Allen Ginsbergs Poetry and Psychiatry Essay -- Ginsberg Mental Health

Allen Ginsbergs Poetry and PsychiatryIntroductionFrom the 1930s to the 1960s, early attempts to combine the psychiatric goals of restoring mental health with new advances in medical scholarship would produce tragic results for many of those who trusted modern psychiatry to provide comfort and healing. During this time, science, psychiatry, ambition, power, and politics came together to leave behind a controversial taradiddle of events that destroyed the trust and hope placed by many upon modern science and left behind a trail of scarred minds and ruined lives.When Allen Ginsberg, the noted Beat poet, attacked the American mental health care system of the 1950s in his poem, Howl, he knew the subject well. These experiences, which he described as memories and anecdotes and eyeballs kicks and shock of hospitals, were vivid, to that degree accurate descriptions of psychiatric practices of the time (Ginsberg 50). Both Ginsberg and his mother, Naomi Ginsberg, had been committed to ment al hospitals. Tragically, his mother would spend her most of her final years as a resident of brisk Jerseys Greystone and New Yorks Pilgrim State mental hospitals, often heavily sedated with medication, then finally lobotomized (Asher).LobotomiesIn 1936, Egas Moniz, a Portuguese neurologist, introduced the world to a radical new appendage to treat the mental illness of schizophrenia. This procedure was a surgical operation performed on the brain, called a prefrontal leucotomy and would become more commonly known as the lobotomy. The operation consisted of the insertion of a needle to perform incisions that destroyed connections between the prefrontal region and other parts of the brain. This helped to reduce incidents of the negative behavior, b... ...berg Selected Poems, 1947-1955. Harper collins Publishers, New York. 1996.Jansson, Bengt. Controversial Psychosurgery Resulted in a Nobel Prize. Nobel e-Museum. < http//www.nobel.se/medicine/articles/moniz/KKMP Ken Kesey and the M erry Pranksters (Author Unknown). University of Virginia, Charlottesville, Virginia. 1999. Nobel E-Museum (Author Unknown). Biography of Egas Moniz. Rodgers, Joann Ellison. Psychosurgery Damaging the brain to save the mind (excerpt). Psychology Today, March-April 1992 v25 n2.Sabbatini, Renato, M. E. The History of Psychosurgery. Shorter, Edward. A History of Psychiatry. John Wiley and Sons, New York. 1997.TDTS The Doctors Trials Summary. United States Holocaust Museum Archives. Weinstein, Harvey M., M.D. Psychiatry and the CIA Victims of Mind Control. American Psychiatric Press, Washington, D.C. 1990.