One woman's experience of psychosurgery

In 1976 Yorkshire TV in the UK showed a documentary called "A Matter of Life: it's a little frightening" which followed Margaret Chapman as she underwent psychosurgery as a treatment for violence.

Margaret Chapman featured more recently in Susan Brin Hyatt's chapter "Poverty and the medicalisation of motherhood" in a book called "Sex, gender and health", edited by Tessa M Pollard and Susan Brin Hyatt, published by Cambridge University Press in 1999. What follows is from this book (pages 97 -112):

"Male voice of a psychiatrist: You've had this anger your entire life and you tend to have little control over it...
Another male voice, the film's narrator, explains: A psychiatrist's office in Yorkshire....
A working-class woman speaks: I was in the club one night and something started in me and I just picked up a glass and I just stuck it in this woman's face, you know.... and I didn't realize afterwards that I'd done it, you know...
Psychiatrist: And, you've attacked people and scratched their faces, haven't you?
Woman: Yes
Psychiatrist: ...rained blows on them
Woman: Yes
Psychiatrist: Has your bad temper and you inability to control it, has this got you in trouble with the police or in the courts at all?
Woman: Yes, I have had five convictions for assault.
Psychiatrist: You have - well, it seems to me that since you've been on tablets and pills for years and you've never really got this major problem in you life under control, it is quite reasonable, VERY reasonable at this stage, to consider an operation designed to tone down very considerably indeed your aggressive impulses, to eliminate your bad temper.
Woman: Will this help me?
Psychiatrist: Yes, I think it will
Woman: It's just a bit frightening, isn't it?
Psychiatrist: Well, I suppose all operations are a bit frightening - some people are more nervous than others.

....The woman who was subjected to this operation in 1976 is named Margaret Chapman. She still lives on a council estate [public sector housing] located on the outskirts of the northern city of Bradford. By the time I first met her in 1991, she had become a well-known local activist and was at the forefront of a number of campaigns her community had courageously waged....The first time I ever spoke to her she recounted to me the startling story of her brain surgery.....

Margaret Chapman's medical history prior to the time of her surgery offers an instructive glimpse into the consequences of the over-medication that is typical of many women in her situation. In her published autobiography, No Option but to Fight, Margaret describes how she first began using prescription drugs, in this case, amphetamines. Trapped in a violent marriage, saddled with three small children and pregnant with her fourth by the age of 25, she consulted her doctor: "I told him that I was feeling worn out and that my mind was willing to do things but my body wouldn't shift. He wrote me a prescription and I went round to the chemist to collect my 'cure'. Until then I had never taken a tablet in my life."...

Throughout her history of treatment for various ailments including addiction to prescription drugs (which was largely an outcome of the medical treatment she had received), alcoholism and depression, Margaret was periodically judged to be an 'unfit mother' and her children were regularly taken into custody by the state. In fact, according to her own autobiography Margaret, having become overwhelmed by the demands of her now five teenaged children and with no support system made up of other adults (she had been raised in an orphanage and had no mother or female kin living nearby), asked to be admitted into hospital for treatment for her depression. Her children were again taken into care. It was at that point, when she was at her most vulnerable andf earful about the future of her relationship with her children, that she was persuaded to consent to surgery....

What the actual effect of the operation was, I was never able to ascertain. Margaret frequently complained that it left her with severe headaches, an inability to concentrate well, and a slackness of her jaw. Her supposed propensity for violence seemed to dissipate many years later, after her children were grown and she had become involved in grassroots campaigns aimed at bettering conditions in her community. Margaret, herself, attributed her relative calm as she grew older to her having learned ot channel her furstrations through political activism rather than as any consequence of the surgery. Indeed, the film, itself, ends ambiguously with Margaret reporting to the doctor on screen that even after the operation, she still felt compelled toward violence."