I agree with you that it was a fair article. Also, I think people should be allowed to do whatever they want to their brains. The picture gets more complicated in psychiatry because of its history of (and current) abuses and because it tends to coerce even when it's not outright abusive.

I have a friend who does kundalini breathwork workshops for OCD and apparently that treatment is so successful, he's presented at the APA meetings several times. "Trying everything" means more than just drugs, shock, and talk. Unfortunately, that concept is lost on most psychiatrists in the US.

What we rarely see in the main stream media are the devastating results in real life terms for millions of lives subjected to a deeply flawed mental health medical modality.

This story (as with many like it) continues on with the long held tradition of medicalizing human mental/emotional suffering.

Though this article should not be deemed as advertisement for Psychosurgery per say. What it does do "running below the surface and radar" is validate or add credence to these experimental procedures as a viable option for desperate patients and their families. This has and is being done with other similar invasive procedures such as vagus nerve stimulation system, deep brain stimulation and transcranial magnetic stimulation.

The problem I see personally in this particular argument "if someone wants to try it, then go for it. It's their brain after all". If someone chose to self mutilate, self medicate "as in illegal use of substances", or even seriously pondered suicidal idealization; they would be locked up and/or criminally prosecuted as gravely disabled, a danger to themselves, and/or others.

Yet if medicine validates a surgical procedure; we remove the term "mutilation"; we then call it a last option or experimental for this relief from suffering.

Let us not forget that Lobotomies started as an experimental treatment; and then quickly became the "Holy Grail" of modern psychiatry. It even received the Noble Prize and was forced upon countless mental health patients with gruesome and devastating results.

Does science and medicine really have the expertize/knowledge at this juncture to say we can surgically treat behavioral disorders and/or melancholy by surgically tinkering with an organ they know so little about in truth.

Do we have the concrete undisputable science to now say this is a chemical imbalance, an organic brain disorder, genetic abnormality, or has biological pathology. I would hope they would at the very least know exactly what they were treating in those terms; before they started cutting away.

Do we need to be reminded by the mistakes of our past: The Lobotomist - http://el-hai.com/

I too thought the neurosurgery article was very fair and nuanced, though the idea of basically experimentation on one's brain still gives me the willies.

There's a long piece in the New York Times Magazine from this weekend about DSM-V and a nebulous disorder having to do with lack of sexual desire in women. It too was well done and managed to slide in a few references to how pharma companies stand to benefit and the role they play.

I thought Ben Carey did a good job of presenting a suitably cautionary stance while also explaining the forces driving this resurgence of psychosurgery. An "operative" key word in both his write up and yours for me is saying antidepressants "failed." I'm not sure "failed" is really a strong enough word for how I view the effects of using antidepressants to treat OCD (and other disorders). It isn't just that they didn't make it any better, that they left the condition as is. It might also be that they are making it a whole lot worse and thus driving the need for these highly invasive and potentially irreversible procedures. I know I'm kind of a lone voice in calling for an investigation of this aspect of things unfortunately, but it seems to me that until we really understand how prior treatments are affecting these behaviors we should be holding off on yet more experimental treatments even though of course I appreciate how desperate these people have become. I also hardly imagine that undergoing these procedures means that people are really taken off meds (I know in the case of DBS most patients are still on cocktails to make your hair curl) so it would sure be interesting to know exactly what happens with the med treatment afterwards -- is it just continued on more or less as is? How is it adjusted? The fact that there can be an extensive discussion of psychosurgery without raising this important complicating and confounding issue seems rather cavalier to me -- as if the meds are just incidental and have no effect anyway. I think most of us reading this site know that meds are hardly incidental in the ways in which they affect behavior -- and symptoms.

I agree with Sara that we need to know more about prior treatments - whether the antidepressants, touted to "cure" OCD, are actually making some people worse.

There are quite a few cases of people on SSRI or SNRI antidepressants in the Website www.SSRIstories.com who committed a crime while on antidepresants for OCD. In fact, a young woman named Lauri Dann in Illinois was given the powerful serotonergic antidepressant Anafranil for OCD in 1989 and went into a second grade class room and shot 8 students, killing one and severely injuring 7. She then killed herself.

Also, we need to talk more about abrupt WITHDRAWAL from ALL psychotropic meds given that the man in Seattle [who shot dead 4 innocent police officers while they were drinking their coffe in a cafe] had a history of mental illness and was just released from prison 6 days before the shooting. True, this man was a scumbag with many felonies but he had never attempted murder before this. The parolees coming out of the prison are so much more dangerous now because most are in abrupt WITHDRAWAL from psychiatric meds.

I am against the destruction of healthy brain tissue in Psychosurgery and ECT. Doctors are supposed to be able tell healthy from unhealth brain cells under a microscope. If under a microscope the brain cells in question are biologically normal, the doctor is playing as God when he/she destroys it. If people are suffering so bad they need their brain destroyed , maybe they should look around at what led them down this path to a worsening of symptoms. I am sure the patients did not just show up one day with OCD and need Psychosurgery.
If they don't know what led them down this path to OCD, it is highly likely to re occur since they don't know why it happened.

If the psychiatrist destroys the part of the brain that has the ability to complain, then there will be no complaint.

If this biological psychiatry continues, there will be no more steel bar and cement prisons. Criminals will no long be criminals but renamed "mentally ill" and will be forced to take long lasting injections, or daily blood-stomach monitored for compliance. Those that continue to resist will get this Psychosurgery to remove their diseased mind.

Your mind is diseased because we say it is, says psychiatry. It is a lie from a legal drug dealer to his junkie.