Washington Post headline: "The lobotomy-chic trend has an ugly history."

I hadn't heard of "lobotomy-chic," but I knew the history of lobotomies, so this article wasn't written for me, but it did tip me off to a trend I'm interested to read about:

It’s become a common social media discourse: the memeification of lobotomies; the romanticization of sanitariums. The hashtag #lobotomychic has 9.3 million views on TikTok; a tweet that reads “I wish it was 1952 so my husband could just take me to get a lobotomy” earned more than 26,000 likes. “Back in the day your husband used to pay for your lobotomy, now thanks to *feminism* I have to pay for my own,” says another user to a chorus of more than 11,000 views. Then there’s this love letter to the trend from i-D magazine, which calls it the “duckface of a nihilistic era” and heralds the “dissociative pout” as the new it-girl go-to for selfies. The article unpacks the aesthetics of sullen eyes and swollen lips — all without once mentioning why women who were lobotomized actually had that vacant look in their eyes; why dissociation for them was a constant state of being. Then there are the viral TikTok makeup tutorials on how to get the lobotomy chic look. If you’re an ASMR girlie, maybe you’ll enjoy this “drive-through lobotomy” simulation where a creator in cherry earrings and bright purple eye shadow and a stethoscope around her neck pretends to lobotomize the viewer all while delivering a dreamlike, coddling narration.

The author of the piece, Caroline Reilly, seems to infer that people fooling around in this manner, having their fun, don't understand the background or that people shouldn't play around with an idea that was once about something serious.

Isn't that like taking issue with people who dress up as witches at Halloween?

It's not as if Reilly is trying to stir up alarm about damaging surgery desired by young people today.

"The History of Lobotomies and One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest."

 

At 1:02: Duncan Trussell starts talking about "One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest" — "It's completely different from the movie... Ken Kesey, he was like..." — and Joe Rogan, who'd just said he read the book, blurts out: "Ken Kesey wrote it?!" Trussell lets that go and proceeds to put the story, as told in the book, into his own words.

At 3:22: Duncan and Joe discuss the real-world medical practice of lobotomies: "They really did that"/"They really did that.... What happened to the person? 'They became a really good patient.'"

At 4:45: Duncan and Joe discuss Thomas Eagleton and electroshock therapy for depression. "Today, in this victimhood society, if you said he suffered from clinical depression but he sought help, [he]'d be a shining example: Look at him!... He's a hero!"

200 journalists and writers release an open letter to the NYT to raise "serious concerns about editorial bias in the newspaper’s reporting on transgender, non-binary, and gender nonconforming people.”

Hell Gate reports.

The open letter, whose signees include regular contributors to the Times and prominent writers and journalists like Ed Yong, Lucy Sante, Roxane Gay, and Rebecca Solnit, comes at a time when far-right extremist groups and their analogues in state legislatures are ramping up their attacks on trans young people....

In recent years and months, the Times has decided to play an outsized role in laundering anti-trans narratives and seeding the discourse with those narratives, publishing tens of thousands of handwringing words on trans youth—reporting that is now approvingly cited and lauded, as the letter writers note, by those who seek to ban and criminalize gender-affirming care.

Hell Gate has an interview with Jo Livingstone, "an award-winning critic and writer who helped organize the open letter."

Here's the open letter. I'll highlight what I think are important parts:

"'The Larry Project,' neurotic and tender by turns, evolved into a much more emotional, all-encompassing undertaking — in which the absent Larry, whom Ms. Upson never met..."

"... expanded into the artist’s muse, her lover, her persecutor and, ultimately, her doppelgänger. By the end, no clean distinction was left between artist and subject; the two had become doubles. One drawing in the Hammer Museum show bore the words 'I am more he than he is.' The project ended in 2011 with a performance at a Los Angeles gallery at which she dragged a charcoal-and-wax mannequin of Larry on the walls and floor inside a plywood cube until the effigy disintegrated, symbolically turning Larry’s body into dust."

 
"Kaari Upson, California Artist of Desire and Disturbance, Dies at 51/Known for her resin sculptures and her disquieting videos, she was one of the most significant artists to emerge from the vibrant 21st-century Los Angeles art scene" (NYT). (Upson died of breast cancer.)

A contemporaneous artist obituary: "Chuck Close, Artist of Outsized Reality, Dies at 81/He found success with his large-scale Photorealist portraits, becoming one of the leading artists of his generation. Late in life he faced allegations of sexual harassment" (NYT):

In the 1970s, he began to translate his photographic sources into pixelated images, filling in the individual cells of a grid with distinct marks, colors and tones that would cohere into photographic images when viewed from a distance....  His pragmatic, problem-solving approach would serve Mr. Close well in the second half of his career. In New York, on Dec. 7, 1988, he was felled by what turned out to be a collapsed spinal artery, which initially left him paralyzed from the neck down. In the ensuing months of rehabilitation, he began to regain movement in his arms, and he was able to sit up and paint using brushes strapped to his hand. He not only returned to painting with unimpaired ambition but also began producing what many would view as the best work of his career.... Up close, the new paintings seemed to swarm with woozy, almost psychedelic energy, while from a distance the image would emerge in all its photographic exactness.

As for the allegations of sexual harassment, a doctor is quoted attributing his actions to Alzheimer's disease: "He was very disinhibited and did inappropriate things, which were part of his underlying medical condition. Frontotemporal dementia affects executive function. It’s like a patient having a lobotomy — it destroys that part of the brain that governs behavior and inhibits base instincts."

"In his decades of medical practice, Marsh has been a witness or a party to almost every kind of mistake."

"There are errors of commission (the hubristic removal of too much tumor) and of omission (the missed diagnosis). There are errors that go unreported (after a successful surgery, Marsh might decide not to tell a patient about a close call) and errors for which Marsh is held accountable. (He writes that, after one operation, 'I told them to sue me. I told them I had made a terrible mistake.') There are errors of delegation—as when Marsh allows a resident to perform a simple spinal surgery, and the patient is left with a paralyzed foot—and historical errors: at a mental hospital, Marsh encounters victims of lobotomy. One morning, Marsh operates after having a petty argument with another surgeon, and the operation paralyzes half the patient’s face. He writes, 'Perhaps this was going to happen anyway—it is called a "recognized complication" of that particular operation—but I know that I was not in the right state of mind to carry out such dangerous and delicate surgery, and when I saw the patient on the ward round in the days afterwards, and saw his paralyzed face, paralyzed and disfigured, I felt a deep sense of shame.'"

From a New Yorker article by Joshua Rothman — "Anatomy of Error/A surgeon remembers his mistakes" — about a book by the neurosurgeon Henry Marsh titled "Do No Harm: Stories of Life, Death, and Brain Surgery."

"The U.S. government lobotomized roughly 2,000 mentally ill veterans—and likely hundreds more—during and after World War II..."

"... according to a cache of forgotten memos, letters and government reports unearthed by The Wall Street Journal."

The U.S. government lobotomized roughly 2,000 mentally ill veterans—and likely hundreds more—during and after World War II, according to a cache of forgotten memos, letters and government reports unearthed by The Wall Street Journal. Besieged by psychologically damaged troops returning from the battlefields of North Africa, Europe and the Pacific, the Veterans Administration performed the brain-altering operation on former servicemen it diagnosed as depressives, psychotics and schizophrenics, and occasionally on people identified as homosexuals....

“Realistically looking back, the diagnosis didn’t really matter—it was the behaviors,” says psychiatrist Max Fink, 90, who ran a ward in a Kentucky Army hospital in the mid-1940s. He says veterans who couldn’t be controlled through any other technique would sometimes be referred for a lobotomy. I didn’t think we knew enough to pick people for lobotomies or not.... It’s just that we didn’t have anything else to do for them.”

In a standard lobotomy, the surgeon opens the skull and severs the prefrontal part of the brain from the rest of the brain.

"It’s the most sane and moral weapon ever devised."

"It’s the only nuclear weapon in history that makes sense in waging war. When the war is over, the world is still intact."

The neutron bomb — so sensible to its inventor — was so intensely reviled.

Samuel T. Cohen, dead of stomach cancer at age 89.

***

Dialogue from the movie "Repo Man":

I had a lobotomy in the end.

Lobotomy? Isn't that for loonies?

Not at all. A friend of mine had one. Designer of the neutron bomb. You ever hear of the neutron bomb? Destroys people, but leaves buildings standing. It fits in a suitcase. So small. No one knows it's there, until... blammo!

MORE:

"She understood deeply the lesson our mother and father taught us -- much is expected of those to whom much has been given."

"Throughout her extraordinary life, she touched the lives of millions, and for Eunice that was never enough."

So said Teddy Kennedy about his sister, Eunice Kennedy Shriver, dead at the age of 88.

In the competitive household of her youth, she established herself as the most intellectually gifted of the sisters in a family where the patriarch, Joseph P. Kennedy Sr., decided that his sons were the ones bound for politics.

Within the constraints of her era, gender, and social strata, she was the most ambitious, too, becoming an international leader more than a half century ago in the burgeoning movement to wrest mental retardation from the shadows of hushed conversations.

A younger sister of Rosemary Kennedy, who was developmentally disabled and institutionalized most of her life, Mrs. Shriver dedicated decades to ensuring that other families would not endure the fate of her own, watching a loved one whisked behind closed doors. In an attempt to alleviate Rosemary’s intellectual disabilities, doctors performed a lobotomy that instead left her in need of constant care.

Here are 2 pictures of the great lady — young and old:

Justice David Souter describes the Supreme Court term as "sort of annual intellectual lobotomy."

That slipped out along with some lofty comments about how people need to read more and how he's forced to do his serious reading in the summers between Court terms.

That makes some people, like Tony Mauro, the author of the linked article, wonder about rumors that he may be leaving the Court:

If he thinks of his work on the Court, even sarcastically, as a nine-month-long, brain-evacuating experience, it is easier to see why he would want to leave it behind -- if nothing else, to catch up on his reading.

Others I'm sure would put that more harshly: If you don't appreciate the great work of the Supreme Court, get the hell out.

Me, I would speculate that he's fine with the Supreme Court work and he was just being funny — and effusive about the value of serious literature.

ADDED: On reflection, I think the problem he's talking about is something I experience as a law professor. I love the work, but it requires me to devote most of my reading time to judicial opinions and lawprof articles and books. This kind of reading is useful raw material for doing what one loves to do, but it isn't enriching on a deep enough level.

My main problem with Souter is that he is one of the judges who writes the long tedious opinions that I have to chew my way through. May I suggest that if he wants more of a challenge during the Court's term that he devote himself to writing better sentences? Just on the Strunk and White level, could you please edit the hell out of those damned things?

If you don't like what reading that stuff does to your brain, why do you do what you do to my brain? If the Term for you is a lobotomy, consider that you are also the lobotomist!

Worse than living with a lobotomy.

Living with the knowledge that your parents procured a lobotomy for you.

The icepick lobotomy doctor -- a little too " stubborn" and "impervious to criticism."

The "King Lear in medical garb" who lobotomized 3,000 persons, including some as young as 4 (to nip schizophrenia in the bud) and some for nothing more than youthful sullenness (the stepmom said he didn't want to take a bath and turned the lights on during the daytime).

UPDATE: Here's the link to the NPR audio reviewed at the original link.

A family's reputation and a lobotomy for mild mental retardation.

A short, chilling obituary for Rosemary Kennedy.

Janet Frame, 1924-2004, "spells history hiss-tree to make an unsettling connection to Eden's serpent."

After a suicide attempt she spent eight years in mental hospitals in New Zealand, receiving 200 electroshock treatments. She was about to have a lobotomy when a hospital official read that she had won a literary prize. She was released.

See her story in the brilliantly acted film, "An Angel At My Table." Click on this link to see how to express interest in its release in DVD format.