Hidden Valley Road: Inside the Mind of an American Family
✒️ Author: Robert Kolker |. 📖 Published: 2020 | 🗓 Read: November 16, 2020 | 📄 Pages: 387
Summary
The story of a midcentury American family with twelve children, six of them diagnosed with schizophrenia, that became science's great hope in the quest to understand the disease. Don and Mimi Galvin seemed to be living the American dream. After World War II, Don's work with the Air Force brought them to Colorado. Their twelve children perfectly spanned the baby boom: the oldest in 1945, the youngest in 1965. In those years, there was an established script for a family like the Galvins--aspiration, hard work, upward mobility, domestic harmony--and they worked hard to play their parts. But behind the scenes was a different story: psychological breakdown, shocking violence, hidden abuse. By the mid-1970s, six of the ten Galvin boys, one after another, were diagnosed as schizophrenic. How could all this happen to one family?
Why You Should Read It
Get insight into schizophrenia, a disease that more than 1.5 million people are diagnosed with every year, and how one family dealt with it. This Galvin’s impact on how we better understand this disease is undeniable.
Notable Highlights
One of the consequences of surviving schizophrenia for fifty years is that sooner or later, the cure becomes as damaging as the disease.
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For a family, schizophrenia is, primarily, a felt experience, as if the foundation of the family is permanently tilted in the direction of the sick family member. Even if just one child has schizophrenia, everything about the internal logic of that family changes.
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For more than a century, researchers have understood that one of the biggest risk factors for schizophrenia is heritability. The paradox is that schizophrenia does not appear to be passed directly from parent to child.
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Schizophrenia is not about multiple personalities. It is about walling oneself off from consciousness, first slowly and then all at once, until you are no longer accessing anything that others accept as real.
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Schizophrenia affects an estimated one in one hundred people—or more than three million people in America, and 82 million people worldwide. By one measure, those diagnosed take up a third of all the psychiatric hospital beds in the United States. By another, about 40 percent of adults with the condition go untreated entirely in any given year. One out of every twenty cases of schizophrenia ends in suicide.
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The mystery of schizophrenia is, apparently, solved: The eugenicists are wrong. People aren’t born with schizophrenia at all. Their mothers and fathers are to blame.
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There was no talk of prevention. There was very little discussion of a cure. But one thing seemed true: If they admitted Donald to anything resembling a mental hospital, the only certainties were shame and disgrace, and the end of Donald’s college education, and the tainting of Don’s career, and a stain on the family’s position in the community, and finally the end of the chance for their other eleven children to have respectable, normal lives.
Notes: 1) The consequences of sending a family member to a mental hospital in the 60's
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“We must be more circumspect yet more precise in our theory-building,” Rosenthal wrote. “Those who emphasize the genetic contribution seldom consider in earnest the role that environment might play, and environmentalists usually pay lip service to the idea that hereditary factors may eventually have to be considered as well.” Future research, he declared, needed to build a bridge between the two ideas. “Both heredity and environment,” he wrote, “are, of course, everybody’s business.”
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She wrote about the composers, artists, and writers with mental illness, suggesting their talents sprang from the difficulty they had with direct, conventional communication. Like a court jester, Fromm-Reichmann wrote, people with schizophrenia often tell uncomfortable truths that the rest of us would rather not hear.
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On the whole, families with a history of schizophrenia seemed more than four times as likely as the rest of the population to pass along the condition to future generations—even if, as ever, the illness rarely passed straight from parent to child.
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What if the problem with schizophrenia patients wasn’t that they lacked the ability to respond to so much stimuli, but that they lacked the ability not to? What if their brains weren’t overloaded, but lacked inhibition—forced to reckon with everything that was coming their way, every second of every day?
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Psychosis is just what the brain does when it’s not working very well.
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From her family, Lindsay could see how we all have an amazing ability to shape our own reality, regardless of the facts. We can live our entire lives in a bubble and be quite comfortable. And there can be other realities that we refuse to acknowledge, but are every bit as real as our own. She was not thinking of her sick brothers now, but of everyone—all of them, including her mother, including herself.
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We are, in some way, a product of the people who surround us—the people we’re forced to grow up with, and the people we choose to be with later.
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Our relationships can destroy us, but they can change us, too, and restore us, and without us ever seeing it happen, they define us. We are human because the people around us make us human.
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