Psychosurgery

About This Book

Psychosurgery is surgery that treats psychiatric disorders by damaging the brain irreversibly in order to save the mind. While it can offer normalcy to some people who have been trapped in despair for years, it also holds out the possibility of abuse, as the barbaric history of the classic ice-pick lobotomy demonstrates. Joann Rodgers shows how our understandable revulsion over past abuses has led us to ignore potentially useful new surgical methods, which destroy tiny. Clusters of brain cells, in favor of drug treatments that do not always succeed and often have negative side effects. Our neglect also means that these new procedures are performed under surprisingly few ethical or legal guidelines. Rodgers's review of the new psychosurgeries and her evenhanded examination of all the moral and medical pros and cons surrounding them give us a firm basis from which we can make a careful reevaluation of their promise and peril. This book. Forces us to face our fear of psychosurgery and take responsibility for its future.