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What's with the "I too"? You're sorely mistaken if you think I'm a quokka who is happy to take everything at face value. I'm merely positing that you are being excessively suspicious of an entirely benign fact, or at least an unremarkable footnote in history.
I have no idea who Leonard Khile is, and what he has to do with anything, and a Google search turns up literally zero results.
Do me a favor and spell out how exactly you can claim:
As for-
The quotes are a literal quote from the article you previously shared. I am pointing out that they had no involvement with anything beyond being practitioners of psychosurgery, who a reporter thought might be offering advice in the future to a Presidential Commission. No evidence of whether they did so, or what they might have said, and fuck all in terms of any effect.
They did not make that specific claim. The closest thing they claimed was that they had found a correlation between violence in general and brain abnormalities. That is a far more general and unobjectionable proposal.
Knowing the average scientist, far more likely to be the latter, and I invite you to demonstrate any evidence of more nefarious intent. What makes you think they were planning to "open more centers explicitly targeting minorities?" Citation?
They are not "oddly quiet" about a tiny group of doctors who have never been demonstrated to have used their niche neurosurgical techniques for malign ends. They are precisely the expected level of quiet.
Hardly. I can assure you that neurosurgery as a field is doing fine, and psychosurgery, in the particular sense where you're trying to solve behavioral issues, still exists.
It's niche, and has been for half a century, but mostly because we have less invasive therapies and non-surgical ways of affecting targeted parts of the brain. The "controversy" ceased to be a meaningful factor in the 50s and onwards, it's worthless today. There are plenty of rare, but well-established surgeries that are done maybe a dozen times a year in superspeciality hospitals where the last research paper of note was decades back. That does not make them discredited or controversial, that shows that they're niche and mundane. Stereotactic amygdalatomies are arguably obsolete, since targeted radio-frequency ablation does the same job and better.
If you want to eat nothingburgers and exist in an excess of paranoia, feel free to do so. The optimal amount of suspicion is not zero, but in your case, you have failed to make a convincing case why anyone should care. Certainly not showing it's been memory-holed in a suspicious manner.
"I too" was meant to express that I did, in fact, used to adhere to that framework too. I don't know if I would call it being a quokka, which I think requires naive innocence in the face of obvious hostile intent. If you want to see my objection expressed as a meme, I'd pick this one.
The issue with this framework is that it will tend to produce a massive status-quo bias. Anything not covered by history will be an unremarkable footnote because no one has covered it, while other small-scale incidents that are covered must have been remarkable, because they were covered.
Sorry, it's been a while since I looked into this, and I misremembered how you spell his name. It's Kille, not Khile, but Thomas R. does yield results. Like I said, he was the flagship success story trotted out by Ervin, Mark, and Sweet, only for it to turn out they were outright lying about the state they left him in, or him being aggressive which supposedly justified the treatment.
They have made direct attempts to convince the American government that their surgeries could alleviate social problems like the riots, and violence more generally. They were successful enough at that, that they secured financial backing to open the Boston clinic, and then again later to expand their project to the "center for the study and reduction of violence" in California, and it would likely result violent criminals being subjected to psychosurgery, were it not for public backlash that happened at the time.
Pardon. As often happens, this is what I get for skimming. Also I didn't re-read that article before the top level post, and also I got hit with the flu, so I'm thinking a bit slower. All excuses in the end.
There's a lot more to the story than that one article. This isn't some guys doing surgeries, and some reporter finding it interesting, this was an actual Culture-War scale controversy, with different sides battling out what is the right thing to do. I won't expect anyone to watch the documentary I linked (like I said it's long and rambly), but don't assume I'm basing everything on a single article.
They did not make that specific claim... in the article, but they did make it in a letter they sent to JAMA (see: Role of Brain Disease in Riots and Urban Violence).
Well, I don't know if we should be going by what average scientists do. Some of these guys were positively glowing.
By 1972 they were looking to branch out. Doctor Sweet appeared before congress to ask for more funding, in order to establish more clinics across the country. One such project was the Center for the Study and Prevention of Violence at the UCLA led by dr. West., which recruited two junior high-school to participate in the program - one in a majority black, and the other majority Chicano are.
As for nefarious intent, call me excessively suspicious, but requesting access to a military base for the Center, because it's "remote" and "secure", sounds pretty damn nefarious to me.
Video link for non-videophobes
Well, you're the doctor, and no offense to neurosurgeons (they actually seem to try to do it right, as far a I can tell), but I was under the impression that they absolute pussies compared to psychosurgeons. Don't they go on and on about how dangerous it is, and how it's a last resort?
Sure, it wasn't shut down completely, but you said yourself the time period in question was the point of it's decline. The paper you linked to seems to confirm it.
How do you think being memory-holed in a suspicious manner would look like, decades after the fact?
I appreciate the sources.
Addressing the letter to JAMA that you linked:
Emphasis added. The letter was written in the context of sweeping race riots, but I do not see anything suggesting racist/discriminatory intent on the part of the authors. They specialize in neurological correlates to violence, there's an epidemic of ongoing violence, and they're urging further research into the topic and treatment of those who have predilections to indulge in it.
The identification of violent/anti-social individuals is still a routine matter in psychiatry, though the matter only extends to formal diagnosis of Anti-social Personality Disorder, which doesn't have any treatment. Consider it a more formal way of saying, yeah, this dude's an asshole.
There's nothing singling out black people, or suggesting they're uniquely prone to violence, the race riots were simply the most salient example.
Regarding the other evidence you've shared, I don't consider it particularly damning. If you wish to study violence, especially the aetiology, then you want to conduct your research in an area with a high amount of violence. Would you deny that high schools with majority black/hispanic students wouldn't on average be more violent? That's a factually true statement. Fund raising before Congress to make the most of a (quite relevant) Current Thing? Who wouldn't?
On the use of a military base:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Project_Nike
The Army was handing out now useless Nike silos, which were snapped up by everyone from schools to airsoft players. This is because they were moving out, not offering a timeshare program!
This isn't some kind of top-secret blacksite for MKULTRA redux, there was property being handed out to whoever asked, and if I was to organize a program that involves isolating violent patients (likely against their will), then "remote" and "secure" sounds like excellent ideas, regardless of what I do with them.
I have met plenty of psycho surgeons, no psychosurgeons, so I have no opinion on their personality and habits. They don't market themselves as such anyway, they call themselves neurosurgeons.
Because it was obsolete, not because it was controversial (not by 2007, at the least). For a perfectly benign example, open cholecystectomies have long been replaced by laparoscopic cholecystectomies. They were never controversial. In the odd case where the destruction of a small portion of the brain is needed, we zap it with radiation, and that's a procedure that happens every day in my hospital, even if it's more for tumors than violence.
I find no conclusion to the case of Kille after looking, it seems the negative PR, especially after the association with Terminal Man came out, was sufficient to derail the psychosurgery division there. He was hardly the only patient, and others presented as case studies did much better. If you manage to find the outcome of the lawsuit, I'd be curious to see it.
Sorry, I somehow missed you were just curious about the outcome. He lost the lawsuit, here's a contemporary NYT article about it. What I wanted to see is the juicy details, hence the FOIA.
Thanks for tracking that down!
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I don't disagree with your description of their argument, but the problem is it doesn't matter. Taking another example, "redlining" is often brought up by progressives as an example of structural racism in America, even though it didn't explicitly target black people (in fact, that is perhaps the entire crux of the argument about "structural racism" to begin with). Being excluded from a mortgage sounds not quite as bad as being included into an involuntary brain surgery to me, so again a massive wikipedia page on one, and crickets on the other looks a little weird to me.
I mean... how many neurosurgery clinics said they can solve BLM if congress gives them a bit more money?
Checking the dates, it looked like they were asking for early access, before they were being handed out like candy. Either way the military still being there or leaving is not relevant to the argument, what caused the controversy stemmed from the center trying to setup camp somewhere where it couldn't be scrutinized by the public. And it was controversial, that letter did them in. It was leaked to the press, caused and uproar, and politicians withdrew the support / funding from the Center.
They did a bunch of other things that looked suspicious: they removed Ervin's name from later drafts of their project proposal, when too many people started asking "wait, isn't that that brain surgery guy from Boston?", and removed references to psychosurgery (which itself was being redefined to exclude placing electrodes, like what they did to Kille), and ended up renaming the Center to the "Project on Life-Threatening Behavior" to deemphasize the focus on violence (and thus contradicting the possible mundane reason for a remote and secure site you brought up).
All of this happened without the public even being aware of West's involvement with MKULTRA, which was declassified in the 2000's, I think.
That would be "The advances of psychopharmacology..." from the abstract you linked, what did they mean by "along with the existent skepticism of the medical community in regards to psychosurgery"?
I wanted to send a FOIA request to the Boston court where the case took place, but never got around to it. I'm not sure how you get started with that sort of thing.
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