I'd rather have a bottle in front of me....

I just finished listening to the NPR piece on transorbital frontal lobotomies that originally ran on Wednesday during All Things Considered ("My Lobotomy" ).

It amazed and disturbed me. I can only imagine what it must have been like to live in an age in which a parent or guardian, a doctor or a spouse could decide that my unhappiness warranted an outpatient operation to keep me from feeling. Anything.

I was told an interesting statistic at a meeting on Wednesday night, that 1 in 5 Coloradoans is affected by issues of mental health. I have a difficult time believing that the statistic is so low. Considering my own life, I consider myself personally to have mental health issues which need work, I have had two friends commit suicide, and two attempt it. I have three friends diagnosed as being bipolar, I have a number of friends with anxiety disorders, and almost every one of my peers have dealt with issues of depression that went treated and untreated (far more have dealt with depression than have not). Even considering that I have always been happiest on the fringes of any large group, with the people who enjoy being on the fringes of large groups (the exception being Guilford, where there was no one main large group, only numerous fringe groups), thats a fairly considerable number of people in my life. And how many people do I know, and how many people do they know? I would be extremely hard put to find a single person in my life who has not been affected directly or indirectly by issues of mental health.

As much as I am wary of our pharmaceutical driven culture, if it were me (and I embrace a there but for the grace of god attitude when considering such things) I would much rather be on medication for whatever ailed me than have someone stick an icepick in my eyesocket and modify my brain function. The idea that any one person could wield such discretionary power over another, to change their brain, makes me feel on the verge of physical illness. I embrace my right to make my own decisions about my body. In this day and age that will 95% of the time translate into issues of abortion. But contemplate for a moment, the more far reaching effects of our cobbled together legal precedence regarding an individula's right to privacy, life, and what happens to their physical presence in the world. Images from 1984, Brave New World and other such fictional prophecises flit through my head. Then I stop to think about the issues of the Patriot Act that are up for review, the changing Supreme Court, erosion of Habeus Corpus. Do you think it has not occured to someone in our government that a simple, ten minute, outpatient procedure and we could rest safe at night in our homes, knowing that all of the potential terrorists are no longer a threat?

Think about it.