Were you pleased to find that Lillian had changed her mind about her son Robert's lobotomy? Did your opinion of his condition change after his sister found the tapes?

Lillian initially agrees to have her son Robert lobotomized to "cure" his schizophrenia. Were you pleased to find out she'd changed her mind? How did your opinion of his condition and the proposed operation change after his sister, Helen, found the tapes?

I WAS glad that Lillian decided against the procedure, although it may have made her life easier in some respects. And my opinion definitely changed, since the poor man wasn't ill, just haunted. I felt a lot of sympathy for him. Even though his sister found the tapes, she didn't realize their significance and thought they were just ramblings of a madman. So sad!

I was so afraid Lillian would get persuaded to inflict that barbaric procedure on her son…so glad she changed her mind!
Those dangerous, bogus operations and other crazy, harmful treatments for atypical minds…it still goes on today!
Maybe not lobotomies, but harmful practices especially via the internet, that people don’t really understand the consequences and risks of and get persuaded to try.

I held my breath through this section of the book because I was so afraid for Robert.

From the introduction of Robert on, I felt he was more lucid than the medical professionals estimated. He seemed to be acutely tuned in to the apparitions. Even if he were as ill as the doctors thought I was very relieved Lillian ultimately chose to spare Robert from the lobotomy.

I was so glad she did NOT go through with the lobotomy. My heart ached for him and even more so after the tapes were found. I always felt he was being misunderstood and misdiagnosed. The thought of him being used as a type of Guinea pig, for a doctor just made me cringe. He was being haunted and was extremely sensitive to the spirits. It was a section that I read with ferocity to find out what happened to him.

I am not sure how I feel about the final decision regarding the "procedure" for Robert. His life seems so traumatized and unhappy, I wish there was another way to bring about a less tortured existence.

Did anyone else notice that Daniel Mason teaches at the Stanford University department of psychiatry? I, too, worked with psychiatric patients for more than twenty years, although not as a clinician. I always felt that our schizophrenic patients were tuned in to another frequency that others simply couldn't understand.
I was overjoyed that Robert's mother decided against the lobotomy. I wonder what Robert saw when he viewed the tapes. More than his sister did, obviously, or he wouldn't have labeled them.

Lobotomies were considered for a while to be a cure, and I’m sure that Robert’s mother was hoping that the procedure would help her son. We know now, of course, how barbaric the procedure ended up being, so I was definitely relieved that she cancelled at the last minute. Robert was such a tragic, tortured individual, and I wished that he had been born in modern times so that current treatments and drugs could help him.

Yes, lobotomies are brutal but I loved how the author allowed our knowledge of this to inform us of the extent of what we learn was really a haunting.

I believe that Lillian was a very poor mother for Robert. He needed a strong person to help him -all Lillian did was cater to his illness. She made the right decision on not letting them do a lobotomy on him.

No the tapes did not change my mind on Robert. What he may have been seeing was probably not what his sister saw when she looked at the tapes. His illness was full circle. Had he had a mother or family that really cared about him they would have helped him - gotten him the medication that he needed and saw to it that he took it. He could have had a decent life, but ignorant, weak family took that from him. His mothers weakness was not helpful for him.

I was worried as Lillian kept going back and forth in her decision. I wondered if the walks were his way of trying to escape the history spirits/ghosts that plagued him. The treatment of the mentally disturbed was barbaric in that time, even the meditation.

I agree that Lillian’s limitations mental and otherwise affected how she dealt with Robert.