Biggest cover-up of mental health in history

WHEN 86-year-old Rosemary Kennedy, sister of President John F Kennedy, died in January 2005, the New York Times ran a story saying she had been born mentally disabled.

This, it seemed, was the final chapter in what Dr Bertram Brown, an advisEr to President Kennedy and one of few who knew the truth about Rosemary, called the biggest cover-up of mental health in history.

The truth was that in the autumn of 1941, when Rosemary was 23, her father Joe arranged for a frontal lobotomy to be performed on her.