Wonderland - Jags

Deeper Mysteries - Mental Health
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testing involves painful stimuli as the patient may be aware—but non
responsive to other stimuli) the coma is allowed to persist for up to two
hours. The patient has a tube inserted in his nose which is run down to
his stomach and is used to administer glucose when the coma has lasted
“long enough.”
The improvements have been declared temporary—but several new
chemical cocktails have enhanced the procedure.
Psychosurgery: the Transorbital Lobotomy
The effect of severing the neural tissue that connects both lobes of
the brain had been observed in animals (to the extent that it could be
understood) and, in 1935, Egas Moniz tried it in humans. The successes
were questionable but the subjects were made a good deal more docile
and easy to deal with.
Later the procedure was “perfected” by Dr. Walter Freeman who
create the Transorbital Lobotomy which involved entering the brain
through the tear duct of the eye and then scraping in the brain to try to
sever the tissue. He was such a believer that he performed all over the
country, driving around in a van which he named his “lobotomobile.”
He performed in hotel rooms, in hospital lobbies, and before groups
of psychiatric officials (once working on several women in a row,
conveyor-belt style, using electrodes to shock them into a faint and then
entering the eye. One head of psychiatry fainted upon witnessing this).
He performed it on children as young as 13 (for delinquency) and on
women who had lost their zeal for domestic chores.
Finally (and thankfully) discredited, he retired in disgrace. However,
with several advances in neuro-science, psycho-surgery has begun to
make something of a comeback with neurological “pacemakers” that can
stimulate certain areas of the brain and certain direct-chemical treatments
that can have a profound effect on the subject.