"My mother had daily bouts of intolerable pain in her colon. Doctors at Duke and Johns Hopkins found no physiological cause. Psychosomatic pain may be due to unresolved conflict or trauma. There was evidence of childhood anal sexual abuse. A relationship with a female professor led her to bolt from college and marry. She was 39 when she was admitted to Graylyn psychiatric hospital."
"Graylyn is an opulent sixty room mansion built in 1928 by Bowman Gray, chairman of the R. J. Reynolds Tobacco Company. In 1947, it became a psychiatric hospital. When I visited her there, she gave me a tour that included bathrooms with gold fixtures. Group therapy and occupational therapy sessions in this luxurious environment did not relieve the pain. Since psychoactive drugs had not yet been developed, she was given shock treatments. Freed from pain, she returned home."
A psychiatrist named Douglas Kelley studied Hermann Göring and twenty-one other Nazis slated for trial at Nuremberg. The same Douglas Kelley served as head psychiatrist at Graylyn Hospital in Winston-Salem, North Carolina. A woman admitted to Graylyn at age 39 suffered daily intolerable colon pain with no physiological cause and had evidence of childhood anal sexual abuse. Treatments at Graylyn, including group and occupational therapy and electroshock, provided only temporary relief. Dr. Kelley performed a prefrontal lobotomy that permanently eliminated the patient’s pain. Graylyn was an opulent 60-room mansion converted to a psychiatric hospital in 1947.
Read at Psychology Today
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