Update!!!
I don’t know how many of you there are, but I appreciate each and every one of you.
Anxiety makes it very difficult to function in a normal way. But this comic is important to me, and you are important to me, so I made it happen.
Small Peculiar
It's comedy yttrium! Updated every Tuesday.
You have my support and empathy for your difficulties with anxiety. Even though I am a psychiatrist, I suspect you have considered or tried more ways to help than I ever heard of.
How I found you. Several years ago, I made a Google search for Dr Watts and found your site. In 1963 he gave a few lectures to my class in medical school at Gearge Washington. He was a modest, thoughtful teacher. There was no hint of hubris. His lecture had nothing to do with lobotomies.
After the lecture, I listened as he talked with some students. One asked a question, and his response was, “I don’t know—but I know where to find the answer.” That stayed with me as an important characteristic of any expert—acknowledging what you don’t know and knowing how to find answers. This was decades before Google searches.
I find it interesting to try to understand what he was thinking as he began to work with Freeman. Psychiatry had very few effective treatments, and randomized control trials were not a common way to evaluate a new treatment. They must have thought that maybe the surgery would revolutionize treatment.
Robert Patterson
MA
Well gosh, that just made my day! Welcome, and thank you for your kind words, and for telling me about your encounter with Dr. Watts.
I have always found it interesting that people these days tend to think of lobotomy (when they do think about it) as something that was forced upon the defenseless mentally ill, whereas in reality the mentally ill were enthusiastic about anything that might relieve their suffering. And sometimes it worked! I don’t doubt that it saved some lives, and it kept a lot of people out of institutions. So I can’t entirely condemn lobotomy, or the people who performed it.
Happily, now we have a wide array of drugs. Right now I’m so full of desipramine that I rattle when I walk.
I think Dr. Freeman, monstrous as he was in some ways, really did want to help people. And I imagine Dr. Watts did too. But by 1963, Watts had moved on, as had psychiatry at large, and Freeman was still doing lobotomies, still insisting that they would come back into fashion. In a way it’s pitiful.
I think it was you that said once that if Lobotomies had been totally ineffective then no-one would have ever heard of them, like people have never heard of far worse treatments.
But because they actually worked for some people, they became somewhat common so people think its the most barbaric and useless treatment ever.
I’ve thought about that a lot.
Yes, that was I! It’s a funny paradox, isn’t it?
I’ve been working on this novel for a while now, and that’s my main project at the moment, but after I finish it, maybe I should go back to those comics about Walter. There’s some good stuff there.