 Patients who were depressed and had not been ill for long were much more likely to have left hospital than those who had a schizophrenic illness and had been in hospital longer.Beginning in the early 1940s, psychiatrists and surgeons experimented with different techniques of psychosurgery, mainly in order to reduce the risk of death, complications and severe personality damage associated with the operation and thus extend its use to depressed and neurotic patients.Transorbital leucotomy (transorbital lobotomy in the US) was a technique invented by Italian psychiatrist Amarro Fiamberti and taken up by American neurologist Walter Freeman, with whose name it is particularly associated.