Tell me the story of the Kennedy child placed in a institution. I had not heard about that one. Tragic in the extreme if true.
JFK’s older sister Eunice.
She was surgically lobotomized as well.
Her behavior embarressed the Royal Family.
Talk about extreme.
Rosemary Kennedy was the eldest daughter of Rose and Joseph Kennedy, and hers is the most heartbreaking, tragic story of all.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rosemary_Kennedy
http://www.cnn.com/interactive/specials/9907/kennedy.tragedy.glance/frameset.exclude.html
Go back to the thread. I posted the information about how the Kennedy family LOBOTOMIZED her. Before that she was normal.
Heartbreaking, horrible story — young Rosemary Kennedy was considered a bit slow intellectually but she was vivacious, lively, affectionate, and definitely not mentally “retarded” according to a good number of contemporary accounts. By her early 20s she was having more troubles with her father (Joe, Sr. was the kind of bombastic a-hole that might have been too much for any sensitive soul). Her “condition” is now often regarded as more likely to be depression (quite possibly due to her overbearing father, at least in part) than anything like “retardation”....
Joe, Sr. had her lobotomized (without consulting her mother, Rose, Sr.) and the operation wrecked her mind and speech forever. From what I have read, she became “mentally disabled” BECAUSE of the operation and most certainly was not disabled prior to the lobotomy. Then she was relegated to an institution for the rest of her life.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rosemary_Kennedy
Kathleen Kennedy’s former boyfriend, John White, claimed that Kathleen admitted to him the secret that Rosemary had learning problems—but what really concerned her father were “mood changes” and a “new neurological disturbance.” She added that “the family considered Rosemary a disgrace and failure’”. [9]
Kessler conducted the only interview with Dr. Watts, who “told the author that, in his opinion, Rosemary had suffered not from mental retardation, but from a form of depression. … ‘It may have been agitated depression, you’re agitated, you’re shaky. You talk in an agitated way.’”
Kessler writes, “A review of all records by the two doctors confirmed Dr. Watt’s [sic] declaration. … None of the papers listed any of the patient as being mentally retarded. … According to a review in the American Journal of Psychiatry, of all reports of lobotomies ever done, the procedure was only used for psychiatric illness” [10]
“One of the doctors who knew the truth was Dr. Bertram S. Brown, … executive director of the President’s Panel on Mental Retardation,” Kessler writes. “According to Dr. Brown, the fact that Rosemary could do arithmetic meant that her IQ was well above 75, the cutoff used by most states for purposes of classification in schools to define mental retardation.” At the age of nine, she did problems like 428 × 32 = 13696, 3924 / 6 = 654. At age 16 she wrote to her father “I would do anything to make you so happy. I hate to disapoint [sic] you in anyway [sic].” Her diary reveals an ability to write about and understand various situations around her.
Kessler quotes Dr. Brown, a former director of the National Institute of Mental Health, as saying, “If she did division and multiplication, she was over an IQ of 75. She was not mentally retarded. … It could be she had an IQ of 90 in a family where everyone was 130, so it looked like retardation, but she did not fall into IQ 75 and below, which is the definition of mental retardation. … There is no way I can picture her at less that a 90 IQ, but in that family, 90 would be considered retarded.”
Kessler adds that in Dr. Brown’s opinion, the family’s treatment of Rosemary led to her mental illness. “I think it’s likely she was somewhat slower than the others. Then she was treated as if she was retarded. Then it becomes reactive depression, including rages and loss of control. That is mental illness. … The reason she got depressed was that she reacted to being treated as a lesser member of the family.” While the children tried to include her in their activities, “given the highly competitive environment of the Kennedy family, they could not help but to communicate to her that she was not up to their standards.” The fact that Joe banished Rosemary to live with his aide demonstrated his rejection of her. “The stigma of mental illness in those days was like tuberculosis or cancer or worse. Mental retardation is more benignly not your fault. … Even in [Dr. Watts’s] day, performing a lobotomy on someone who was mentally ill would have been medical malpractice.”
According to Kessler, Dr. Brown called the suppression of the truth “the biggest mental health cover-up in history.” Since the “public story” is still that Rosemary was retarded, the “lack of support for mental illness is part of a total lifelong family denial of what was really so. … Some of us knew the secret and kept it secret …” [11]