Please, please, for the love of all that is good and holy, do NOT prescribe a prefrontal lobotomy for anxiety!!!
Every year for the last five years that I have used this one essay that asks students to describe treatments for anxiety, my students have leapt right onto the lobotomy (or just as bad, electroconvulsive therapy) bandwagon. Why? Are they so quick to think that brain surgery is a great idea, and would really help some poor soul who feel anxious all the time? Brain surgery? Really? Something that is irreversible?
Really? And especially given that without fail every time we talk about drug therapy (the appropriate answer, just in case you were wondering), they all remember the commercial for the drug with the little bouncy ball thing:
See, and now you can see why I'm worried.
2 comments:
Just give me the lobotomy, and then I won't worry about everyone else's anxiety. ;) I don't know why our society is so happy with the quick fix. Just dig out a piece of your brain; yeah, that'll make it all better.
But unfortunately, drug therapy hasn't been conclusively proven to be irreversible either. To put it into networking terms, rather than messing around with the physical layer, we're messing around with the data links that we know even less about. I worry about studies that will be done 50 years from now that will show drastically unexpected long-term effects from our 'drug-it-till-it-goes-away' culture.
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