Howard Interviewed on "Talk of the Nation"

Here's a link to the NPR page where the interview will be posted around 6 PM ET.

Also "A Hole in One" directed by Richard Ledes is now available on DVD at Amazon. It stars MeatLoaf Aday and Michelle Willaims of Dawson's Creek fame. It's a very interesting fictionalized account of a woman who wants a lobotomy because she thinks it will relieve her of her worries.

Howard Makes the New York Times

Here's a link to a New York Times article about Howard.

Here's a link to a Daily News article about him.

Also here is a link to his NPR interview.

His show was so popular that it crashed NPR's web servers!

Howard Dully on CNN tonight

A taped interview with Howard Dully is (probably) going to appear on CNN Thursday Night (tonight!) during the show that's on at 8pm eastern 5pm pacific.

He's also going be on another NPR show called Talk of the Nation on Thursday. He will be interviewed and take caller's questions.

Go Howard!

Howard's Radio Premier

So on Monday night my mother and I went to Bellevue Hospital in NYC to attend the premier of Howard’s NPR program called “My Lobotomy”. It was a deeply emotional experience. Psychosurgery.org member Carol Noell was there along with Howard Dully himself. While Carol, Howard, and I have communicated for years, this was the first time we met in person. All of the Sound Portraits staff who produced the documentary were present too, including Dave Issay and Piya Kochar. Jack El Hai, author of "The Lobotomist", was there, as well as Richard Ledes who directed “A Hole in One”.

The most unexpected attendee was the doctor who had assisted Walter Freeman when he lobotomized Howard all those years ago. He was tall, thin and dressed all in black which sharply contrasted with his very white hair. I’m not sure he meant to do it, but he looked like a movie representation of a “bad guy” dressed in black like that. The truth is it took a great deal of character to face such a controversial event in his distant past. It was right that he was there.

Howard is immense at well over six feet tall. That night he was nervous – the venue was full of people who were all interested in what he had to say. It was the first time he was to speak publicly about what happened to him. His bravery is incredible.

While waiting for the program to begin my mom and I talked about my grandmother (my mom’s mom) and the terrible events that led to her commitment and lobotomization. It was good to talk to people who understood the history of the issue so deeply. Carol was amazing as she told about her memories of her mother Anna Ruth. I talked to so many people who had an interesting stake in the issue. One was a woman who worked as a psychiatric nurse and court advocate for mentally ill people. She actually talked about their civil rights which impressed me greatly. By contrast, the doctor who was Freeman’s assistant could only bring up old canards about dangerous schizophrenics who had to be forced to take medication lest they mow us all down in some fashion.

When the program began we sat with our eyes closed and listened. First we heard a voice that sounded like a 1940s radio announcer. It was the only known recording of Freeman’s voice. Then Howard's speaks in a voiceover about his story and the interviews he's about to conduct.

One person Howard interviewed was one of Freeman’s sons, a monstrous person who talked with glee about his father keeping icepicks used in surgery in the back of their cutlery drawer. There was not a bit of decency or shame in his voice. He was oblivious damage his father had done. It was revolting.

Howard spoke to Carol who talked about what her mother, who was lobotomized for headaches, was like after the surgery. It was very sad. Howard also talked to a very elderly surgeon who said he had never agreed with what Freeman was doing – it was brain surgery as an office procedure and he couldn’t stand it. The most emotional interview of all was Howard talking to his father, trying to ferret out why his father let his stepmother do this to him. Even though his father kept dodging responsibility, Howard totally forgave him and told him he loved him. He was a lesson in forgiveness that I won’t soon forget.

I can’t begin to do the program justice. There was so much more. As soon as it’s available I’ll post a link to it.

Afterward a panel made up of Howard, his wife, Jack el Hai, and the doctor who assisted Freeman was available for questions. There were lots of good ones and some interesting facts came out – for example the youngest person Freeman ever lobotomized was only four-years-old. The astonishing reason he gave was “early onset schizophrenia”. Wow.

Also it was established that there was no medical reason for Freeman to have photographed every victim/patient with the icepick in their eye socket.

Not everyone there was hostile to Freeman. Another fascinating attendee was a woman who was lobotomized and felt it had helped her. Her sister stood up and implied that Freeman wasn’t as bad as he was being made out to be. She also implied that it had been an experimental surgery and was justified. Then she did the worst thing possible – she implied that Howard had been made better by the operation, something that made all of us who know that there was nothing wrong with Howard cringe. Dave Issay took the question and stated that it’s clear from the record that there was nothing wrong with him and that the operation happened because Howard’s stepmother had manipulated the situation and Freeman was a willing accomplice. The reasons they listed for lobotomizing Howard were pathetic – “he stares into space”, “responds neither to punishment nor love”, “he won’t take a bath and likes to be dirty” and he dared to glare at his stepmother. He was 12, for goodness sake!

Howard described his life after the operation. His stepmother, disappointed that he hadn’t been made into a vegetable, kept him for five months before she had him shipped off to juvenile hall. Authorities could not keep him there because he had committed no crime, so they sent him to the only place available, Saint Agnew’s Psychiatric Hospital. After being there for 14 months, and being told daily he didn’t belong there because he was fine, the hospital closed and he went back to juvenile hall where he was forced to live until he was 20-years-old. He could have gone to a foster home but his father wouldn’t allow it. After his release he lived on disability, trying to pull his life back together.

Finally, after many years, he got tired of living on disability and decided to try to go to college. He earned an associates degree in IT. Then he started driving buses and was eventually promoted to become a bus driver trainer. It was a moving story.

After the program we all gathered to talk and too soon we were saying our goodbyes. As my mother and I headed back to Penn Station to catch the train back home she said, “All this time I thought we were the only ones.” That isolation is over for all of us, now.

God bless you Howard. You are the bravest man I know.

An abridged life

This is a wonderful article about Howard Dully. I'm not sure why, but they left Psychosurgery.org out (we introduced Howard to Sound Portraits). Oh well - what can you do? I think it communicates Howard's story very well anyway.
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By Glennda Chui
Mercury News

In 1960, Howard Dully's parents took him to a San Jose hospital for what they said would be tests.

Two days later, he woke up with a headache and two black eyes, feeling like a fog had penetrated his mind.

At the age of 12, he had been given a transorbital lobotomy, in which ice-pick-like instruments were hammered through the top of the eye sockets and twirled to destroy brain tissue in an area associated with emotion.

Dully, now 56, never went back to school, never graduated. At the insistence of his stepmother, he was made a ward of the state, drifting from juvenile hall to halfway houses to Agnews State Hospital. He committed petty crimes, drank too much and lived on disability payments. He no longer felt welcome at his parents' Los Altos home.

Yet his intellect, sense of humor and emotions survived. A big, amiable man -- 6 feet 7 inches tall, with laugh lines in the corners of his eyes -- he eventually earned a two-year degree, married and became a tour bus driver in San Jose.
And five years ago he went looking for answers: Who had done this to him, and why?

The result of that quest is a radio documentary, ``My Lobotomy,'' premiering Wednesday on National Public Radio's ``All Things Considered'' program. Dully narrates the tale in his deep, gravelly voice and interviews lobotomy patients and their relatives.

``You'd probably never know what happened to me if I didn't tell you,'' Dully said in an interview. ``But I felt I was not who I was supposed to be anymore. You can't put your finger on it, but something's been taken away. Something's been altered or changed. It's very frustrating.''

In the documentary, he talks to his father for the first time about the procedure that changed his life. And he finds his medical file among the archived papers of Dr. Walter J. Freeman, the doctor who gave him the lobotomy -- years after it had been discarded as a treatment for mental illness.

``My file has everything -- a photo of me with the ice-picks in my eyes, medical bills,'' Dully says on the broadcast. ``But all I care about are the notes. I want to understand why this was done to me.''

He reads one of the entries. It's from his birthday, Nov. 30, 1960: ``Mrs. Dully came in for a talk about Howard. Things have gotten much worse and she can barely endure it. I explained to Mrs. Dully that the family should consider the possibility of changing Howard's personality by means of transorbital lobotomy. Mrs. Dully said it was up to her husband, that I would have to talk with him and make it stick.''

At the archives Dully also found a pair of leucotomes, the instruments that had been driven into his eye sockets.

The lobotomy was introduced in 1936 by a Portuguese physician, Dr. Egas Moniz. It won him the 1949 Nobel Prize in Medicine. Some 50,000 lobotomies were performed in the United States from the 1930s to the 1970s.
The original method, called prefrontal lobotomy, involved boring open the patient's skull to cut the connection between the prefrontal region -- an area concerned with emotion, learning, memory and social behavior -- and the rest of the brain. While it often relieved symptoms of severe mental illness, it also blunted emotion, leaving patients listless, apathetic and childlike.

Freeman invented an easier way, the transorbital or ``jiffy'' lobotomy, which left no obvious scars. It could be done in a few minutes as an outpatient procedure.

He traveled the country promoting the technique, performing up to 25 lobotomies per day -- some 3,400 of them in the course of his career, according to Jack El-Hai, whose biography of Freeman came out this year.

Some of Freeman's patients said they felt better after the procedure, and kept in touch with him until his death in 1972.

But others died or were severely damaged. They included Rosemary Kennedy, sister of John F. Kennedy, who was mildly impaired before the operation but had to be institutionalized afterward.

In 1954 Freeman moved from the East Coast to Los Altos, where he helped found El Camino Hospital in Mountain View. Dr. Robert Lichtenstein, 77, of Los Altos shared an office with Freeman in Sunnyvale for a few years. A neurosurgeon, he was present for half a dozen or more lobotomies, holding the instruments in position after they'd been thrust into a patient's eye sockets so Freeman could make sure they were properly placed.

In the early days, he said, when there were no effective treatments for the mentally ill, lobotomy seemed plausible.

``In the Santa Clara Valley, Agnews State Hospital was filled with thousands of psychiatric patients, and a lot of them were uncooperative and belligerent and would attack the caretakers,'' Lichtenstein said. ``So the idea of trying to render some of these people more cooperative was one of the major goals of management. Otherwise they would have to be put in a room with sometimes just a mattress on the floor, and sometimes they would destroy the mattress.''
However, by the time Freeman operated on Howard Dully, medications were available for mental illness and lobotomy had fallen out of favor.

For years, Dully told only his wife and a few close friends what had happened. He had no relationship with his stepmother, and never discussed the lobotomy with his father. But he always thought that someday he would talk to them and get some answers.

Then, in 2000, his stepmother died.

``I guess it was a jolt to me,'' he said. ``I realized I wasn't going to be able to talk to her. It was over now.''

His mother had died of cancer when he was 5, and he said he resented the fact that someone was trying to take her place.

``Oh, I hated her,'' Dully said of his stepmother. ``I didn't want any harm to come to her, physical harm. It was more a mental game. She'd tell me go to my room and I'd mutter under my breath. She always said I had a look that scared her.

``I think what happened, if you want the truth, is that when I started to get big like I am, she started to fear me.''

After she died Dully started to surf the Internet, looking for information. Eventually he was put in touch with Sound Portraits Productions, which makes radio documentaries.

``Nobody who had had a transorbital lobotomy had ever talked about it -- not that I knew of,'' said David Isay, co-producer of the radio piece. ``I was curious to know the perspective of patients.''

At first Dully did not want his name used, Isay said; later, he changed his mind.
``Having the courage to really face down his demons and ask those very, very difficult questions of the people in his life was a wonder to behold,'' Isay said.
Dully said he's thought a lot, over the years, about what life would have been like -- what he would have been like -- without the lobotomy. Yet he said he does not feel bitter.

``What good is it going to do to hate somebody?'' he said. ``I'm more about, `Let's get it out in the open and forget about it.' I can sit here and point fingers at 950 people, and it means nothing. I think we all have to live with the part we played in it ourselves.''

People Magazine for November 14th, 2005

The November 14th issue of People Magazine (Ellen Degeneres is on the cover) became available today. On page 85 is the story of Psychosurgery.org member Howard Dully who was lobotomized at age 12 by Walter Freeman himself. Howard is incredibly brave and the story is really well done. So far the story is not on their website, but I will link to it if it becomes available.

Thank goodness that people like Howard are brave enough to come forward and tell their story. We will not allow history to be re-written by people who were not there and don't understand what happened.

Walter Freeman's Handiwork

Though I never dreamed it possible, Walter Freeman actually has apologists. It's pretty stunning. This is something they should see. It is a photograph of our friend Howard Dully being lobotomized. He is 12-years-old in this image taken in 1961. The hand belongs to Walter Freeman's assistant. Freeman took the photograph. In fact, though there was no medical reason to do so, Freeman took photos of every single person he ever lobotomized with the icepick in their eye socket. I believe the reason he did it was because, like a serial killer, he wanted to keep a momento of his conquest. I suspect that Freeman looked at them with great satisfaction, enjoyment, and pleasure. Why else would he have kept taking them for so many years?

This photograph is the property of Howard Dully, rendered here with permission. It is NOT to be reproduced elsewhere without written permission from Howard Dully who can be contacted via christine@psychosurgery.org.