I worked with some people who had been state hospital patients in the 50s. The effects of those treatments was pretty horrible. Some of them seemed to have been treated with awful things (the one I'm thinking of was lots of high-dose ECT) for so long that it made their brains not susceptible to modern meds. Some of them had really complicated histories and nothing really helped them. Many of those people could be completely calm and sweet one second and attacking a visitor the next. Their brains mis-fired so badly. Where I worked had been providing care between state hospital and group home level for 30 years so lots of our patients had been there 30 years and still weren't stabilized on meds. I was there just a few years after the final lobotomy patient. One day we were digging for a restraint in a storeroom because restraints were something I had to do and found a straightjacket, left over from the early days at that place. Apparently in the heyday there was such a waiting list that when someone died the body was put in a morgue and the bed was filled immediately. It really wasn't much less when I was there because we took violent patients with dementia and nobody else did. It was a whole different world than I've experienced as a patient myself and I'm so grateful for that perspective.