Psychosurgery

Synonyms

Psychiatric surgery

Definition

Psychosurgery is brain surgery conducted explicitly to amend aspects of human behavior. As such, it can be distinguished from neurosurgery, where the aim is to address some specific and identifiable brain pathology such as a tumor. Although there are noticeable gray areas such as brain surgery for intractable pain or to halt the spread of epileptic seizures from one brain hemisphere to the other, the above distinction is important in differentiating between the primarily behavioral aims of psychosurgery and the primary aims of treating physical pathology that characterize neurosurgery.

Description

The first psychosurgical operation was undertaken on November 12, 1935 by Egas Moniz at the Neurological Institute of the University of Lisbon, Portugal. Moniz’s surgery was conducted on severely disturbed psychiatric patients who had proved resistant to other forms of treatment. He called his operation the prefrontal leucotomy; a wire garrote inserted...