WWII Navy Nurse Veteran Had Life From Hell After VA Lobotomy

Lobotomy

Dorothy Ludden, Survivor of VA Lobotomy Program, Dies
One of the 2,000 World War II veterans who received the procedure
Wall Street Journal
By MICHAEL M. PHILLIPS
Feb. 23, 2015

Mrs. Ludden married after her brain surgery and raised three sons. Her volatile temper, odd behavior and limited emotional range left scars on her family that lasted decades.

Dorothy Ludden, one of the last survivors of a government program that lobotomized mentally-ill World War II veterans, died on Monday. She was 94.

During the war, Mrs. Ludden served as a Navy nurse in stateside military hospitals. She was hospitalized for psychiatric reasons soon after her discharge from active duty in 1946. Diagnosed with schizophrenia, she underwent a lobotomy at the Veterans Administration hospital in Tuscaloosa, Ala.

The Tuscaloosa facility was one of 50 VA hospitals that performed the controversial brain surgery to treat intractable mental illness among veterans. Some 2,000 veterans were lobotomized by the government before the first antipsychotic drug, Thorazine, came on the market in the mid-1950s.
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The U.S. government lobotomized roughly 2,000 mentally ill veterans — and likely hundreds more — during and after World War II, according to a cache of forgotten memos, letters and government reports unearthed by The Wall Street Journal.

“They got the notion they were going to come to give me a lobotomy,” Roman Tritz, a World War II bomber pilot, told the newspaper in a report published Wednesday. “To hell with them.”

Tritz said the orderlies at the veterans hospital pinned him to the floor, and he initially fought them off. A few weeks later, just before his 30th birthday, he was lobotomized.

Besieged by psychologically damaged troops returning from the battlefields of North Africa, Europe and the Pacific, the Veterans Administration performed the brain-altering operation on former servicemen it diagnosed as depressives, psychotics and schizophrenics, and occasionally on people identified as homosexuals, according to the report.

Tritz was one of roughly 2,000 World War II veterans lobotomized during and after the war, a recent Wall Street Journal investigation discovered. The procedure, once lauded as a "miracle cure" for nearly all types of mental illness, has since fallen so far out of favor in the medical community that it's rarely even discussed, said Mario DeSanctis, medical director at the Tomah VA. Vet one of thousands lobotomized by government after WWII, La Crosse Tribune, Wis., By Allison Geyer Published: February 8, 2014