Psychosurgery, also called
neurosurgery for mental disorder (
NMD), is the
neurosurgical treatment of
mental disorder. Psychosurgery has always been a controversial medical field. The modern history of psychosurgery begins in the 1880s under the Swiss psychiatrist
Gottlieb Burckhardt. The first significant foray into psychosurgery in the twentieth century was conducted by the Portuguese neurologist
Egas Moniz who during the mid-1930s developed the operation known as
leucotomy. The practice was enthusiastically taken up in the United States by the
neuropsychiatrist Walter Freeman and the
neurosurgeon James W. Watts who devised what became the standard prefrontal procedure and named their operative technique
lobotomy, although the operation was called leucotomy in the United Kingdom. In spite of the award of the
Nobel prize to Moniz in 1949, the use of psychosurgery declined during the 1950s. By the 1970s the standard Freeman-Watts type of operation was very rare, but other forms of psychosurgery, although used on a much smaller scale, survived. Some countries have abandoned psychosurgery altogether; in others, for example the US and the UK, it is only used in a few centres on small numbers of people with
depression or
obsessive-compulsive disorder (OCD). In some countries it is also used in the treatment of
schizophrenia and other disorders.