurgery remains a highly controversial treatment.