Nobel Responds!

Dear Ms Johnson,

Please accept our apologies for this late response.

The purpose of the essays on the Nobel e-Museum is, amongst other things, to inform the general public about previous Nobel Prizes, to give some background information and to describe the history that led to the awarding of the prizes. The essay “Controversial Psychosurgery resulted in a Nobel Prize”
by Bengt Jansson, a former Professor of Psychiatry, who lived and worked during the time when this controversial therapy was introduced and practiced, is such an example. The Nobel archives are kept closed for 50 years after the awards have been made. It has therefore not been possible until recently (1999) to comment publicly on the prize to Egas Moniz (1949) based on information in
the archives. When the archives were made accessible, the editorial board of NeM found it important to invite a knowledgeable expert to write an essay on this controversial and heavily criticized prize.

The essay describes the history leading to the establishment of lobotomy as a treatment for psychiatric disease for which, at the time, there was no effective alternative therapy. Treatment changed dramatically when first ECT, and somewhat later neuroleptic drugs were introduced. The opinions expressed in the essays are those of the author and not the editorial board. However, the editorial board thinks that the essay in a fair, critical and balanced way
recapitulates the history and the period following the gradual abandoning of lobotomy. We therefore are unwilling to remove it from our repertoire of essays.

We have also consulted Professor Jansson who has read your e-mail and decided not to change the text. We sympathize with your views expressed in your letter regarding the long-term, negative consequences of lobotomy. Fortunately, thanks to continuous research efforts which have led to the development of new neuroleptic drugs, the medical profession can today offer much more humane and effective therapies for the severely mentally ill patients.

Yours sincerely,
Agneta Wallin Levinovitz
Executive Editor
Nobel e-Museum
The Nobel Foundation

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Dear Sir or Madam,

My name is Christine Johnson and I am the founder of Psychosurgery.org. We are a collection of lobotomy victims and their families who are still trying to recover from the immense damage that lobotomy, leucotomy, and related operations did to our families.

It is difficult to describe how painful your posted article on Egas Moniz is to us. In our years of talking to victims we have found no one who was helped by these operations. Not one. We have members who Moniz and Freeman claimed as success stories who will attest that those assertions were false. These doctors hurt us, they did not help us in any way. Many of the discharged people went on to lead horrible lives - often their children were put into foster care.

The worst part of the article is the claim that it was only used when there were, ” …very special indications such as in severe anxiety, and compulsive syndromes which have proved to be resistant to other forms of therapy.” This is not true. One boy was lobotomized when he was 12 years old for delinquent behavior.

One woman’s mother was lobotomized while pregnant for headaches. My own grandmother was lobotomized in 1954 and was still held in a psychiatric hospital for twenty years. Obviously there was no great cure there.

Your author asserts that we should not feel indignant because it was the only treatment available at the time. That is a disgusting, cavalier statement that could only be made by a person who did not live through being victimized by psychosurgery. Our relatives were severely damaged and we are angry about it.

The members of our group would like you to take that article down from your website. We find it to be extremely hurtful and insulting. Frankly, we place some of the blame of what happened to us at the Nobel Committee’s feet … if you had not endorsed this monstrous treatment perhaps some of us might have been spared.

We look forward to a response on this matter.

Sincerely,

Christine Johnson

Founder, Psychosurgery.org