Medical horror story worth watching Monday night January 21 at 9:00 P.M., on WETA and other PBS Stations, is, as Washington Post put it “One of the most horrifying medical treatments of the 20th century was carried out not clandestinely, but with the approval of the medical establishment, the media and the public. Known as the transorbital or “ice pick” lobotomy, the crude and destructive brain-scrambling operation performed on thousands of psychiatric patients between the 1930s and 1960s was touted as a cure for mental illness.”

The fact-based documentary, “The Lobotomist,” supports the overwhelming and sweeping anti-psychiatric movement today.

“The Lobotomist” clearly shows a zealous, self-centered, self-important neurologist, Walter J. Freeman, who relished putting on a show using a carpenter’s mallet instead of a surgical hammer to demonstrate his operations of ripping unsuspecting mental health patient’s brains.

The filmmakers Barak Goodman and John Maggio chill the audience with black-and-white home movies as well as haunting photographs of patients before and sometimes after their lobotomies. A gravel-voiced Freeman narrates many of the movies, demonstrating the procedure he performed on more than 2,900 people, the youngest of whom was four.

One of the most riveting affecting interviews is with Berkeley bus driver Howard Dull, whom Freeman lobotomized at age 12 after is stepmother complained he was difficult.

The documentary is unsettling but powerful with a message about a barbaric activity, mistakenly called a science, that’s gone off the rails.