Episode Archive

Vlad the Impaler

In this episode, Savannah and Dr. Amy Wallace examine Vlad III of Wallachia—the historical ruler later known as Vlad the Impaler. Born into a volatile borderland between the Ottoman Empire and Christian Europe, Vlad learned early that loyalty was fragile, power was temporary, and survival often depended on intimidation.

They trace his years as an Ottoman political hostage, the violent deaths of his father and brother, his repeated struggles for the Wallachian throne, and his deliberate use of impalement as punishment, spectacle, deterrence, and psychological warfare. They then consider how trauma, rigid control, vengeance, political strategy, and possible sadistic traits may help explain his behavior.

Adolf Hitler

In this episode, Dr. Amy Wallace and Savannah Osgood examine Adolf Hitler’s psychological development—from a childhood marked by repeated loss, an anxiously devoted mother, and an authoritarian father to the rise of a dictator whose personal grievances became political ideology.

Rather than dismissing Hitler as simply “mad,” they explore the longstanding personality traits that shaped his worldview: grandiosity, paranoia, deception, aggression, lack of remorse, and an overwhelming need for admiration and control. They also consider how those traits aligned with Germany’s humiliation after World War I, allowing Hitler to channel national anger into scapegoating, extremism, and mass violence.

Ed Gein

In this chilling yet deeply human episode, Dr. Amy Wallace and her co-host Joplin revisit the life and legacy of Ed Gein, the Plainfield, Wisconsin man whose crimes inspired Psycho, The Texas Chainsaw Massacre, and The Silence of the Lambs. They unpack the intersection of mental illness, isolation, and trauma—and how one man’s descent reshaped psychiatry, criminal profiling, and pop culture.

Vincent Van Gogh

In this episode, Dr. Amy Wallace and Savannah Osgood explore the life of Vincent van Gogh through the lens of modern psychiatry. Was Van Gogh's genius fueled by bipolar disorder? Did obsessive-compulsive traits shape both his art and his suffering? Together, we examine the remarkable life of one of history's most influential artists and consider how modern treatments might have changed his story.

Georgia O'Keeffe

In this episode of Shrinking Heads, Dr. Amy Wallace and Joplin Wallace explore the life of pioneering American artist Georgia O'Keeffe. Known for her iconic flowers, desert landscapes, and groundbreaking modernist vision, O'Keeffe overcame profound personal and professional challenges, including a debilitating depressive episode that nearly ended her career. Together, we examine the psychological forces that shaped her creativity, the complex relationship with photographer and promoter Alfred Stieglitz, and the remarkable role that environment may have played in her recovery.

Lord Byron

Lord Byron was the first modern celebrity poet: dazzling, scandalous, magnetic, self-destructive, and unforgettable. In this episode, psychiatrist Amy Wallace, MD, MPH and storyteller Joplin explore the life and mind of George Gordon Byron through the lens of modern psychiatry, examining whether the poet’s legendary intensity may reflect patterns consistent with bipolar disorder, narcissistic traits, and mood instability rooted in both genetics and environment.

Born to the reckless “Mad Jack” Byron and raised amid financial chaos, physical disability, and emotional volatility, Byron transformed personal turmoil into art that still electrifies readers two centuries later. From the manic brilliance of Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage and Don Juan to the apocalyptic despair of Darkness, Byron’s poetry became both confession and performance.

John James Audubon

John James Audubon gave the world some of the most breathtaking images of birds ever created, yet his methods were as unsettling as they were meticulous. In this episode of Shrinking Heads: The Last Specimen, psychiatrist Amy Wallace, MD, MPH and storyteller Joplin place Audubon “on the couch,” exploring the obsessive, narcissistic, antisocial, and possible autism-spectrum traits that may have shaped both his brilliance and his brutality.

Born amid revolution in Haiti, raised in post-Revolutionary France, and reinvented on the American frontier, Audubon was a man of contradictions: visionary naturalist, theatrical self-mythologizer, slaveholder, obsessive collector, and relentless killer of birds. Together, Amy and Joplin examine the psychological patterns behind his artistic genius, his cruelty toward animals, his compulsive cataloguing, and the troubling legacy left behind in the wake of The Birds of America.

Charles Darwin

Charles Darwin transformed biology, but internally, certainty never came easily. Darwin’s greatest strength may have been his inability to settle. This episode explores how persistent doubt, intellectual caution, and a need for certainty drove one of the most consequential theories in history—and how those same traits mirror modern understandings of obsessive thinking.

Babe Ruth

Before he was the Great Bambino, Babe Ruth was a restless, impulsive kid labeled “incorrigible” and sent away to a reformatory school. In today’s language, many of those traits—constant motion, difficulty with structure, appetite for stimulation—might raise the question of ADHD.

In this episode of Shrinking Heads: What Were They Thinking? Dr. Amy Wallace and son, Joplin Wallace, explore how the very characteristics that made Ruth difficult off the field became extraordinary assets on it. Through a modern psychiatric lens, we look at ADHD not simply as a disorder, but as a pattern of attention, energy, and reward-seeking that can either impair or propel—depending on context.

The Hundred-Acre Wood

In this episode, we examine the concept of mental illness and how its definition and categories have evolved over the years. Characters from the Hundred Acre Wood offer a familiar and surprisingly insightful framework for exploring how we recognize patterns of behavior, assign meaning, and sometimes over-pathologize traits that may simply reflect personality, temperament, or context. Through this lens, we consider how diagnostic systems—from early moral interpretations to modern classifications like the DSM—have shifted with culture, science, and societal values.

We also explore the limits of diagnosis: when labels clarify versus when they constrain, and how environment, adversity, and developmental history shape what we come to call “illness.” Using both clinical perspective and narrative examples, this episode sets the stage for the series by asking a central question: when we look at historical figures through a modern psychiatric lens, what are we truly seeing—disorder, adaptation, or simply humanity in context?