To be shocked at the appalling treatment of Rosemary Kennedy?

[IfyouseeRitaMoreno]

And even more shocked that the Kennedys never suffered the consequences for what they did to her (well the father to be more precise).

I’ve just found out about her story and can’t stop being horrified. Sister to JFK, she had minor developmental issues, was considered mentally deficient because she had sexual liaisons (the horror!) as a teenager.

Her father, Joe Kennedy, took her without the consent of either her or her mother, for a secret lobotomy with a physician Dr James Watts. It left her unable to walk or speak. It gets worse...

So then they dump her in various institutions and barely visit her for 20 years. Her siblings tried to make up for it in some way (JFK passed a law to help mental illness and her sister introduced the Special Olympics) but her parents just abandoned her and NOTHING happened to the physicians Watts and Freedman who did this to her knowing the risks. Except of course that they went on to have illustrious successful careers.

I also read that 80% of lobotomies were performed on women which shocks me even more. Why?

Will someone else be shocked and horrified with me? I guess I’m just that they could do this to their daughter, cover it up, and face no reprisals.

[post edited by MNHQ to remove offensive language]

Mental health, especially the treatment of women, had a horrifying history.

And today, women are diagnosed with so called Borderline Personality Disorder and are treated appallingly. Refused medical treatment for physical illness or injury ("they're making it up for attention" or "no point treating someone who'll die by suicide soon anyway"), officially labelled attention seekers and liars, refused mental health care, treated by health professionals with callousness and disdain, stitched up without analgesia or anaesthetic to "teach them a lesson", and in the worst cases left to die.

If you don't believe me on that last point, there have been numerous inquests into the deaths of women who'd been labelled BPD, who had tried to ask for help and support - begged for it - because they were frightened and suicidal, but were dismissed as attention seeking, and ignored/sent home as "behavioural management". There was a very distressing case where the police joined the woman in begging healthcare staff to help her, but they still refused. She was found dead shortly afterwards. At her inquest health professionals continued to blame her.

Most of the women labelled with BPD have experienced trauma and abuse. By way of care and support they are told their personality - their very core - is disordered. They're faulty. They are the problem. Everything bad in their life is their own fault. They're not suffering, they're just behaving badly and have to be managed and trained to behave better. If they get angry about being treated like this it's chalked up as a symptom of BPD, rather than a normal human response to being mistreated.

Men in the same circumstances are more likely to accurately be diagnosed with PTSD and provided with actual treatment, care and support, that reflects that their experiences of distress, anger, fear, etc are all expected human responses to trauma.

We haven't progressed as far as we'd like to believe. Future generations will also be horrified at what was done to female trauma survivors under the banner of BPD.

The Kennedeys were and are a horrible family. I think JFK hoodwinked the whole world. The way they treated Marilyn Monroe was awful. Trump's family was similar in its ambition and trajectory.

Yes it was deemed effective in many cases - that's what the Nobel prize was for. It also went terribly wrong sometimes and it could be argued that the 'positive' results were mutilated people with their personalities changed.

But you need to remember there was nothing else at the time. No anti-depressants or anti-psychotics. If you were seriously mentally ill, the options were suicide or institutions. Institutions where mechanical restraints and physical treatments like insulin coma were regularly used and widespread abuses occured. And you would probably live out your days there.

This procedure helped some people escape that. It was fucking awful but we can't judge it by modern standards.

Hear hear Anouk. There is a shocking history of abuse of women labelled as BPD (often 'difficult' women who don't play the being nice game).

The eg you gave about the poor woman who was denied medical treatment even when the police said she have it, is utterly chilling. Do you happen to know more details on that? Don't want to derail, but I'm very interested.

Thanks for highlighting this op I'm going to read the links above

Her story is an extreme version of what happened to a lot of women. Not necessarily the lobotomy, but the narrow view of what is socially acceptable behaviour for women meaning that any deviation (accidental or otherwise) resulted in diagnoses of insanity and complete social isolation.

There is a great short novel on this issue called The Vanishing Act of Esmee Lennox about a girl in Edinburgh. I won't give away the plot. I found it gripping - read it all in one evening and went to be far too late.

My great aunt lost her fiancé during the war and had a bit of a break down. She went from being a successful and independent woman working as a decoder at Bletchley Park to spending the rest of her life living in an asylum, where she ended up as the asylum librarian. I think in her case, with her parents dead and her brothers all serving in the war, there was no one to scoop her up at the time, but I still remember visiting her in the 80s and thinking how odd it was that this learned woman had lived there for 40 years and had no desire to leave.

Olanzapine (anti-psychotic) has given thousands of people diabetes and metabolic disorders and permanently changed their metabolism and appearance.

It's also really effective in managing psychotic symptoms and keeps many people well, which is why we still use it. But I imagine it will be banned at some point and in 50 years time it'll be looked back on as cruel and abusive.

And even more shocked that the Kennedys never suffered the consequences for what they did to her (well the father to be more precise).

There were no consequences for any family who did this to their women in those days. Especially if your family was ridiculously rich and powerful.

I'd like to think that things are different today - I hope so anyway. Though some cultures still treat their women shamefully and with no consequences.

Desperately sad but not surprising. I read recently that Eva Peron was kept completely in the dark about her cancer and was operated on several times without knowing what procedure was being performed on her thanks to Juan Peron trying to “protect” her. Given that his first wife also died of the the same form of (virally sexually transmitted) cancer after a similar time being married to him, it’s likely that Juan Peron was the one who gave her cancer in the first place.

He couldn’t bear her watching her in pain so had her lobotomised, without her knowledge or consent. He had a steel cage made so she could be held up (couldn’t stand unaided as she was weak and unaware of what was going on) and paraded through the streets in a motorcade with a heavy fur coat placed over the top to conceal the frame.

I always thought it was the cancer that killed her but it’s now thought that after the lobotomy she forgot how to eat or do anything at all and she just wasted away until she died of starvation. He then had her embalmed and later kept in his dining room where his new wife would do her hair every morning. Bizarre and barbaric times.

This is also the reason why Eunice Kennedy Shriver, her sister was so tightly involved with the Special Olympics.

Times were sadly very different, especially around mental illness and other long term issues illnesses like Epilepsy cf. the Royal family and Prince John.

We are more open now, but we still have a long way to go.

The Kennedys, Joe in particular, were power-mad. JFK’s sister Kathleen married the elder son of the Duke of Devonshire who was a Protestant, so the family cut her off. She was widowed very early into the marriage, and would have become the Duchess in due course instead of Deborah. I think Kathleen herself was killed (plane crash?) a year or two after her husband; few of her family attended her funeral.

The Queen had two cousins who had learning disabilities; there was a documentary a few years ago about them, which implied they were ‘forgotten’ by their family. I choose to take that with a pinch of salt, because it’s an awful thought that anyone would do that.

More on the story here;

www.bbc.com/future/story/20150710-the-gruesome-untold-story-of-eva-perons-lobotomy

Theres an episode of the podcast hidden brain called emma, carrie, vivian about forced sterilisation and asylums.

I've heard the story before. I was horrified then and am horrified still hearing it again. I think it just illustrated the attitudes to any kind of developmental difference at the time and the attitudes towards women. Anything like this was an embarrassment to be swept under the carpet away from public view and who cares about the individual involved. Awful.

This is the novel, for anyone interested:

www.amazon.co.uk/Vanishing-Act-Esme-Lennox/dp/0755308441/ref=sr_1_1?keywords=the+vanishing+act+of+esme+lennox&tag=mumsnetforum-21&ie=UTF8&qid=1538299952&sr=8-1.

I think that the richer the family, the more at risk the long woman, as asylums and lobotomies were expensive options.

Yes I had heard that the Queen's two first cousins were institutionalised for life.
The Kennedys were awful in many ways, particularly attitudes to women.

It is awful, but not shocking. It was common.

sorry, that should say young woman, not long woman.

When i was training as a mental health nurse in the early 1990,s they were in the process of shuting the old Psychiatric hospital down ( the site still has a lor of specialist mental health units but not the old wards) I had a placement om a long stay mental health rehab ward in reality most of the patients were too institutionalized for any kind of rehab, one patient i met was first admitted to hospital in the 1950,s she had a child with a black man (she was white) and that was one of the reasons for her admissipn , years later i worked on another long stay ward there were still a couple of patients that had been moved around the system they peobably had some mild learning disabillities but they were so instirionaliaed there was no way they could live independent ly

It is true about the Queen's cousins. Their father was the brother of The Queen Mother. They were put in an institution and never visited ever. The family simply said they had died and it was never questioned. It wasn't until they were very old that they were discovered- and family members were said to have been shocked to find out what had happened. They stil had no visitors though.

Let's be honest, we would scarcely remember JFK as a President if it weren't for his untimely death and how it happened. He was unlikely to do anything of great significance during his presidency.

Queen Mary also had a child with disabillities Prince John he lived with his nanny and died when he was about 13 , I dont think the family were cruel to him or anyrhing but i suppose it was a sign of the times

There is some info in the link below about them and the family.
en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Bowes-Lyon#Nerissa_and_Katherine_Bowes-Lyon

It sounds as if their father died when they were young and their mother was left to cope. They were in their early 20s when they were incarcerated. The article mentions other family members with the same condition which suggests a genetic condition.

Very sad story. They seem to have just been left there.

To be honest, if Prince John had not had disabilities, he probably would have lived with a nanny, then gone to boarding school. The children of the aristocracy and royal family lived very separate lives for their parents.

Another example is Frances Farmer

en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Frances_Farmer

The film Frances with Jessica Lange is about her lobotomy.