In defense of the lobotomy
A very interesting video about the lobotomy made by The People Show. Some of the skimmed topics and implications of the video but especially of the comment section bothered me a little.
To chime in on the comment's idea that "an entire generation of creative and bright minds that were destroyed" or that "if I lived back than I would be lobotomised" I do want to say that even in the worse way to view the numbers, and slicing the population at 1949 instead of 1952 with for example, 40,000 to 50,000 range (which is another estimate that is cited as being "generous" (not the best word choice)) that would mean that the percentage of people lobotomised would fall between about 0.026% and 0.033%.and we already established that the bar for "mentally ill" could be "didn't want to marry that old dude" or "was emotional during her period" or "stopped going to work after his dog died" would mean that the actual ratio of mental illness to labotomy is not that high. Now a second point is that the even acounting for lack of diagnosis it is likley and widly accepted that more people are mentally ill today than in the past (Human biological evolution vs societal evolution). All of this leads me to point out that if you are today one of the roughly 79,724,452 Americans (23.08%) experiencing (more) well diagnosed mental illness or even the 20,241,997 (5.86%) cited as having severe mental illness you are not likely to become a household pet were you to be born back than.
Additionally, we don't have good numbers on how many were preformed on none institutionalised patients (as we are lead to believe was common with the labotomobile story) but it is clear that the number is very low as the main focus always has being state hospitals, including of the labotomobile itself. Regardless it is hard to speculate on the matter, I will personally assume 5% (but for the following calculation I will increase to 10% to be more conservative) of lobotomy patients were not institutionalised.
for fun lets look at the historical summary of the NIMH that states around 558,000 institutionlized "mental health" patients for the nineteen fifties that would put the percentage of patients that are then labotomised at around 6.45% to 8.06%
(ok, need to go to work. Will hopefully continue this train of thought later)