"2_, 13 svehiatry can easily recognise the i author- VIP, and if
the guess is right, the author s "own as an established authority, a sincere end sensitive worker, and a man with neither need nor wish to advertise. a There is room for divergence of opinion in silY science, and it is right that the public s ould know that for many doctors leucotomy deems to be the most awful of mistakes that myself from time to "time have made. I
question the whole outlbok of those who practise the so-called ' physical ' methods of treatment of persons with healthy brains but with mental illness. This new development in medical science runs counter to the advances gained on behalf of the true individual self by philosophers and poets during recent centuries, so that it is difficult to see how the idea of " 10,000 leucotomies in this country alone" can be generally tolerated except it be that the public knows only how to trust a doctor, and is not in a position to suspect him.
The author of the article gives himself away gradually, for we find that not only hospital patients but also psycho-neurotics and indeed those who are driven by anxiety to smoke or to drink or to take phenobarbitone apparently need a course of fits, if not actually the division of a tract in the frontal lobe of the brain.
Surely the trouble is that there are dis- illusionments and dilemmas inherent in life, that life is difficult, and that the doctors who enthusiastically deal in the 'physical methods' are caught up in a flight to sanity which is perhaps the ugliest thing in our modern world.
Can we assume that the aim of the doctor is to relieve suffering at all costs ? The question must always be asked: at what cost ? If mental illness is an organisation defending the true self then it must be respected; and the only cure we should tolerate is an undoing of the need for the defence. The slogan: relief of suffering, applied to mental dis- orders can lead anywhere, certainly to euthanasia, and euthanasia has distinct advantages over the partial destruction of a normal brain.—Yours faithfully,
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