Howard DullyCritiques

Very interesting read. In the very end he speaks about some MRI scans they took to study his brain now since most lobotomy patients aren't able to be interviewed . I'd be curious to learn what they learned from their study aside from the fact that his brain was damaged and he beat some pretty significant odds.

If you want to be in a good mood on a Tuesday, don't read My Lobotomy the night before. I was sickened by Howard's family and depressed at how this was allowed to happen.

One of the most even handed memoirs I've ever read. Tells of the damage that can be done to people that are too young or naive to be properly consulted about the treatment they would prefer. Hard to read at parts, but honest looks back at the past can be.

Literally the most horrifying book I've ever read.

When I was a Freshman in high school, we had an assembly where an ex-pro football player came to speak to us about his experiences on the team. The catch was that he had also become addicted to drugs and alcohol, so the gist of his message was supposed to be something like "This is what I did, but I could have been so much more if I hadn't gotten hooked on drugs."

Unfortunately, the message that came across was more along the lines of "I did all these drugs and drank all this booze, but look! I was still third string on the Eagles!"

I got the same feeling after reading this book, as though it missed the point somewhere. It could have been a book about the horrors of lobotomies, or it could have been a book about Dully's struggle after having had one, or it could have been about searching for an answer, but it wasn't, really. It tried to be all of them, but didn't end up satisfactorily being about any of them.

I didn't feel particularly inspired after reading this book. It was interesting, but not interesting enough for me to actually recommend it to someone else. It's also pretty universal, I believe, that lobotomies are considered a bad practice, so it's not controversial in its warnings. I guess I'm pretty much left wondering what the point of the book was.

heard about this when the author was interviewed on NPR.... could hardly believe my ears. I guess I always imagined One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest. if I ever thought of lobotomy at all....

This started out interestingly enough, but once Dully was a few years past the operation, it dragged. The book gave an overly detailed account of an alcoholic, drug addicted, unmotivated loser. During the first part, you could sympathize with Dully; that he was a normal, although perhaps especially energetic boy was believable. But throughout the rest of the story, Dully's assertion that he was a poor victim at the mercy of others loses credibility. For example, he claims he was unable to take care of himself, that he didn't know how to buy a shirt or get a haircut -- things surely any 12-year-old would know. And yet somehow he knew how to open a fake bank account and run a sophisticated check-forging operation. He knew how to scam the pawn shop dealers. I lost all sympathy. Furthermore, I saw inconsistencies with some of his dates. In one instance, a photo he describes as having been taken at Christmas is dated "March 1963". The gaps in credulity made me start to doubt some of the tale. While I don't doubt that the lobotomy happened to him, I do suspect his version of much of the rest of the story.

In the end, Dully redeems himself by acknowledging that he did play the victim most of his life. My impression is that this portion of the book was written well after the main section, so it could very well be that while he was writing the book he was still falling back on the "Poor me, I had the operation" attitude, and it wasn't until some of his experiences AFTER the book came out that he realized he had allowed himself to waste his life. "I became a victim --- a full-time, permanent victim. My lobotomy was the explanation for everything that happened to me.... [My life] started when I stopped acting like a victim."

I'm glad he got his life together and found peace, but I hope he doesn't take up a career as an author.

When he was 12 years old, Howard Dully received a transorbital lobotomy (aka the ice pick lobotomy). The procedure was performed by its inventor, Dr. Walter Freeman, and was fairly well discredited at the time Howard was lobotomized.

When he was in his 50's, having led a very troubled life until then, Howard set out to answer the question that had troubled him for all the years since his lobotomy: Why? He was able to obtain Freeman's records, and interviewed many of those who were close to him at the time. While today Howard might be diagnosed at most as a child in need of affection who is acting out, after his physically and emotionally abusive stepmother brought him in, Dr. Freeman (who wasn't a psychiatrist), after one short visit, diagnosed him as a paranoid schizophrenic. Here are Howard's words:

'In 1960 I was given a transorbital or 'ice pick' lobotomy. My stepmother arranged it. My father agreed to it. Dr. Walter Freeman, the father of the American lobotomy, told me he was going to do some 'tests.' It took ten minutes and cost $200. And I never understood why. I wasn't a violent kid. I had never hurt anyone. I wasn't failing out of school. I wasn't in trouble with the law. I wasn't depressed or suicidal. I wasn't dangerous. Was there something I had done that was so horrible that I deserved a lobotomy?'

This is a fascinating and sad book, but ultimately one of hope and forgiveness.

So, of course this book is really depressing, and not just because a doctor thought giving a 12-year-old a frontal lobotomy was appropriate. Having read a biography of the famous Walter Freeman, known for "perfecting" lobotomies in America and hawking them like hucksters at a sideshow, I wanted to see what Dully, one of his youngest patients, had to say.
Dully's home life -- a doting mother who died too young, a father at best negligent, at worst abusive, and a stepmother who is the kind who gives stepmothers a bad name -- was unloving and lonely. His story is all too familiar to some of us who are or have known siblings who are lost and sometimes beyond the point of redemption.

This book was fairly terrible. I was only intrigued when they talked about the statistics of lobotomies and some of the history. The story this man tells is repetitive, boring and a little unbelievable - as in... I have heard this before. I wouldn't recommend this to anyone... I couldn't even finish the book, I stopped halfway through it.

Howard Dully's memoir is a story of his tragic childhood and his search as an adult for answers about his past. Both fascinating and very disturbing!½

This book kicked my ass. Seriously. I've got that Schindler's List feeling in my stomach right now.

Author Howard Dully was a "rambunctious" kid growing up in San Jose in the mid-1950's. His neatfreak stepmother could never seem to get him to remember to wash his hands when he came in from outside, and he sometimes fought with his three brothers!!! What would you do if your life was being completely destroyed like that, by such an out-of-control monster?

Would you go doctor shopping until you found a psychiatrist willing to certify the child as a dangerous lunatic?

If so, you just might have hit the doctor-shopping jackpot, by meeting Walter Freeman, M.D. In 1947, he declared himself the "Father of Modern Lobotomy" (I guess there was ancient lobotomy?), and started touring mental facilities around the country in his "Lobotomymobile" (I shit you not). After extremely brief consultations with patients he had never met before, he would usually conclude that the cure for what's ailing them was to remove some of their brain tissue. Some of his patients had severe psychiatric problems. Others, no so much. The following tendencies could land you under Dr Freeman's knife:

-boys fighting
-girls acting slutty
-not listening to parents or teachers
-not having as many friends as the other kids
-not engaging Dr Freeman in "thoughtful conversation"
-headaches

That was informative; let's make some more lists. The following are some fun facts about Dr Freeman, which are no cause for alarm, and should not reflect negatively on him in any way:

- he practiced surgery, without having done a surgery residency
- he practiced neurosurgery, without having done a neurosurgery fellowship
- by his own account, he was "not overly concerned" with keeping a sterile field during operations (this may be due to the first two items)
- when challenged that there was no scientific basis for performing lobotomy on schizophrenics, he defended: "I just think some people are better off with less brain tissue".
- he had his priviliges revoked by the executive committee of the medical staff, Stanford Palo Alto Hospital, for performing unneccessary procedures
- he killed a patient in the middle of surgery once, when he stopped the procedure while an instrument was in the patient's brain, so he could run around to the other side of the operating table and activate a timer on his camera, to take a picture of himself. Since he didn't instruct any assistants to hold the instrument during the photo session (you think maybe he could have asked one of them to take the picture?) it sagged under its own weight and sliced through the patient's brain, killing her instantly

That's some crazy shit. Here's some more:

To his befuddlement, Dr Freeman observed a very wide range of results from his surgeries. Some patients seemed to improve. Some developed serious complications, like loss of cognative function, dramatic personality changes, and seizures. About 15% died. This lack of uniformity is no surprise, if you consider that Freeman never actually saw what tissue he was cutting. ...That's right, you heard me. You see, instead of opening the patient's head to visualize the anatomy of the brain, he drove metal "lobototomes" (like long hollow knitting needles) through the back of patients' eye sockets, breaking through the thin bone back there to get into their brains. Then he just kind of wiggled the lobototomes around through the soft gray matter (living brain has the consistency of butter), until enough broke off that it could be sucked up through the lobototome like a straw. Naturally, there was quite a bit of variability from patient to patient as to what part of the brain was being removed, and how much.

GOOD GOD!! How could something like this be allowed to transpire?

To be fair, a lot of the medical establishment was up in arms about it. Unfortunately, a powerful minority among them was allied with hospital administrators, who were fretting about the rising cost of long-term psychiatric care. This was the 40's and 50's (and into the 60's) we're talking about. Most serious medical conditions either got cured, or resulted in a timely death. Mental patients were somewhat unique in requiring decades of continual care, with no cure in sight. Administrators found Freeman's procedure attractive, because even if it rendered a patient comatose, at least that person could then be discharged from the hospital and sent back to his family for long-term care.

Well... most patients. Howard Dully got lobotomized at age 12, but after the procedure, his insane stepmother and mostly-absentee Dad decided they didn't want him back. He bounced around between state hospitals and juvenile detention until he became a legal adult. Then, with no education to speak of, they turned him loose.

You can probably write the rest from here. Meeting bad influences. Petty crimes. Jail. Drug use. Unplanned pregnancies. More jail. More drugs. Begging money off his relatives. Begging money off friends. Begging money off strangers.

I was amazed how much mental function and personality Dully retained after the lobotomy. My only prior image of the lobotomized had been Jack Nicholson staring inertly at the ceiling, at the end of One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest. Freeman must have been having a good day when he did Dully. Thirty turbulent years followed, until Howard sort of settled down. He eventually went on to get an Associate's degree, and learned some trade skills- first in a printing shop, and then as a bus driver. He's an intellegent guy. His bizarre and mostly-criminal adventures make for fascinating, if not slightly guilty, reading. I'm fairly astounded how much tail this man got in his younger years! Normally that would be inappropriate for me to say, but Howard basically says it himself, in his good-natured way. He attributes the number of women willing to look past his substance abuse, occassional violent outbursts, infidelity, poor socioeconomic prospects, and criminal record/behavior as a testiment to the power of the "bad boy" image, and I guess he must be right.

Toward the end of the book, he's mellowed out a bit, and is remarkably nice, considering what he's been through. He's not nearly as angry about what happened to him as I am for him (if that makes sense) ...or as I would be if it happened to me. He even went as far as reaching out to his father, and asking him about the decision to lobotomize his son. The father comes across very unsympathetically: essentially shrugging and saying "what's done is done". Even after everything Howard has endured, he loves his father, and forgives him. In the afterword, he even forgives his stepmother. That's going further than I ever could, but I think it has brought Howard some peace, and I'm all for that.

Dr. Freeman died miserable, an estranged alcoholic after two failed marriages, living with the guilt of indirectly causing his son's accidental death on a camping trip. Karma wins again, I guess. There's your happy ending for you.

I read this book carefully as my grandfather had bi-polar disease (or manic-depression as it was called then) and regular electric shock treatments and was recommended a lobotomy.

I could not for the life of me see what difference a lobotomy made to the author. He suffered not a single one of the complications of the operation and it was only his shame at having been lobotomized that affected his life. He made it the centre of his life when it was really not the issue at all.

The issue was the extreme child abuse, of which the lobotomy was part, handed out by his stepmother, a classic wicked stepmother for true. The stereotype of Snow White's murderous stepmother, the abusive stepmothers of Cinderella, Hansel and Gretel, even Imogen's stepmother in Shakespeare's Cymbeline are all brought to life in the person of the second Mrs. Dully and her hateful, enabling husband, Dully's (un)natural father.

I understand Mr. Dully. At 14 I was taken to Wales' only 3-star Michelin restaurant for my first dinner alone with my father. I was grown-up! This was wonderful. Not. Although he was still quite young my father had had several heart attacks - it ran through the men in the family and would eventually kill him - and he told me over dinner that my behaviour towards my mother was causing his heart attacks and that if he died, it would be my fault. He said that my mother was his wife, the woman he had chosen to marry and I was only the daughter born to them and if he had to choose, he would choose her. So, in the same way that my father enabled my mother to abuse me in every which way and even joined in when requested, so did Dully approve of his wife's awful treatment of his son. He took scarcely 48 hours to approve a pre-frontal lobotomy performed through his son's eye socket with an ice pick. It wasn't the ice pick that did the damage it was Dully and his chosen bride.

Howard Dully acknowledges that his stepmother was the author of his problems, that without her he would probably have been a normal kid, teenager and adult, but he doesn't blame her for all his shortcomings, he blames the lobotomy instead. His reconciliation with his weak father is that of a little boy wanting to be kissed and hugged and made to feel loved and wanted, but the father, that cold and unnatural man, cannot bring himself to even give his son that, not even a simple hug and kiss and 'I've always loved you my son', he's still with his evil bride in the spirit if not in the flesh.

Howard had no confidence in himself, he felt himself to be the lowest of the low and acted this out for most of his life. It is only when he is valued for his first-hand knowledge of lobotomy, his articulate intelligence and beautiful speaking voice that he recovers and, at last, begins to live the life of a successful man, successful in all ways.

You can't recover from a lobotomy, but you can recover from the damage of abuse and he did recover and I'm glad of that, I like my stories, fairy tales or anything else, to have happy endings. Good luck for the future, Mr. Dully.

Like countless others, I heard Howard Dully's My Lobotomy on NPR in November, 2005. This was the second time I've ever stayed in the car when I got home or pulled to the side of the road to finish listening to a program. (Notably, the other piece, Remorse: The 14 Stories of Eric Morse was also produced by David Isay and aired on NPR.) In only 22 minutes, Dully described his complex and difficult childhood relationship with his stepmother and father, his stepmother's decision to have him lobotomized by Walter Freeman, the pioneer and zealous advocate the "icepick lobotomy," and his attempt to understand what had happened to him from the vantage of about 40 years later. While the producers did a masterful job, much of the emotional impact of the piece derives from Howard's narration.

I am a psychologist, and teach in a department that trains interventionists and therapists from the bachelor's to doctoral level. I have my students listen to Dully's NPR piece every year. In the lesson I ask, "What current practices in your profession will cause you shame and anguish 20 years from now? What will you be referring to when you have to say, 'I don't know what we were thinking'?" My students are always moved and horrified by Howard's experiences and determined to ask questions and raise concerns about professional acts that may be more dubious or dangerous than they appear.

Dully has now published a fuller account of his experiences. I will be sharing an excerpt with students this term and will add it to the books I assign in future classes. Dully's narration is simple and calm. At times there is repetition, and at times it is a straignhtforward accounting of events--I did this, this happened, this happened. Since the tone is conversational, I did not think this detracted from the overall experience of the book. I suggest listening to the NPR piece first so you can hear the book in Dully's voice.

Dully's account of his childhood and post-lobotomy adolescence and early adulthood is fascinating and raises the complexity of his story considerably. What was he really like as a child? Were there good reasons to think he was schizophrenic, or was he badly misdiagnosed? What would he have been like in a different family constellation? How would a similar child be treated today? Are any radical psychiatric interventions justifiable with children? It's impossible to answer these questions, of course, but it is interesting to compare Dully's origins and outcomes to Noah Levine's as recounted in Dharma Punx, or Jeanette Walls's in The Glass Castle.

I'm very grateful to Howard Dully for telling his story of a chapter of U.S. psychiatric history that is often downplayed, not fully explored, or simply missing in contemporary psychology education. I hope this book brings him even greater recognition and regard for his willingness to describe such a difficult life.

Browsing through a collection of used books for sale in a church basement, I ran across this one, I'd learned something about Dr. Walter Freeman's infamous ice pick lobotomies earlier in the year, so the idea of a book written by someone who'd had a lobotomy at age 12 grabbed me.
This is a great read but a terrible story. A somewhat rebellious adolescent from an exceptionally dysfunctional family can't get along with his neurotic stepmother. She takes him to a series of psychiatrists (in the days before the advent of psychactive meds), but they all tell her that she's the one with the mental problems. Finally, she learns of the famous Dr. Freeman, the flamboyant self-promoting physician who performed hundreds of lobotomies and reported tremendous outcomes, albeit with the occasional patient being rendered paralyzed or even vegetative.
After several interviews with young Howard and the stepmother, Freeman agrees to perform the procedure if Howard's father signs off. He does, and the the 12 year old goes into the hospital expecting only to have some vague tests performed.
The resulting story is both horrific and inspiring. When the procedure doesn't change his behavior, the family places him in settings ranging from group homes to psychiatric hospitals until he's legally an adult. But an adult with no skills and no guidance. He descends into alcohol, illegal drugs, and criminal behavior before finally getting himself together in his 40's, finding a stable wife, and building his career.
As much as anything, though, the book is the story of his search to find out not only what happened to him but why it happened and how it was permitted to happen.

To be completely honest, this book was very hard to read. Very well written, just a very uncomfortable read. I wanted to reach into the book and slap the crap out of Lou, Mr. Dully (the father), and Freeman. Such an awful thing to live through, but I guess it is better than the alternative, which happened to a lot of people who underwent lobotomies also. I am glad that Howard grew up to be a functioning member of society when so many who had psychosurgery performed on them died or lost who they were completely. A very good read, but at times so very very uncomfortable.

"My Lobotomy" was not quite what I expected. I had been interested in reading an account of a patient who had been legitimately diagnosed with a mental illness and treated with a lobotomy, about that individual's experience before, during and after the operation. Howard Dully's story was one of abuse and negligence of a child, and how significantly those childhood experiences impacted the rest of his life. Although it wasn't quite the story I was looking for, and despite it's occasional ramblings, it was nonetheless intriguing and thought-provoking. I felt his story highlighted how complicated and unclear the interactions between an individual's own personality, his upbringing and his circumstances are in determining his future, and how difficult it can be to overcome those obstacles.

A sad story of a nearly wasted human life. A commentary of how poorly we understand unhappiness/mental illness.

This story tears at your heart. How did something like this happen to a 12 year old boy? Mr. Dully's ability to make it out of all this is remarkable, and his ability to forgive is amazing. Remarkable book! A must read for all who love memoirs and biographies.

A few months ago, I read The Lobotomist, Jack El-Hai's excellent biography of Walter Freeman, the doctor who popularized lobotomies in the United States and performed the procedure thousands of times on people suffering from pretty much every mental or emotional problem imaginable. It was a fascinating and disturbing book, and it left me very interested to see what things might look like from the other side -- that is, from the point of view of one of Freeman's patients. Although maybe "victims" might be a better word. The patient/victim in this case is Howard Dully, who was only twelve when he was taken to Freeman and given a transorbital (aka ice pick) lobotomy for "symptoms" that seem to be a combination of normal boyhood rambunctiousness and an understandable inability to cope with an abusive home environment.

Dully's book isn't quite what I was expecting. It isn't entirely or even mostly about the lobotomy, which was very far from his only problem. Instead, it's a depressing memoir about a boy with (initially pretty mild) delinquent tendencies whose family -- primarily his stepmother -- were willing to try just about anything to render him less annoying except for actual loving attention. After the lobotomy failed to "fix," him, he spent much of the rest of his childhood locked up in a series of mental wards and juvenile detention centers, despite the fact that most of the people involved were well aware that he didn't belong there. Unsurprisingly, between the horrible childhood and the deliberately inflicted brain damage, Dully had serious problems as an adult -- arrests, drug use, periods of homelessness, dysfunctional relationships -- before finally managing to pull his life together, at which point he began to look for answers to his questions about exactly what was done to him and why. Eventually he met some NPR reporters interested in doing a story on Freeman, which metamorphosed into a story about Dully, which led to this book.

It's written in a very simple, rather flat style, which while not exactly compelling prose is somehow a lot more effective than you might expect it to be. It's impossible not to feel sympathy for the poor kid, and the final chapters, in which Dully describes what it's like to finally confront his past and share his experiences with others, are really very moving. His story also touches (albeit very lightly) on some troubling and thought-provoking questions about how we treat "difficult" children, not just in the era of the lobotomy but today.

A rather enlightening memoir of someone who lived through (& beyond) a transorbital lobotomy at age 12. I snatched this up on a whim & am glad I did so. Immediately upon finishing I had to go Google Howard Dully & find out more.

Really, the "lobotomy" part of this memoir is minimal. This is more a story of a boy who grew up under unfortunate family circumstances, whose mother died at a young age, whose father didn't know how to express love, and whose stepmother really took control of his young life & molded it into something it shouldn't have been. The effects of the lobotomy itself are questionable in Howard Dully's life -- overall, I think he was very lucky to turn out as well as he did. This is more a story of an individual struggling to survive a tough life, & searching to find himself amidst a life of chaos. There's no doubt Howard was a troubled young man & made some bad decisions on his own, but I think it's also evident that he was initially a victim & this affected him to a great extent. I think the written story as a whole could have perhaps been organized a little better. I felt there was some unnecessary repetition and also some unnecessary detail, but on the whole, it was very informative and will likely stick with me for some time.

An excellent memoir. Once I started reading this book I couldn't stop. A very emotional read, and riveting from beginning to end.

It was interesting and thought provoking. Gave a look of what was going on in medicine in the 50s that I didn't know about. It left me frustrated that there are so many parts of his past that you never really understand.

Mr. Dully's ordeal is horrifying to read, yet he not only manages to salvage his life but find true positivity from it. I enjoyed the straightforward voice of the narrator, even when I did not enjoy the story being told. This is a remarkable and unforgettable memoir.

Interesting story, especially in the first half of the book. An attempt by the author to figure out why he received a transorbital lobotomy at the age of 12—what he did that was so wrong he was labeled schizophrenic and received this devastating injury. More interesting in many ways for the background on Dr. Freeman, the lobotomy pioneer. To me, having grown up in the 60's, it was shocking that this was still going on at that time. Seems very late in the century for such crude procedures, that resulted in so many deaths and maimings, to still be endorsed or even allowed by the medical community and the legal system! The author leaves so many questions unanswered and much of the story is unclear. What EXACTLY he did to irritate his stepmother is unclear, as is how bad his actions really were as a child. It is clear, however, that his parents were grossly inadequate and abusive. It's also unclear how impaired the author is, especially since the book was written with coauthor Charles Fleming. He seems to feel he functions at a completely normal level mentally, which is hard to accept. I have rented a documentary from PBS on Dr. Freeman and look forward to watching it to see if I can learn a bit more. Overall, a thought-provoking memoir, even if a bit frustrating and surprisingly dull in some sections.