About the lecture

In this lecture, we think about the history and effectiveness of psychosurgery, focusing in particular on: (i) the modern term for psychosurgery being neurosurgery; (ii) the popularity of psychosurgery, particularly the lobotomy, during the 1940s and 50s; (iii) the goal of a lobotomy being to sever the brain tissue that was thought to be causing symptoms of psychosis; (iv) the two main types of lobotomy being prefrontal and transorbital; (v) the logic behind lobotomies being that behaviour and decision making happens largely in the prefrontal cortex, so severing connections there would reduce symptoms of psychosis; (vi) common side effects of lobotomies being motor and emotional dysregulation; (vii) the invention of the lobotomy by António Egas Moniz in the 1930s; (viii) challenges around assessing the effectiveness of lobotomies due to the bias in reports on their ability to ‘cure’ patients of psychosis; (ix) the development of psychotropic agents, or antipsychotic drugs, which replaced many lobotomies as a treatment plan; (x) the continued use of neurosurgery today, but only in cases of treatment resistant conditions, and in the form of implanted electrodes to regulate localised brain activity.

About the lecturer

Dr Ivana Babicova is a lecturer in psychology in the School of Social Sciences at Birmingham City University. Dr Babicova’s research interests are in dementia, pain assessment and positive psychology. Some of Dr Babicova’s recent publications include ‘Validation and evaluation of psychometric properties of PainChek®: an electronic pain assessment tool for people with moderate-to-severe dementia’ and ‘Pain in people with dementia: a systematic review and a meta-analysis of the effectiveness of observational pain assessment tools’ (2020).