1 Comments Posted by NeilP

Curious - I found this website by chance and then spent a lot of time finding out about the way America dealt with mental illness. I'm in no position to be judgemental, for me its (gladly) a remote, further than armslength subject.

For all that I found it fascinating that America needed so many massive institutions, such as Edgewood, Pilgrim, Islip and Kings Park, I guess there are many more but these were big enough to be significant towns in their own right. Then all of a sudden they just became unrequired, neglected and finally derelict.

Along the way I came across two documentaries, "The Lobotomist" and "Let There Be Light" which profoundly disturbed, enlightened, scared and I have to say, fascinated me.

The subject can be viewed as gruesome of course, and rightly. I guess that its impossible to fully understand the motivation of someone like Freeman without living his life.

He appears to be genuinely motivated by a need to help some desperate souls who he probably felt he had a magic cure for. How could you ignore that? And how easy to rationalise away the failures, the ones which responded well and then slowly deteriorated, to the cases who died on the operating table, when the worlds press and the medical community did nothing but tell him he was a saviour.

I fully understand the damage that was done during this bizarre period in medical history, and its inexcusable.

I guess without condoning it in any way, "The Lobotomist" helped me understand in a small way why it happened.

Monumentally great television - its this sort of analysis which helps curb over-entusiastic zealots from getting carried away when the next untested scientific miracle comes along.

Radium based toothpaste for whiter teeth anyone? How about carcinogenic insecticides to make the home more comfortable? Opium based 'soothing syrup' to keep the baby quiet? They have all been touted as a great solution to our problems at some time in our past.

I guess our problem is we want the quick fix, and aren't prepared to wait and find out what the side effects really are - but history always has a habit of showing us...