A while ago I was looking for some good pages to reference about some of psychiatry’s more barbaric procedures. Along the way, I stumbled across the Washington Post’s peculiar profile of Dr. Walter Freeman, the pioneer of the ice-pick lobotomy and one of the most controversial figures in the past few decades of clinical psychiatry.

For those who aren’t familiar, Freeman performed thousands of lobotomies on people suffering from depression, anxiety, obsessive-compulsive disorder, schizophrenia, mental retardation, and other disorders. Sublimely apathetic to the fact that there was no actual evidence that his treatment worked, he carried on mutilating people’s brains–knocking them out by electroshock or anesthesia, and then hammering an icepick through the tear duct and swinging it around in the frontal lobe to destroy the connection with the thalamus.

Freeman made his fame, and a great deal of money, by refining Egas Moniz’s techniques for human lobotomy and touring the country evangelizing its use to psychiatric hospitals. Because lobotomy succeeded in making some trouble-making patients more docile, it was widely adopted by psychiatric hospitals after presentations by Freeman. It didn’t seem to bother them that most patients suffered severe losses of functioning after the procedure, that adult patients ended up pissing on themselves and having to be re-taught how to eat. It didn’t even matter to them that Freeman had forcibly anesthetized patients in order to carry out his assault on their brain whether they wanted it or not. What mattered to them was that patients were docile and manageable, not whether their humanity was being respected or their underlying mental conditions improved. In the period of Freeman’s greatest activity, between 1936 and the late 1950s, somewhere between 40,000 and 50,000 Americans were subjected to lobotomies.

Along the way, Freeman managed to kill several of his patients in surgery and to try bizarre experiments to refine his technique, such as a case where he followed the lobotomy of 14 patients with an injection of hot water into the brain, in which he was prepared to accept two fatalities. Prior to his career as a lobotomist, he had also personally introduced electroconvulsive therapy and insulin shock therapy to the hospital in which he worked.

A few of the incidents are recounted by the Post:

When the day arrived, Mrs. Hammatt tried to change her mind when she found out that her head had to be shaved. Freeman and Watts promised to spare as much of her hair as they could, before forcibly anesthetizing her. Later, Freeman recorded that her last words before surgery were, Who is that man? What does he want here? What’s he going to do to me? Tell him to go away. Oh, I don’t want to see him, followed by a scream.

The Post doesn’t bother to point it out, but what Freeman and Watts had just done was to cut into a person’s brain against her will, committing a bizarre and wantonly cruel surgical assault. Later in his brain-slicing career, he committed what could only be called murder from depraved indifference to human life:

At Cherokee State Hospital in Iowa, he accidentally killed a patient when he stepped back to take a photo during the surgery and allowed the leucotome to sink deep into the patient’s midbrain.

We’ll leave alone the question of why he was never put in prison for his crimes; so many atrocities against mental patients have gone unpunished. But why is it that the Washington Post has decided to portray Dr. Freeman, whose wanton disregard for human life and barbarous procedures should put his medical influence alongside that of Dr. Josef Mengele, as some kind of unheralded psychiatric innovator? They conclude their profile by writing:

Lobotomy also raised high hopes in its day. During the late 1950s, when the new tranquilizing drugs had grown popular in state hospitals, Freeman wrote letters to his psychosurgical colleagues around the world, praying for a time when brain operations would again gain wide favor in the battle against mental illness. It didn’t happen in his lifetime.

Now that it might happen in ours, Freeman’s presence is unwelcome. He flits around, a pesky spirit looking for the recognition he believes he is due, an unwanted ghost causing sighs and regret.

Poor Walter Freeman! As to the reason for these sighs and regret, the Post writes that The answer lies in the complex tangle of Freeman’s personality and motivations, and in the public’s fear of past abuses.

Perhaps the Post should reconsider the possibility that Freeman is discredited not only because of a grating personality and lingering public hysteria. Maybe it also has something to do with the fact that he was an irresponsible, sadistic asshole who killed several people and ruined the lives of tens of thousands more with a procedure that was completely useless, cruel, and barbaric.

Of course, methods which are not much more refined are carried on today–the ice-pick lobotomy was replaced with the chemical lobotomy of tranquilizers and other disabling psychiatric medications. The article would have been no more responsible if it had stridently condemned Freeman but uncritically endorsed these modern methods. But I really have to wonder what could have blinded the Post to something so thoroughly obvious as the evil that Freeman perpetrated on innocent people. It’s a fucking ice-pick driven through the skull. Even some of his psychiatric contemporaries, who regularly used electroconvulsive therapy and insulin shock, fainted at the sight of Freeman’s procedure. Can’t we expect at least that much sympathy out of those of us who have lived to have the benefit of hindsight on the horrors that Freeman wrought?

(link courtesy of Max [2002/08/15])

One of the things about this crazy postmodern age is the absolutely insufferable number of people who think that they are being clever and naughty but are actually just being stupid and hackneyed.

A case in point is the promotional materials for the upcoming film, The Rules of Attraction. It’s bad enough that it is being made by Roger Avary, and based on a novel by Bret Easton Ellis–virtually guaranteeing it will be too smarmily hip for its own good. But did they really have to make a poster and a trailer which are about nothing at all, other than how naughty they are being?

Here’s a hint boys: you’re not actually "corrupt minds;" you’re just boring little hipsters playing at epater les bourgeoisie, and there is perhaps nothing in the world that is less edgy or interesting than that.

So let’s say that you’re a mother in Florida, who has gone through with the achingly difficult decision to put your child up for adoption. It’s a situation no-one would want to be in, but apparently Florida legislators have taken it upon themselves to make it even harder [CNN]. Under a law passed last year, Florida women putting children up for adoption are required to print an advertisement detailing their sexual history in their hometown newspaper.

Yes, that’s right. The bio-mother must publish a newspaper advertisement trying to find the bio-father of the child which lists the woman’s name, age, and description, along with descriptions of any men who might be the bio-father of the child. The ad has to be run in papers in every city where the woman has lived or traveled in the year before giving birth where the child might have been conceived, which is to say, her hometown and possibly the hometown of all the relatives and friends she went to visit. Privacy? What privacy? The law does not even make exemptions for survivors of sexual assault; unless you’re in Palm Beach County (where you are protected by a local court ruling), you will have to list your rapist if he is possibly the bio-father of the child.

This is one of those laws that is so utterly bizarre and senseless that it cries out for further explanation—how did anyone actually come up with this bill? Who thought it was a good idea? What committee put it forth as a step forward for the state of Florida?

The genius behind the bill is Democratic state senator Walter Skip Campbell, who has been described as the ultimate male chauvinist pig. It was claimed [SP Times] that the bill was introduced to clarify the rights and responsibilities of all parties involved in an adoption so that cases such as the custody battle over Baby Emily would not happen again. In the Baby Emily case, the bio-father of Emily, a convicted rapist, filed suit to contest her mother’s decision to place Emily up for adoption. It took three years of court battles for the Florida Supreme Court to finally rule that he would not have received custody. And when they did rule against him, they based their decision that on whether or not the bio-father had met technical requirements for abandonment of the mother under Florida law. They held that it did not matter whether or not Emily would be worse off from being placed in the custody of a convicted sexual predator; all that mattered was whether or not the bio-father could exercise his supposed biological rights to custody of the child.

Supposedly, this is supposed to prevent protracted court battles by establishing a process and a time limit for the bio-father to come forward. But, Christ, people. In order to avoid situations such as this, they could have:

1. Passed a law which says Rapists can’t contest the other bio-parent’s decision to put the child up for adoption
2. Passed a law enabling men who think they might be the bio-father of a child to submit their name into a registry so that they can be notified in case of adoption proceedings. The state could then ask the woman for names of men who might be the father and check it against the registry, without forcing her to publish this information in the newspaper.

Of course, even if they created such a system, the basic idea behind the Baby Emily case—that a bio-father can just come forward after years and assert a right to tear the child out of the home she grew up in, just because he happens to share 50% of her DNA, is bullshit. The Father’s Rights movement believes otherwise, of course. I suggest that they get over their mental roadblocks by chanting this daily mantra: My DNA is not a license of ownership; my dick is not that important. While we’re at it, I also suggest: I care about my child’s welfare, not my fatherhood rights.

The fact is that being a bio-father or bio-mother of a child means very little in the grand scheme of things. Who cares whether or not your reproductive organs work? Who cares whether it is the bio-mother’s fault or the bio-father’s fault that the bio-father wasn’t involved in the decisions about the child’s future? That may be a reason to take legal action against the bio-mother, but it’s no reason to tear the child out of her home and send her over to the bio-father who never had any relationship with her. What matters is the established relationships that the child has grown up in, and her welfare in a given home environment. If more people would realize this, then we’d need a lot fewer regulations of adoption in the first place.

Most Israelis oppose the occupation and want the settlements dismantled.

Let’s say that again: a clear majority of Israelis oppose the occupation and want the settlements dismantled.

It’s a secret that Ariel Sharon and his hawkish allies, both in the US and Israel, don’t want you to know. It’s a secret they’ve managed to cover up not only from the American public, but even from most of the Israeli public. It’s a dirty little secret that, even in these dark days, ought to give us some hope for the longer term. As harrowing as the daily news coming out of Israel is, 2/3 call for unilateral withdrawal from the occupied territories. 2/3 call for evacuation of all or most of the settlements. 60% believe that Israel should agree to the creation of a Palestinian state.

Now, let’s not get too optimistic here: clear majorities of Israelis also call for strong military measures. 74% say that Sharon is doing a good job, and 60% say that the Israeli army should be allowed to attack the refugee camps in Gaza. But they are short-term hawks and long term doves. The long-term measures they support–ending the occupation–will pull the bottom out of the vicious circle of violent escalation and vengeance that the occupation has sustained. They are quickly growing war-weary (much as America did as the Vietnam war rolled on), and are in no mood for the bloody escalation that will be needed to sustain or expand the occupation for much longer.

Why hasn’t this been heard? Why does Likud continue to pretend as though it had a blank check from the Israeli populace to continue and expand the occupation and ethnic cleansing indefinitely? Why don’t we know that the vast majority of the Israeli populace wants a peaceful, two-state solution?

Well, part of the reason is the well known fact that the Israeli press allows for a much greater range of debate than the American press over controversies such as the occupation. In America we tend to be blinded to the huge presence of moderates and the burgeoning peace movement within Israel. Instead we get fed infantile formulas, as if there were only Sharon’s side and Hamas’s side, and if you are not with Sharon you are with the attacks on civilians. Positions such as those taken by, say, Ha’aretz in Israel, are marginalized and confined to the Left-wing alternative media in the US.

That’s part of the reason we haven’t heard about the pro-peace supermajority in Israel. The other reason is that many Israelis themselves don’t know about it. Policymakers, as they often do, have ignored majority views, and opinion-shapers in the media follow along with this distorted picture of reality (the same thing happens in the United States on issues such as drug prohibition, where government drug warriors and their media lackeys are far to the Right of the American public). The power of the settler lobby in the Knesset, and Sharon’s refusal to actually discuss settlement issues head-on, have aided and abetted the misperceptions. As a consequence, in polls, Israelis significantly overestimate pro-settlement and pro-occupation opinion in their own country, even though they themselves predominantly believe in withdrawal and evacuation.

So let’s spread the secret, and say it as much as we can. Let’s bust up the lie that the Right-wing elites have tried to push down our throats.

Next time tells you that we have to stand with the Israelis, tell him where the Israelis really stand. Next time someone calls you an anti-Semite for opposing the occupation, tell her what the voice of Israeli Jews is calling for. Say it again: most Israelis oppose the occupation.

The Bush Administration: Guarding your freedom and security.

Since Tuesday,the Bush administration has been refusing federal court orders to turn over documents on the interrogation of a United States citizen that the Bush administration is holding as an enemy combatant.

Yaser Esam Hamdi was one of two American Taliban who were taken prisoner by Northern Alliance forces in Afghanistan. He is currently locked in a Navy brig in Norfolk, Virginia without charges and without access to counsel during interrogations. Hamdi’s attoney has asked U.S. District Judge Robert G. Doumar to release Hamdi or at least provide him with access to counsel. Judge Doumar ordered the government to give Hamdi unrestricted access to counsel, but his decision was stayed by the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 4^th Circuit and remanded to Doumar, which advised him to hear more facts about the case before making a ruling.

The Ashcroft Department of Justice has taken the position that the federal courts have no authority to review the Executive’s determinations of who is and is not an enemy combatant. Thus, it has simply refused the judge’s order to hand over additional documents pertaining to Hamdi’s case.

I hope I don’t need to point out how dangerous a precedent it would set to allow the administration to unilaterally pick and choose whose civil liberties in wants to protect. But just for the sake of argument, let’s look at what’s happening here.

1. The Department of Justice and Department of Defense have detained three men who have been accused of attacking the United States: John Walker Lindh, Abdullah al-Mujahir (formerly José Padilla), and Hamdi.
2. One — Walker Lindh — was tried in open court according to Constitutional protections of civil liberties. Two — al-Mujahir and Hamdi — continue to rot in military prisons with no charges filed and with no access to counsel. The government has decided that these two will be test cases for their claimed war powers. Somehow it just happened to be the case that the government chose to take it out on the Puerto Rican gang-banger from Chicago and the Saudi Arabian-American, but not the rich white kid from Marin County.
3. The Executive says that Hamdi is an enemy combatant on the basis of a two-page affadavit from a Defense Department adviser which gives a brief outline of Hamdi’s alleged actions and says he’s an enemy combatant.
4. The Executive claims that his designation as an enemy combatant gives them the authority to hold him forever without charges and without access to counsel.
5. The Executive claims that federal courts have no power to review their decisions on this matter, and has refused to respect a court order to supply further documents.

So currently the administration is acting in brach of a court order and asserting its right to unilaterally designate anyone that it wants to to have no civil liberties protections whatsoever in the courts. As if deliberately going for perverse irony, the administration is basing its claims from the doctrine of the separation of powers, as if the Executive’s authority over the conduct of war gave it the right to suspend court proceedings whenever it says there’s war business going on. We’ll also simply note in passing that Congress has not actually declared any war in the first place.

There is a word for a system of government where the Executive arrogates the powers of life and death on the basis of the unilateral say-so – the dictates – of no-one other than itself. The word for that system is dictatorship. What’s scary to me is the complete arrogance with which they are proceeding, as if they feel completely comfortable in telling the courts to go fuck themselves, as if they no longer feel that there’s any point in even pretending to be accountable to the people or to the rule of law.

We have to make them uncomfortable and accountable. If the administration continues to refuse the court’s orders, President Bush should be impeached. There is no room to tolerate these kind of abuses. Regardless of what Bush, Ashcroft, or Rumsfeld intends to do with the powers that they are claiming they have, it should be obvious that it would establish a terrifying and intolerable precedent.

Write a letter to the President demanding that the administration comply with the court orders. Write a letter to your Representative and Senators urging them to call the Bush administration to task. Write a letter or Op-Ed to your local newspaper asking how dare the Bush administration ignore basic civil liberties and the separation of powers. They think they can slip this one by while we aren’t looking, but we have to let them know that we’re not going to take it.