Active in Community Club And Social Affairs
(EDITOR'S NOTE: On August 19, 1947, the first operations of a new technique called transorbital lobotomy ever performed in this state were done at Western State Hospital by Dr. Walter G. Freeman of George Washington University, the man who devised the new surgical technique. Thirteen patients listed as hopeless victims of mental diseases underwent the brain operation. Since that time 72 others, all believed doomed to life in mental institutions, have been given transorbital lobotomies by Western State Hospital staff psychiatrists.
Forty-five of the operations have been performed too recently for results to be determined. Of the 40 others, 21 have been released from the hospital and returned to normal living; all of the remainder have improved to some extent, the hospital has reported. This is the remarkable story of one of those 21 for whom life which held no hope at all, suddenly became good again.)
By Lucille Cohen
Woman’s Mental Fog Replaced By Happiness
She was the seventh patient to be wheeled into the operating room that morning. A straitjacket pinned her arms to her sides. She's only a little bit of a thing, who has never weighed much over a 100 pounds in her life, but on some of her bad days - and that day was a bad one - it took three husky nurses to control the scratching, biting, kicking fury she became.
* * *
TODAY SHE IS NO MORE ILL of her old disease than a person who'd been cured of a bad siege of scarlet fever.
Today she is happily remarried and keeps an attractive home for her two children by a former marriage.
Today she is active in community and social affairs. Some ways, she feels, she is much better than she was even before she became sick. The other day they asked her to make a report in a neighborhood club she is active in. She got right up and made a very nice report. Before, she would have been too frightened of standing up before those people to speak.
And, most important of all, she is happy.
"I don’t believe I've ever been happy before," she says.
* * *
ON THAT DAY OF her operation, like the six who preceded her and the six who followed her, she was in the operating room because she had nothing to lose. Without the operation which might or might not help her - no one could be sure - Western State Hospital doctors were convinced she would spend the rest of her life in a mental institution in a dark world of her own peopled by enemies who poisoned her food, talked against her constantly, stuck fish to her, tried to operate on her by radar and hooked her refrigerator and telephone up to listening devices so they could spy on her the better.
She doesn’t remember that day they took her into the operating room or any day in the two months that preceded it. Sometimes things are too bad to be borne in memory.
She knows how she fought and cried out against anyone who came near her because, in her mind, everyone was her enemy. Dr. James Shanklin and Dr. Charles Jones of the hospital staff have told her of these things since and she knows they must be true because of her confidence in the two psychiatrists who she feels are her best friends.
* * *
But her own memory stops on July 4 when she was at a baseball game on the hospital grounds and doesn’t pick up again until sometime around September 1, about two weeks after her transorbital lobotomy was performed.
From the moment her memory black-out ended she felt, she says, as though "a great weight had been lifted" from her mind. It was like "waking up from a bad dream."
She knew – for the first time – that she had suffered a mental illness.
Before that she had known only that she was terribly tired and terribly frightened all the time. Before she came to the hospital she hardly ever ate and her weight dropped down to 69 pounds. She kept the blinds on her windows pulled down all day. She left milk to sour on her doorstep. And when people came to the door she shouted threats at them until they went away.
She didn’t seem to care much about anything, not even her children.
Her family told her to pull herself together and stop acting so wilfully silly. It was like telling a woman with a raging fever to be sensible and bring her temperature down to normal immediately.
* * *
IT WASN’T UNTIL AFTER the operation when she realized that what had been wrong with her was really a sickness, she began to understand a little of how it all happened, of how, in her own words, she "got into such a complicated mess." And then she began cooperating with the doctors instead of fighting them.
She doesn’t understand it all. She probably never will.
A person who catches smallpox may be able to figure out where and when he was exposed, but he never knows just how it happened that he caught the disease when someone else similarly exposed escaped it.
There were many elements in her life that exposed her to mental illness. Somewhere along the line so many of those elements piled up that she could no longer resist the disease. Just where that happened no one, not she herself nor Dr. Jones and Dr. Shanklin, who explored the secret recesses of her history, can say for sure.
- (Post-Intelligencer Photo)
* * *
BUT THE TWO PSYCHIATRISTS who treated her say that her history follows a classic pattern of rejection.
She was the eldest in a big family of children, all competing for the affections of their parents. And she was the one who got the least parental attention. She grew up feeling that her father, particularly, didn’t like her at all.
She was married her first year out of high school. She’d wanted to be a nurse but everybody at home scoffed at the idea; they told her she’d never be much good at anything. So when a man came long who told her he loved her and wanted her to marry him, she did
But even there she was finally rejected.
* * *
THE YEARS AFTER HER MARRIAGE were years of economic pinch. She lived in a little lumbering community in a house without running water or plumbing, on a paycheck that would hardly stretch to three meals a day in a week when one of her children needed new shoes.
Without economic security, she had no emotional security. Friends kept telling her tales of her husband’s philandering. In a little community things like that get about. Then her husband became involved in an affair with a woman, so serious it caused the breakup of her marriage.
By that time she was 30 and everywhere she had turned for affection – except to her children – it had been withdrawn.
She began then to do the things her family called "silly," but which were, in reality, symptoms of a desperate illness. And, as a result, she lost the only humans who gave her affection – her children.
The welfare department, which was then paying her grants for the children, took the two youngsters away.
* * *
NOT LONG AFTER THAT she was in Western State Hospital. The doctors held no hope for her recovery and feared for the injury she might do, in her violent moments, either to herself or others. Her family felt much as the doctors did. When she finally went back home, it was obvious they hadn’t been expecting her back – her clothes had all been given away.
In the first few weeks after the surgery, she kept all her old delusions but had lost her old emotional tensity. She still said her food was poisoned but ate what she said was poisoned food with apparent unconcern.
They gave her electric shock treatments and group psychotherapy, which is a way of reintegrating people into a social living by putting them into group activities like games, dancing, hiking.
In the middle of October they thought she was well enough to go home. Right away, she got a job taking care of an elderly woman and did fine at it.
Almost a year later she went back to the hospital to ask Dr. Shanklin if he thought it would be all right for her to marry again. She’d met a fine, decent man who liked her children and wanted to marry her. The doctor told her she could do just as she wished.
So she was married and now she has a nice home, her children with her and a good husband.
And she is a good housekeeper, a good mother and a good wife.