The answer depends on where you draw the line and which country you mean. Walter Freeman, the American physician most closely associated with popularizing the procedure, performed his final transorbital lobotomy in February 1967 on a patient named Helen Mortensen, who died of a brain hemorrhage three days later. But lobotomies did not stop with Freeman. In Scandinavia, at least 11,500 people were lobotomized between 1939 and 1983, meaning the procedure persisted in parts of the developed world well into the era of personal computers and MTV.1PubMed Central. Post-lobotomy epilepsy illustrated by the story of Ellinor Hamsun, the daughter of the famous Norwegian author Knut Hamsun. The full story of when lobotomy ended is messier than a single date, tangled up with politics, geography, and how you define the procedure itself.
How Lobotomy Became a Standard Treatment
The prefrontal leucotomy was introduced in 1935 by the Portuguese neurologist António Egas Moniz, who believed that severing nerve fibers in the frontal lobes could relieve severe psychiatric symptoms. The procedure earned Moniz the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine in 1949, which remains one of the most controversial Nobel awards ever given.2PubMed Central. The Legacy of Egas Moniz: Triumphs and Controversies in Medical Innovation Between 1935 and 1955, psychosurgery was treated as a standard approach for patients with schizophrenia and other severe mental illnesses, and physicians operated on thousands of patients worldwide.3CEEOL. THE ICE PICK OF OBLIVION: MONIZ, FREEMAN AND THE DEVELOPMENT OF PSYCHOSURGERY
In the United States, Walter Freeman and his surgical partner James Watts adapted Moniz’s technique and then went further. Freeman developed the transorbital lobotomy, a simplified version that could be performed outside an operating room using an instrument resembling an ice pick, inserted through the eye socket. This made the procedure faster and cheaper, which meant it could be carried out in overcrowded state psychiatric hospitals that lacked proper surgical facilities. Freeman personally performed or supervised an estimated 3,500 lobotomies over his career, sometimes traveling from hospital to hospital in a van he called the “lobotomobile.”
Who Got Lobotomized
Lobotomy was not applied evenly across the population. Despite the fact that men are diagnosed with schizophrenia at higher rates, the majority of lobotomies worldwide were performed on women.4The British Student Doctor Journal. The looming past of lobotomies: a dive into the exploitation of women This disparity was rooted in the social expectations placed on women at the time. Behaviors that were considered merely eccentric or difficult in men could be labeled as mental illness in women, particularly when those behaviors conflicted with expectations of domesticity and obedience. Well-known cases illustrate the pattern: Rosemary Kennedy, the sister of President John F. Kennedy, was lobotomized in 1941 at age 23 after her family grew concerned about her mood swings and mild intellectual disability. The procedure left her permanently incapacitated, and she spent the remaining six decades of her life in institutional care.
A survey of one Swedish state mental hospital found that the typical lobotomy patient was a woman in her mid-forties who had already spent over a decade in the hospital before surgery. Male patients, by contrast, averaged about 39 years old at the time of operation and had spent an average of three and a half years hospitalized beforehand.5PubMed. Lobotomy at a state mental hospital in Sweden. A survey of patients operated on during the period 1947-1958. The diagnosis behind the vast majority of these operations was schizophrenia, accounting for 84% of the 771 patients at that hospital.6PubMed. Lobotomy at a state mental hospital in Sweden. A survey of patients operated on during the period 1947-1958.
What Lobotomy Actually Did to People
The outcomes of lobotomy were deeply mixed, and proponents at the time presented the statistics in the most favorable light they could. A follow-up study begun in 1948 found that about two-thirds of lobotomized patients improved enough to live outside a hospital, though a quarter of those relapsed and needed further treatment.7PubMed Central. The lobotomy patient–a decade later: a follow-up study of a research project started in 1948. “Improved enough to live outside a hospital” is a low bar, though, and the complications were staggering. That same study reported that 91% of patients showed personality changes, and 12% developed epilepsy.8PubMed Central. The lobotomy patient–a decade later: a follow-up study of a research project started in 1948.
In a separate long-term follow-up of private-practice lobotomy patients, roughly two-thirds were found to be largely free of the symptoms that prompted the operation. But six of those patients had developed moderate to severe organic brain syndromes, three had seizure disorders requiring ongoing treatment, and 17 experienced substantial weight gain. The best outcomes were in patients who had been treated for obsessive-compulsive or phobic symptoms; the worst outcomes were in patients with paranoid schizophrenia.9Archives of General Psychiatry. Lobotomy in Private Practice: Long-Term Follow-up What both studies share is a portrait of a procedure that could reduce psychiatric symptoms while simultaneously inflicting brain damage. The personality changes, often described clinically as “blunting,” meant that many patients became passive, apathetic, and emotionally flat. They were quieter, which made them easier to manage in institutions, but calling that an improvement requires a very specific definition of the word.
The post-operative mortality rate at the Swedish hospital mentioned above was 7.4%, with the worst year being 1949, when the death rate reached 17%.10PubMed. Lobotomy at a state mental hospital in Sweden. A survey of patients operated on during the period 1947-1958. For context, these were not frail terminal patients. Many were young or middle-aged adults who entered the operating room physically healthy. A nearly one-in-five chance of dying on the table in a given year puts the procedure somewhere between reckless and unconscionable by any modern standard.
Why Lobotomy Declined
Several forces converged in the 1950s and 1960s to push lobotomy out of mainstream practice. The most commonly cited factor is chlorpromazine, the first antipsychotic medication, which became available in the mid-1950s. For the first time, there was a pharmaceutical alternative for managing severe psychotic symptoms, and it did not require drilling into someone’s skull. The drug was far from perfect, but it offered a way to reduce symptoms without permanently destroying brain tissue.
Equally important was a growing public and professional revulsion at what lobotomy actually did. As long-term follow-up data accumulated, it became harder to ignore the personality devastation, the seizures, the deaths, and the minimal improvement for many patients. Journalism played a role: news coverage of patients left in vegetative or near-vegetative states after the procedure fueled public outrage. The civil rights movements of the era also raised questions about the ethics of performing irreversible brain surgery on institutionalized patients who could not meaningfully consent.
The Soviet Union was actually the first major country to formally ban lobotomy, doing so in 1950, well before most Western nations moved away from the procedure.11PubMed. Banning the Soviet Lobotomy: Psychiatry, Ethics, and Professional Politics during Late Stalinism The Soviet ban was motivated partly by genuine ethical concerns but also by professional politics and ideological factors during late Stalinism. Whatever the mixture of motivations, the result was that thousands of patients in the Soviet sphere were spared the procedure while it continued for decades in Western Europe and the Americas.
The Timeline Across Countries
There is no single date when lobotomy ended worldwide, because different countries abandoned it on wildly different schedules. In the United States, the number of lobotomies dropped sharply after the mid-1950s as antipsychotics became widely available, but the procedure was never formally outlawed at the federal level. Freeman continued performing transorbital lobotomies until 1967, when Helen Mortensen’s death on his operating table led Herrick Memorial Hospital in Berkeley, California, to revoke his surgical privileges. He never operated again and died in 1972.
Other American surgeons and institutions continued to perform lobotomies into the 1970s, though in dwindling numbers. By the late 1970s and early 1980s, a handful of states had passed legislation restricting or effectively banning the procedure, and it had essentially disappeared from American practice. The last documented lobotomies in the traditional sense in the US appear to have taken place in the late 1970s or very early 1980s, though precise records are difficult to pin down because many were performed in state institutions with poor record-keeping.
Scandinavia tells a more startling story. Norway, Sweden, Denmark, and Finland embraced lobotomy enthusiastically relative to their populations, and the practice lingered longer there than in many other countries. The period of active lobotomy in Scandinavia stretched from 1939 to 1983.12PubMed Central. Post-lobotomy epilepsy illustrated by the story of Ellinor Hamsun, the daughter of the famous Norwegian author Knut Hamsun. That 1983 endpoint makes Scandinavia one of the last regions in the world where classic lobotomy was being performed, though by the final years the numbers had slowed to a trickle and the technique had been modified from Freeman’s crude approach.
Japan had a particularly tangled history with the procedure. Lobotomies were performed there from the late 1930s and continued through the 1970s. Public awareness of the practice’s abuses in Japan came late, and the full scope of Japanese lobotomy programs only emerged in investigative reporting decades after the fact. In the United Kingdom, the practice declined in the 1960s but was not formally regulated until the Mental Health Act of 1983, which imposed strict consent requirements on any neurosurgery for psychiatric conditions.
The Difference Between Lobotomy and Modern Psychosurgery
People sometimes hear that “brain surgery for mental illness” still exists and assume lobotomy never really ended. This conflation is understandable but misleading. Modern psychiatric neurosurgery bears about as much resemblance to a Freeman-era lobotomy as a targeted laser surgery bears to removing a tumor with a bread knife. The distinction matters because it shapes how you should think about current treatments for severe, otherwise-untreatable psychiatric conditions.
Today, the most established forms of psychiatric neurosurgery include cingulotomy and capsulotomy, both of which create small, precisely targeted lesions in specific brain circuits implicated in conditions like severe obsessive-compulsive disorder. These procedures use stereotactic imaging to target areas measured in millimeters, a far cry from the blind sweeping cuts of a lobotomy that destroyed large swaths of frontal lobe tissue. They are reserved for patients who have exhausted all other treatment options, and they require rigorous informed consent and ethics board approval.
Deep brain stimulation represents an even more refined approach. Instead of destroying brain tissue, DBS involves implanting thin electrodes that deliver continuous electrical pulses to specific brain targets. Trials of DBS for psychiatric conditions began in the late 1990s, initially focusing on obsessive-compulsive disorder, major depression, and Tourette syndrome.13PubMed Central. Psychiatric neurosurgery in the 21st century: overview and the growth of deep brain stimulation The technology is reversible in principle: if the stimulation is not working or causes side effects, the device can be turned off or removed. Research in this area continues, though it faces methodological challenges including small sample sizes and lack of agreement on which brain targets work best for different conditions.14PubMed Central. Psychiatric neurosurgery in the 21st century: overview and the growth of deep brain stimulation
Calling any of these modern procedures a “lobotomy” would be like calling a modern appendectomy the same thing as Civil War-era battlefield amputation. The underlying premise that the brain can be physically altered to relieve psychiatric suffering is shared, but the precision, safety profile, reversibility, and ethical framework are completely different.
Why the Nobel Prize Still Hasn’t Been Revoked
One of the most common questions people have after learning about the history of lobotomy is why Moniz’s 1949 Nobel Prize has never been taken back. The Nobel Foundation has a longstanding policy that prizes, once awarded, are not revoked. This is not because the Foundation views lobotomy favorably in hindsight. Rather, the organization’s position is that the prize recognized what was judged at the time to be a significant scientific contribution, and retroactively revoking awards based on later knowledge would undermine the entire system. Petitions to revoke the prize have surfaced periodically, including a notable effort in the early 2000s, but all have been declined.
The prize itself was controversial even in 1949. Some members of the Nobel committee were uneasy about awarding it, and the decision has been scrutinized by historians of science ever since.15PubMed Central. The Legacy of Egas Moniz: Triumphs and Controversies in Medical Innovation Critics argue that the prize lent medical legitimacy to a procedure that was already showing devastating side effects, and may have encouraged its wider adoption during the peak lobotomy years of the late 1940s and early 1950s. The prize stands as an uncomfortable reminder that what one generation considers a breakthrough, another may view as an atrocity.
Survivors and Living Memory
Because lobotomies were still being performed into the early 1980s, and because many patients were young adults at the time, some lobotomy survivors are still alive. Their experiences have been documented in memoirs, interviews, and investigative journalism, and they represent a living connection to one of the most disturbing chapters in medical history. Many survivors describe a lifelong struggle with cognitive difficulties, emotional flatness, and social isolation. Studies of patients examined decades after surgery found persistent deficits in verbal fluency and other cognitive functions.16PubMed. Long-term effect of prefrontal lobotomy on verbal fluency in patients with schizophrenia
The Swedish hospital records that have been examined offer a window into how institutional psychiatry operated in this era. At one hospital alone, 771 patients were lobotomized over a twelve-year period, and the data collected from their psychiatric and surgical records has become a resource for understanding the scope and consequences of the practice.17Taylor & Francis Online (Nordic Journal of Psychiatry). Lobotomy at a state mental hospital in Sweden. A survey of patients operated on during the period 1947-1958 Archival recovery projects in multiple countries continue to uncover records, sometimes revealing patients whose families never knew what had been done to them. These efforts have helped ensure that the human cost of lobotomy is not reduced to an abstract historical footnote but remains grounded in the individual lives it permanently altered.