The Decline of Psychosurgery: How Antipsychotics Changed Treatment

The development and widespread adoption of antipsychotic drugs in the 1950s and 1960s revolutionized mental illness treatment. These medications effectively controlled psychosis symptoms without surgery, making psychosurgery (e.g., lobotomy) largely obsolete.

Antipsychotics offered a safer, reversible alternative, fundamentally shifting psychiatric care from destructive surgical interventions to pharmacological management.