Severed Minds

When Gretchen Reb moved to swinging Chicago from sleepy Dubuque, she seemed unstoppable: ambitious and charismatic, her whole life was in front of her. Within a decade, she would be barely recognisable. Poor mental health can afflict anyone and Gretchen soon found herself in a position outside her control, which coincided with one of the darkest chapters in US medical history.

Niall Breslin follows the paper trail Gretchen left behind of letters, diaries, photographs, and family memories to uncover the story medicine tried to forget. As he digs into the life of a woman who once dazzled with promise, he discovers how her life collided, with tragic consequences, with that of Walter Freeman, a doctor whose obsession with a scandalous physical intervention blurred every line of ethics and care.

Content Warning: This series references adult themes including around mental health and death. And there are some graphic descriptions of medical procedures. We use historical language – some of which is inappropriate or offensive – that was normalised at the time and is important to include for context.

Ep1: Glamorous Gretchen

Gretchen Rebs’s 1940s diaries depict a vibrant young woman, soaring through big city life after leaving her sleepy hometown of Dubuque, Iowa. But her daughter Roberta doesn’t recognise the effervescent woman preserved on the pages of Gretchen’s weathered scrapbooks. What happened to her?

Ep2: The Doctor’s Icepick

As Gretchen starts her career as a waitress in Chicago’s swankiest restaurants, a young doctor named Walter Freeman is pursuing an obsession. Haunted by the worst of America's mental asylums, Freeman is confident he has a better solution. He calls his new procedure the transorbital lobotomy.

Ep3: We Don’t Talk About Rosemary

She was one of Walter Freeman’s most famous patients—but for decades, her story remained shrouded in secrecy as she lived out her days in an obscure institution in Wisconsin. Niall explores the cautionary tale of John F. Kennedy’s older sister Rosemary.

Ep4: Legally Insane

Within a year of arriving at Walter Freeman’s office, Gretchen is declared insane by the state of Iowa. And her children Roberta and Ricky find themselves without a mother. But for Freeman, the icepick circus show rolls on across the country, in the vehicle historians would dub a “lobotomobile.”

Ep5: Lobotomy Gets Them Home

Relatives of Freeman’s patients grapple with the devastation his procedures left behind. But if lobotomy wasn’t the answer, what was? Nearly one hundred years on, have prisons simply replaced asylums as a place to lock away the mentally unwell?

Ep6: The Tattered Medal

Walter Freeman moves West, hoping to reinvent himself in California, but psychoanalysis is gaining popularity and ''the ice pick lobotomist'' finds himself out of fashion. Back in Iowa, things start picking up for Gretchen.

Available in Dolby Atmos on Audible.

If you are affected by any of the themes in this series, the following organisations offer support and information:

· Samaritans provides support to those in mental distress: Samaritans.org Call 116 123 or email jo@samaritans.org or jo@samaritans.ie (or the Samaritans Welsh Language Line is 0808 164 0123)

· The National Alliance on Mental Illness, offers support with mental illness in the US: nami.org

· In the UK, Mind offers mental health support: mind.org.uk

· Action on Postpartum Psychosis, supports UK mothers and families dealing with postpartum psychosis: app-network.org