Development of Psychosurgery from the Early 1800sWas psychosurgery, also known as brain surgery and neurosurgery, safer before the year 2000 or after? First of all, what is psychosurgery? Psychosurgery is a surgical procedure on the brain to treat a psychotic or mental disorder. In order to treat the patient, part of the brain must be destroyed or erased. Psychosurgery is typically used to treat severe depression and obsessive compulsive disorder (OCD). Since the 1800s, brain surgery has slowly spread around the world. It all started with a Swiss psychiatrist, Gottlieb Burckhardt. In the 1930s, a Portuguese neurologist, Antonio Egas Moniz, continued Burckhardt's work by following the leucotomy procedure. Leucotomy is the surgical procedure of cutting the white nerve fibers of the brain. During the same period, in the United States, neuropsychiatrist Walter Freeman and neurosurgeon James Watts devised the standard prefrontal procedure. They then named their technique “lobotomy” (https://www.princeton.edu/~achaney/tmve/wiki100k/docs/Psychosurgery.html). In the 1940s, curiosity about psychosurgery grew, despite the fact that it represented a great chance of death. This surgery also caused permanent damage to the personalities. By the end of the decade, up to 5,000 psychosurgical operations were performed annually in the United States. In the 1950s, the use and thought of psychosurgery declined, due to the advent of new medications and awareness of the long-term damage caused by surgical procedures. During the 1960s and 1970s, psychosurgery became a subject of increasing public concern and debate, culminating in congressional hearings in the United States. In the United States, the work of Harvard neurosurgeon Vernon Mark and psychiatrist Frank Ervin has been the main source of contention in the United States. abrasions in defined areas of the brain to treat rare cases of serious mental illness such as life-threatening depression or impaired anxiety or obsessions. However, such procedures are hardly necessary today. Antipsychotic medications and antidepressants are the treatments of choice for treating mental disorders. Mainstream medicine now classifies psychosurgery as an experimental procedure, and many rules exist to protect patients who might be subjected to it. The majority of mental health professionals believe that psychosurgery is never justified or should only be considered as a last resort, reserved for the most extreme cases of incurable mental illness when all other therapies have failed (http:/ /www.minddisorders.com/Ob-Ps/Psychosurgery.html).