Rosemary Kennedy and psychiatric abuse

[thenamingofcats]

I've been thinking a lot about her story lately and how she and others were tortured and maimed due to the mental health practices of the day, especially lobotomy.

Background info: She was JFK's sister. When she was born the nurse made her mother keep her legs closed for 2 HOURS to delay the birth until the doctor arrived. It resulted in hypoxia and developmental delays. At 23 Rosemary's father order her to get a lobotomy which left her in a near vegetative state without language. Her father then had her secretly institutionalized for the rest of her life, claiming that she was "retarded" and didn't mention the lobotomy. Apparently he didn't disclose her location to her siblings and she was completely isolated from family for 20 years. She lived a heart wrenching 86 years, a case for ctb if I've ever heard one.

Rosemary Kennedy - Wikipedia

en.wikipedia.org

Rosemary before lobotomy:

After:

Before/After:

What is lobotomy:

In the 1940s, there were no effective treatments for the severely mentally ill. Doctors had experimented with insulin shock therapy and Electro-Convulsive Therapy with limited success and asylums were filled with patients, including shell-shocked soldiers, who had no hope of a cure, or of going home.
It was against this background that Portuguese neurologist Egas Moniz developed the lobotomy - or leucotomy as he called it - in 1935. His procedure involved drilling a pair of holes into the skull and pushing a sharp instrument into the brain tissue. He then swept it from side to side to sever the connections between the frontal lobes and the rest of the brain.

Lobotomy: The brain op described as ‘easier than curing a toothache’

Tens of thousands of lobotomies were carried out in the UK and US in the 1940s and 50s. Should we condemn the surgeons?

www.bbc.com

What stopped lobotomy was the creation of psychiatric drugs. It's not like psychology had a come to Jesus moment where they realized what they were doing was cruel and ineffective. The last recorded lobotomy was in 1967, although I wonder how long it actually went on for. Keep in mind that the creator of this torment, Egas Moniz, received the nobel peace prize in medicine.

We still see massive abuses in psychology and psychiatry today and many members have shared their stories here. I will never trust these fields but like many of you, cautiously use them since they're the only option we're given. I hope there is something better in the future.

 

[todienomore]

Check out the antipsychiatry movement, its arguably a scam. The serotonin (aka ssri's) theory of depression is a current scam. We like to think we are in some modern age but so did everyone for centuries. Read about how vaccines started as a different example its insane.

There is a youtube psych expert, sam vaknin, who explains it all more lucidly than any i've seen. Even he says its pseudoscience (no agreement at top levels of academia on basic concepts), that its politicized (aka victim blaming vs quaranting the psyhopaths ad narcissists, because our society functions via them in politics, law, and medicine)!, and that common diagnoses like bpd are a "wastebasket diagnosis" (aka we dont fuckin know but we have to bill insurance for something). Oh and bpd typically resolves itself in the 30s. They arent curing anyone. I also cant help but notice how most people end up on an expensive therapy treadmill. Are you just paying for some expensive confessional?

I do think some of its effective, but its one of the biggest grifts in the world. There is a lot of money involved in not solving it, just treating it. Huge % of general practitioner visits in usa are just for mental health.

Shit I think works? Polyvagal stuff like TRE, EMD. Rewiring your brain with Cerebrolysin. Living natural circadian and dietary patterns. You should be in the sun intermittently, sunrise to sunset. You should be grounded in nature, in the physical world, not hyperfocused on a black square 8" from your face.

 

[crystal_meth97]

Thank you for making this post, really. And for presenting this case, I didn't know it, although I was well aware of lobotomy and what it entails. After a decade of being over-medicated or being prescribed medication I didn't actually need and after being misdiagnosed, I've come to have what people would call an antipsychiatry stance. I've been clean of psych meds for about 5 months, I only have to get rid of the diazepam now, but it takes time after 8 years of daily benzo use. The withdrawal is pure hell, but I hope that it's not going to be that bad if I taper slowly, like over one year or even longer. The only situation when I would take psych meds again is if I lost contact with reality, if I developed psychosis, but it would be temporary, I would taper off antipsychotics after the episode ran its course. They ran their courses anyway, psychotic episodes, but I understand they can be quite dangerous for the sufferer and those around them. I've never experienced one, but my BPD allegedly makes me prone to it somehow. I might also have bipolar 2, so I need to be careful.

Back to the topic - psychiatric abuse has always been present as a worldwide phenomenon and psychiatrists, or most, have always been treating patients as subhumans. I am repulsed by psychiatry, even though my experiences weren't that bad. But I can see covert abuse nevertheless. I witnessed abuse in the psych ward several times. Thankfully I was never so removed from reality to maybe make them abuse me, but this is not how it works - they can abuse anyone, regardless of how that person behaves. I was just lucky, really, and lucky to have been born (in this case, as I wish I was never born, but that's another discussion) in this day and age, when we no longer have lobotomy as a psychiatric practice. Abuse is still happening, but it is different, comes in different forms. I am not 100% against psychiatry, I am not unreasonable, as I can see it helps some people at least to some extent. I needed psychiatric help recently, it was absolutely necessary, nothing else could have helped me. I won't go into details, but now I'm back on just 2.5 mg of diazepam for tapering, I came off the rest of the meds, which were the light ones for lack of a better term.

To sum up, I agree with your stance and your post. More people need to see this IMO.

ETA: "The last recorded lobotomy was in 1967, although I wonder how long it actually went on for." - same. And that subhuman got the Nobel Peace Prize... I wanted to add that antipsychotics are the new lobotomy. They are basically chemical lobotomy. I was living as a vegetable for years while I was taking those. I didn't even need antipsychotics, believe it or not, they gave them to me for depression because it was allegedly too severe for antidepressants. But for the first 2 years of my experience with psychiatry, antidepressants actually improved my mental health to an extent, though they also did have side effects. This shit makes me furious and helpless. They will prescribe you meds like candy, then who's going to help you come off? No one. You'll have to figure out how to do it yourself.

 

[needsomeoptions]

Thank you for this post. I only hope one day society is more openly cynical to other practises in the psychiatric field - namely overmedication and over labelling of PD's. Perhaps we may view these approaches as harmful in the same way lobotomy's and asylums are now understood to be.