The consequences of the operation have been described as "mixed". Some patients died as a result of the operation and others later committed suicide. Some were left severely brain damaged. Others were able to leave hospital, or became more manageable within hospital. A few people managed to return to responsible work, while at the other extreme people were left with severe and disabling impairments. Most people fell into an intermediate group, left with some improvement of their symptoms but also with emotional and intellectual deficits to which they made a better or worse adjustment. On average, there was a mortality rate of approximately 5 percent during the 1940s.
The lobotomy procedure could have severe negative effects on a patient's personality and ability to function independently. Lobotomy patients often show a marked reduction in initiative and inhibition. They may also exhibit difficulty putting themselves in the position of others because of decreased cognition and detachment from society.
Immediately following surgery patients were often stuporous, confused, and incontinent. Some developed an enormous appetite and gained considerable weight. Seizures were another common complication of surgery. Emphasis was put on the training of patients in the weeks and months following surgery.
Freeman coined the term "surgically induced childhood" and used it constantly to refer the results of lobotomy. The operation left people with an "infantile personality"; a period of maturation would then, according to Freeman, lead to recovery. In an unpublished memoir he described how the "personality of the patient was changed in some way in the hope of rendering him more amenable to the social pressures under which he is supposed to exist." He described one 29 year old woman as being, following lobotomy, a "smiling, lazy and satisfactory patient with the personality of an oyster" who couldn't remember Freeman's name and endlessly poured coffee from an empty pot. When her parents had difficulty dealing with her behaviour, Freeman advised a system of rewards (ice-cream) and punishment (smacks).[135]
Russian psychiatrist Fedor Kondratev, of the Serbsky Center, said that thousands of the people with schizophrenia to whom the method was applied have completely lost the remnants of their mental health, their fate has been irrevocably broken
