Psychosurgery in Australia

Psychosurgery is still carried out on one or two people a year in Australia. In 2002 the Radio National programme “All in the Mind” featured a discussion about psychosurgery. Taking part were Melbourne, Victoria, neurosurgeon Professor Jeffrey Rosenfeld; and former Chair of the Victoria Psychosurgery Review Board Beth Wilson.

Jeffrey Rosenfeld stresses the differences between lobotomy and modern operations, while Beth Wilson defends the early practitioners of psychosurgery.

Beth Wilson: They saw the incredible suffering of people, particularly in the southern States of America, Negro soldiers who were languishing, not able to go home, hideously ill, very little treatment. The treatments comprised straightjackets, seclusion, insulin shock and electric shock treatment, that was it.

There is a mention of Dr Harry Bailey, who was prominent in psychosurgery in Australia in the 1970s. The operation he favoured for his patients was the anterior cingulotomy, which is still used, for example, at Massachusetts General Hospital in the US and at Ninewells Hospital, Dundee, Scotland. Harry Bailey committed suicide in 1985 rather than face an enquiry into his practice at Chelmsford private hospital, where he used Deep Sleep Treatment and ECT.

The number of lobotomies, or leucotomies, fell dramatically after the 1950s, as drugs became available, especially for schizophrenia. But as recently as the 1970s, in Australia we faced our own controversies surrounding psychosurgery. In 1974, an ABC-TV ‘Four Corners’ investigation into the procedures being used, in part re-ignited public concern. And at the centre of the debate was one Dr Harry Bailey of Chelmsford and ‘Deep Sleep’ therapy notoriety.

Presenter: In Australia, habitual thieves, sex offenders, drug addicts, and people with chronic obsessional behaviour, have undergone psychosurgery by a team of doctors in Sydney’s Macquarie Street.

The team, headed by psychiatrist Dr Harry Bailey, has carried out more than 150 brain operations over the past seven years. They include, among others, Case 1: a 26-year-old housewife with a germ mania who washed her hands at 3 to 5 minute intervals and used one cake of soap a day. Case 2: a 42-year-old accountant, who after sexual intercourse with his girlfriend, would compulsively exhibit himself to a girl on the street 10 minutes later. Case 3: an 18-year-old nurse, suicidal, two overdose attempts, who stated, ‘My last two years have been hell. I only want to die. The voices are screaming at me.’

The programme also contained extracts from Janet Frame’s book, an Angel at My Table (1984) in which she describes how she was saved from a leucotomy at the last moment when the medical superintendent of the hospital saw in a newspaper that one of her books had won a literary award. Janet Frame went on to be nominated several times for the Nobel Prize in literature, demonstrating that the outlook for patients considered for psychosurgery in those days was not, contrary to what the defenders of lobotomy say today, necessarily so bleak.

Reader: My mother had been persuaded to sign permission for me to undergo a leucotomy. I know she would not have done so had not the experts wielded heavily weighted arguments. The experts, who over the years, as my history was accumulating, had not spoken to me at one time for longer than 10 or 15 minutes, and in total time, over 8 years, for about 80 minutes; who had administered no tests, not even a physical test of EEG, or X-rays, apart from a chest X-ray whenever there was a new case of tuberculosis, a disease prevalent in the mental hospitals then. I listened, trying to avoid the swamping wave of horror, when Dr Burt, a likeable, overworked young doctor who had scarcely spoken to me except to say 'Good Morning, how are you?', and not wait for a reply as he would whisk through the ward, found time to explain that I would be having a leucotomy operation, that it would be good for me, that, following it, I would be out of hospital in no time.

I listened also with a feeling that my erasure was being completed, when the ward sister, suddenly interested that something was about to be done with, and to me, painted her picture of how I would be when it was all over. ‘We had one patient who was here for years until she had a leucotomy, and now she’s selling hats in a hat shop. I saw her just the other day, selling hats, as normal as anyone. Wouldn’t you like to be normal?’

Everyone felt that it was better for me to be normal, and not have fancy intellectual notions about being a writer.

My friend Nola, who unfortunately had not won a prize, whose name did not appear in the newspaper, had her leucotomy, and was returned to the hospital where, among the group known as ‘the leucotomies’, some attempt was made to continue with personal attention, the process of being made normal, or at least, being changed. The leucotomies were talked to, taken for walks, prettied with make-up and floral scarves covering their shaven heads. They were silent, docile, and their faces pale with damp skin. They were being ‘retrained’ to fit in to the everyday world, always described as ‘outside’, ‘the world outside’.

In the whirlwind of work, and the shortage of staff, and the too-slow process of retraining, the leucotomies one by one became the casualties of withdrawn attention and interest; the false spring turned once again to winter.

Read a transcript of the programme here