In 2013 The Wall Street Journal discovered a cache of files that revealed the U.S. government lobotomized over 2000 veterans against their will after WW2.

The veterans were lobotomized for reasons such as PTSD, depression, schizophrenia, and occasionally homosexuality.

Here is the Link to Part 1 of this important investigation: The Lobotomy Files

Here is the introduction to this important story

Roman Tritz’s memories of the past six decades are blurred by age and delusion. But one thing he remembers clearly is the fight he put up the day the orderlies came for him.

“They got the notion they were going to come to give me a lobotomy,” says Mr. Tritz, a World War II bomber pilot. “To hell with them.”

The orderlies at the veterans hospital pinned Mr. Tritz to the floor, he recalls. He fought so hard that eventually they gave up. But the orderlies came for him again on Wednesday, July 1, 1953, a few weeks before his 30th birthday.

This time, the doctors got their way.

The U.S. government lobotomized roughly 2,000 mentally ill veterans—and likely hundreds more—during and after World War II, according to a cache of forgotten memos, letters and government reports unearthed by The Wall Street Journal. Besieged by psychologically damaged troops returning from the battlefields of North Africa, Europe and the Pacific, the Veterans Administration performed the brain-altering operation on former servicemen it diagnosed as depressives, psychotics and schizophrenics, and occasionally on people identified as homosexuals.

The VA doctors considered themselves conservative in using lobotomy. Nevertheless, desperate for effective psychiatric treatments, they carried out the surgery at VA hospitals spanning the country, from Oregon to Massachusetts, Alabama to South Dakota. Roman Tritz talks about the scars from his lobotomy.

The VA’s practice, described in depth here for the first time, sometimes brought veterans relief from their inner demons. Often, however, the surgery left them little more than overgrown children, unable to care for themselves. Many suffered seizures, amnesia and loss of motor skills. Some died from the operation itself.

Has Psychiatry Earned Its Unpopularity?

As seen on the Huffington Post

While psychiatry--similar to the Bush administration -- may want to blame its current unpopularity on the press, the corporate media is generally reluctant to challenge a powerful institution until it is already out of favor. Thus, the unpopularity of a powerful institution is usually well-earned through undeniable deceit, incompetence, corruption and failure.

Just how unpopular is psychiatry? A December 2006 Gallup poll on the "honesty and ethical standards" of different professions reported the following: 84 percent of Americans have a positive opinion of nurses, while only 38 percent have a positive opinion of psychiatrists--much lower than the 69 percent positive rating for other medical doctors.

Until recently, most journalists have been extremely timid about confronting Big Pharma's hijacking of psychiatry. One exception is Robert Whitaker, winner of the George Polk award for medical writing. Whitaker, in his book Mad in America (2002), summarizes the beginnings of the corruption of America's psychiatrists and their professional organization, the American Psychiatric Association (APA): "By the early 1970s, all of psychiatry was in the process of being transformed by the influence of drug money." Whitaker reported, "The APA, had become even more fiscally dependent on drug companies. Thirty percent of the APA's annual budget came from drug advertisements to its journals."

The APA, for quite some time, has seen no conflict of interest in its collaboration with drug companies. In 1992, after Upjohn, makers of the tranquilizer Halcion, had given an unrestricted gift of $1.5 million to the APA, the APA medical director claimed that the Upjohn-APA relationship was a "responsible, ethical partnership that uses the no-strings resources of one partner and the experts of the other." This sort of partnering has continued. In the first quarter of 2007, Eli Lilly, makers of the antidepressant Prozac and the antipsychotic Zyprexa, provided grants of over $412,000 for two APA programs: "Improving Depression Treatments" and "Understanding the Complexity of Bipolar Mixed Episodes."

Is the partnership between the APA and Big Pharma a "no-strings" relationship? The American Journal of Psychiatry is published by the APA. In September 2007, attempting to reverse declining antidepressant prescriptions in young people, an American Journal of Psychiatry study unjustifiably concluded that increased suicide was caused by decreased antidepressant use. This time The New York Times and others nailed APA's journal for its data dishonesty; and The Boston Globe reported that Pfizer, makers of the antidepressant Zoloft, had contributed $30,000 to that American Journal of Psychiatry study. This is only the tip of the iceberg.

When the serotonin-enhancer Prozac first hit the market in the late 1980s, Americans heard from the APA and psychiatry officialdom that depression is caused by a deficiency of serotonin. There was no proof of this, and by the mid-1990s the serotonin-deficiency theory of depression had been scientifically tested and rejected. But antidepressant manufactures knew that more people would take Prozac, Paxil, Zoloft and other antidepressants if they believed these drugs worked by correcting a deficiency (analogous to insulin) rather than by "taking the edge off" (analogous to alcohol and illegal drugs). So drug companies and their partners in psychiatry kept quiet. Psychiatry also kept quiet about antidepressant tolerance (the need for an increasingly higher dosage), dependency, and nightmarish withdrawal--all of which was well-known in the scientific community several years before word got out to the general public.

In the past, those who have confronted Big Pharma's corruption of psychiatry have been accused by psychiatry apologists of belittling emotional suffering. But Americans increasingly understand that such smearing is as ridiculous as accusing critics of the Bush administration's invasion and occupation of Iraq of disloyalty to American soldiers.

His lobotomy, his recovery, in his words

A review of an important book from the San Francisco Chronicle

Until he was 5, Howard Dully was a happy child. That was the year his mother, June, died of cancer. June was "loving and indulgent," Dully writes, so devoted that his father once said, "I could've dropped dead and it wouldn't have made a bit of difference. She had you."

After his mother's death, neighbors started sewing and cooking, doing laundry for the Dullys. One of them, Lucille "Lou" Cox, became his stepmother two years later. Rigid and punitive, Lou hated Howard. When he was 12, she arranged for the boy to have a transorbital lobotomy.

The surgeon, Dr. Walter Freeman, did the procedure at Doctors General Hospital in San Jose. After sedating Howard with four jolts of electroshock, Freeman inserted two skewer-like steel knives into his skull, entering through the inside of the right and left eye sockets.

"(He) swirled them around," Dully writes, "until he felt he had scrambled things up enough." The lobotomy took 10 minutes to perform. The charge was $200.

This is the story that Dully, a 58-year-old San Jose bus driver, tells in his memoir, "My Lobotomy" ($24.95, Crown Publishers). It's a gruesome but compulsively readable tale, ultimately redemptive. Unlike most lobotomy patients - some became vegetables, 15 percent died - Dully was relatively unscathed.

"The biggest impact it made on me was my self-esteem," Dully says during a conversation in Jimmy's, a San Jose coffee shop with early-'60s decor. "You know, they changed me. They rearranged me. 'Am I me any more? Am I really crazy and don't know it?' These things all go through your mind."

Dully is hardly the picture of victimhood. Six-foot-seven, 330 pounds, he's a bear of a man with enormous hands, a voice like a cello and the visage of a grizzled biker. Until last year, he wore his mustache super-long and droopy, like Yosemite Sam, and then decided "I was hiding behind it."

No one would want to mess with this guy, but when you sit down with Dully you find a gentle, vulnerable man who speaks easily of emotional hurt. Traces of sadness are embedded in his face. His mood is subdued - or at least leveled - by the Prozac he's taken for four years.

What's surprising is Dully's lack of bitterness. Despite the lobotomy, despite the subsequent years when he was bounced from foster home to juvenile hall to mental institution - he says "there's no point" in being angry.

"I've worked through all that. The only person it's gonna hurt is me. My biggest question is 'Why?' Why would an adult play the game to the extent it was played? ... I'm not going to say I was walking on water and here came the evil stepmother who just had things poked into the back of my head. But I don't feel I did anything to deserve a lobotomy."

At 12, Dully was already 6 feet tall - a "hellious" kid, in his words. He lied and shoplifted on occasion. He smoked cigarettes. Hated homework. Because his dad worked three jobs and was never home, his stepmom meted out the discipline. "Lou was a fairly small woman and it finally got to the point where she'd spank me and I'd laugh. I think that scared her."

In "My Lobotomy," Dully and co-writer Charles Fleming describe how Lou consulted six psychiatrists in her search for a solution, and was told by four of them that she was the problem and not Howard. Finally, she found Freeman and convinced him that her stepson was a candidate for lobotomy.

Freeman, subject of a recent book, "The Lobotomist" by Jack El-Hai, didn't need to be lobbied or prodded. A psychiatrist and neurologist, he didn't invent the lobotomy but popularized and promoted it. Full of hubris, he touted the procedure's benefits at medical conventions, behaving, his partner James Watt said, "like a barker at a carnival."

When patients suffered permanent brain damage, Freeman was unfazed. "Maybe it will be shown," he said, "that a mentally ill patient can think more clearly and constructively with less brain in actual operation."

Given the brutality and imprecision of the lobotomy procedure, Dully is luckier than most survivors. He believes his tear ducts were damaged by the lobotomy and attributes his sinus problems to the procedure. His thinking processes, he says, "seem to go off in different directions to reach conclusions, instead of focusing down one path."

More than anything, he feels a loss - a sense of having missed his youth. "I still go to Los Altos, to the old house where I lived (before the lobotomy). Go to the schools that I went to. I get out of the car and walk around. I'd do it daily if I had time. For some reason it fascinates me.

"I think it gives me an attachment to when I had a family," he says, clearing his throat. "A normal family life. Mom and dad and brothers. Because from 12 years on my life was not normal."

Throughout his 20s and 30s, Dully had problems with alcohol, drugs and homelessness. He went sober in 1985 and quit smoking in 1994 after a heart attack. In his 40s, he went back to school and got a degree in computer information systems but found he was too old to find work in that youth-centric market.

"I'll never get to where my brothers are, because I started at 40 and they started at 20. I lost 20 years. It happened too late in some respects. That's just the way it is."

Dully credits his wife, Barbara, with putting him on a positive track. They met 22 years ago and got married in 1995. Wedding pictures show them in gown and tux, astride matching motorcycles. Dully has two sons, 30 and 27, from an earlier relationship and has worked as a bus driver for 10 years. He's on a leave of absence from San Jose Charter Bus while he promotes his book.

"My Lobotomy" began as a radio documentary on NPR's "All Things Considered" in November 2005. Producers Dave Isay and Piya Kochhar intended a profile on Freeman but when they found Dully, who had recently started researching lobotomy on the Internet, they fell in love with his story. They decided to focus on him instead, and urged him to narrate the piece in his gentle, resonant baritone.

Isay and Kochhar took Dully to Freeman's medical archives at George Washington University in Washington, D.C. "My file has everything," he says in the narration. "A photo of me with the ice picks in my eyes, medical bills. But all I care about are the notes. I want to understand why this was done to me."

The NPR piece captures a conversation with Dully and his father, Rodney, a former schoolteacher who was later divorced from Lou. "I was manipulated, pure and simple," his dad says in regard to the lobotomy.

But when Howard breaks down and professes his love to his dad, his father answers, "Whatever made you think I didn't know that? You shaped up pretty good!" He doesn't say "I love you" back.

"Ever since my lobotomy I've felt like a freak," Dully says at the end of the broadcast. (But) I know my lobotomy didn't touch my soul. For the first time, I feel no shame. I am, at last, at peace."

The response to the broadcast was huge. So many e-mails flooded in that NPR's Internet server collapsed. Today, Dully says, there's interest from Hollywood producers to make a TV movie or feature film from his book. "I'd love it, provided it's done with truth. I don't want any fictional account making someone out worse than they were or better than they were."

There's also a playwright in New York who, inspired by the NPR documentary, has written a play about Dully called "The Memory of Damage."

Dully, who looks like a Buddha as he sits in his favorite coffee shop, seems to regard the celebrity as a cosmic joke. For someone who spent his life plagued by self-doubts, who says he's still intimidated by his father, it's difficult to accept this attention.

"I tease my wife and other people, and say I have a swollen ego," he chuckles. "But I don't have any news people camping outside my door. I don't live in any mansion.

"My idea for writing the book was first to get a little closure - which I find a little selfish, but that's OK. The other reason was to help people to think about how we treat each other daily. Not just loved ones but everybody.

"Something you start here or say here may affect somebody's whole day, maybe their whole life. Ten minutes of what Freeman did to me has affected me for 47 years."

Famous Psychiatrist No Longer Endorses Hysterectomies for Teenagers

Commentary, as seen in Mother Jones

Louann Brizendine, psychiatrist and author of the much-hyped The Female Brain, admits in the most recent issue of the New York Times Magazine that she's not a fan of placebo-controlled studies.

Deborah Solomon: Although your book draws heavily on other scientists’ research, you don’t do any clinical research yourself. Isn’t that a drawback?

Dr. Brizendine: I don’t like doing clinical research because of placebos. In a “double-blind placebo-controlled study,” as they are called, neither the doctor nor the patient knows what the patient is taking. I don’t want to give patients a placebo. It’s cruel.

Hmmm. Sounds like someone does not accept standard scientific methods. And the journal Nature has discredited her book. I wonder if we should really take her seriously.

Oh, guess not. Turns out, Brizendine is not a fan of fact-checking either. She culled the statistic that women use 20,000 words a day, while men use about 7,000 — the bedrock of her thesis — from self-help guru Allan Pease, author of such classics as Why Men Don't Have a Clue and Women Always Need More Shoes, Why Men Lie and Women Cry, and Why Men Can Only Do One Thing at a Time and Women Never Stop Talking.

But Brizendine is a fan of Zoloft, so much so that you wonder if she got paid for product placement. A quick scan turns up at least seven mentions of the brand name, as a cure for cases such as Shana, who presented symptoms of depression as early as age 10. But consider these symptoms: Shana "started sleeping till noon on weekends," "waited till the last minute to finish big projects, and she liked to stay up watching television." Her female hormones soon surged to such heights that she talked back to her mother, saying, "I am going to the beach tomorrow and there's nothing you can do about it," and "You don't know what you're talking about." (Read more insults/symptoms on page 44). Her mother slapped her, but came to her senses and sought help from a psychiatrist, the one and only Louann Brizendine.

Dr. Brizendine writes:

Fifty years ago, one successful treatment for PMDD was removing the ovaries surgically. At the time, this was the only way to remove the hormone fluctuation. Instead of removing Shana's ovaries [emphasis mine], I gave her a hormone to take every day — the continuous birth control pill — to keep her estrogen and progesterone at moderately high but constant levels and prevent her ovaries from sending out the big fluctuations of hormones that were upsetting her brain. With her estrogen and progesterone at constant levels, her brain was kept calmer and her serotonin levels stabilized. For some girls I add a medication such as Zoloft — a so-called SSRI (selective serotonin reuptake inhibitor) — which can further stabilize and improve the brain's serotonin level, in other words, improve one's mood and sense of well-being. The following month her teacher called me to report that Shana was back to her good old self again — cheerful and getting good grades.

How creepy. Shana better be happy. Or else the doctor would take out her uterus.

-- April Rabkin