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This topic has appeared in the trending rankings 1 time(s) in the past year. While it does not trend frequently, its appearance suggests a renewed or concentrated surge of public interest.
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Psychosurgery entered the ranking for the first time today at position #. This is its highest position ever recorded.
This topic has appeared in the English Wikipedia rankings 1 time. It first appeared on 2026-05-26 and was most recently seen on 2026-05-26.
Psychosurgery, also called neurosurgery for mental disorder (NMD), is the neurosurgical treatment of mental disorders. Psychosurgery has always been a controversial medical field. The modern history of psychosurgery begins in the 1880s under the Swiss psychiatrist Gottlieb Burckhardt. The first significant foray into psychosurgery in the 20th century was conducted by the Portuguese neurologist Egas Moniz who, during the mid-1930s, developed the operation known as leucotomy. The practice was enthusiastically taken up in the United States by the neuropsychiatrist Walter Freeman and the neurosurgeon James W. Watts who devised what became the standard prefrontal procedure and named their operative technique lobotomy, although the operation was called leucotomy in the United Kingdom. In spite of the award of the Nobel Prize to Moniz in 1949, the use of psychosurgery declined during the 1950s. By the 1970s the standard Freeman-Watts type of operation was very rare, but other forms of psychosurgery, although used on a much smaller scale, survived. Some countries have abandoned psychosurgery altogether; in others, for example the US and the UK, it is only used in a few centres on small numbers of people with depression or obsessive-compulsive disorder (OCD).
In some countries it is also used in the treatment of schizophrenia and other disorders.
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