Editing Psychosurgery (section)

===1960s to the present===
During the 1960s and 1970s, psychosurgery became the subject of increasing public concern and debate, culminating in the US with congressional hearings. Particularly controversial in the United States was the work of Harvard neurosurgeon [[Vernon Mark]] and psychiatrist [[Frank Ervin]], who carried out amygdalotomies in the hope of reducing violence and "pathologic aggression" in patients with temporal lobe seizures and wrote a book entitled ''Violence and the Brain'' in 1970.<ref name="Mashour"/> The National Commission for the Protection of Human Subjects of Biomedical and Behavioral Research in 1977 endorsed the continued limited use of psychosurgical procedures.<ref name="Mashour"/><ref>{{Cite journal | doi = 10.1017/S0269889714000349 | last1 = Casey | first1 = B. P. | title = The surgical elimination of violence? Conflicting attitudes towards technology and science during the psychosurgery controversy of the 1970s | journal = Science in Context | volume = 28 | issue = 1| pages = 99–129 | pmid = 25832572 | date=March 2015| s2cid = 25379245 }}</ref> Since then, a few facilities in some countries, such as the US, have continued to use psychosurgery on small numbers of patients. In the US and other Western countries, the number of operations has further declined over the past 30 years,{{clarify timeframe|date=February 2023}} a period during which there had been no major advances in ablative psychosurgery.<ref name="Sachdev"/>