Name: They "Cured" You with a Spike to the Brain ?
Uploaded: 2026-01-21T21:01:10.000Z
Duration: 3 min 53 s
Description: Thousands of YouTube videos with English-Chinese subtitles! Now you can learn to understand native speakers, expand your vocabulary, and improve your pronunciation...

Imagine suffering from OCD or severe depression,

confiding in your doctor about it, and then they just bust out a drill aimed directly at your noggin.

Well, if you suffered from a mental illness in the early 1900s,

doctors might have "treated" you with something called a lobotomy.

Lobotomies sound kind of scary, and they honestly were.

In this archaic procedure, physicians broke the connections between the frontal lobe and the thalamus,

because the frontal lobe is responsible for functions like language, voluntary motion, and cognition.

And the thalamus relays information to your cerebral cortex, where function is carried out.

Scientists believe that severing the neural fibers between them would stop abnormal behavior.

This was originally accomplished through open brain surgery until the 1930s,

when the less invasive leucotomy was developed.

That first involved drilling through the skull.

Some doctors modified this further by inserting an ice pick through the eye socket

or a chemical that would harden the neural fibers.

Doesn't this sound like something from a Saw movie?

Of course, having your brain messed with comes with loads of bad side effects.

These included bleeding, infection, dementia, intellectual impairment,

apathy, epilepsy, incontinence, and death.

And yet, despite their gruesome methods and terrible outcomes,

lobotomies were super popular in the 1930s and 40s.

They were performed on tens of thousands of people across the world.

And the man who invented the laconomy was awarded the Nobel Prize in 1949.

I'm sure you're thinking, "Why on earth would anyone do that to someone?"

Back then, there were no drugs for mental health disorders,

Mental hospitals and asylums were overcrowded with people suffering from severe symptoms.

These often included those with OCD, severe depressive illness,

psychosis, psychopathy, and schizophrenia.

The procedure was intended to calm these patients

and reduce their aggression so they could live at home.

However, at the time, the term mental illness encompassed a wide range of behaviors,

including intellectual disability, homosexuality, and committing a crime.

But the group most often subjected to a lobotomy was women,

even though mental hospitals contained more male patients.

At one hospital in the US, 85% of the lobotomies performed were on women.

In another analysis of two main proponents of the procedure,

And in most cases, their symptoms were simply apprehension or insomnia.

Due to the many severe side effects and overuse,

lobotomy critics think it's clear that this treatment is for the public and not for the patient.

Luckily, once antipsychotic medications were developed in the 1950s,

In the US, lobotomy is still legal, although many states have heavy restrictions on it.

The last known one took place in 1967 and resulted in the death of the patient.

Now to something less depressing and more exciting.

In December, we're going to do a Viewer's Choice video series.

So leave a comment on a video topic you want us to cover and we'll pick a few to do an episode on.

Subtitles ListPlay Video

They "Cured" You with a Spike to the Brain ?

mental

depression

desperate

severe