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Patients' Stories: Ellen Ionesco

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• "The first American lobotomy patients were patients today that we would call chronically depressed." -- Jack El-Hai, author

In 1946 Walter Freeman performed the first transorbital lobotomy on Ellen Ionesco, a 29-year-old housewife and mother that Freeman noted as having "suicidal ideas."

Ellen Ionesco (2:12)

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Ellen Ionesco before transorbital lobotomy in 1946. George Washington University Archives, Freeman-Watts Collection

Ellen Ionesco after transorbital lobotomy in 1946. George Washington University Archives, Freeman-Watts Collection

Ellen, John and Angelene Ionesco at the family jewelry store, circa 1950. Courtesy Angelene Forester

Find out what doctors today would advise.

Transcript

Before
"She would take me to the basement... I remember her taking me down there and pointing up to the ceiling and saying, 'Do you see those wires? That's what they torture me with.' And I was a tiny little girl and it's like, 'Okay, this is my mother telling me this, so it must be true.' But it just didn't sit right.... And I remember going to bed at night and she would do things like this -- and crying because my mother wasn't like my other girlfriends' mothers. "

After
"I can remember Daddy taking us out to eat because she just couldn't handle it. He even cooked. But afterwards, she resumed not quite as vivacious as she was, that was never back again. But she came back. She was the person I knew before. And I felt like he had given me a tremendous gift to give my mother back to me. I guess to my father it was not to have to institutionalize her."

Looking Back
"It's a hard decision to make, but inevitably life is just full of decisions like that... For me it was a good thing. I think for mama it was a good thing. And I think the lobotomy he did on her was a very good thing. Certainly the electroshock therapy was. Of course now they have medicine for this, so it's all a moot point. But they had nothing back then. That's the thing, people who are looking at it don't understand, they didn't have anything else and nobody was coming up with anything."

-- Angelene Forester, daughter

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