Hidden Valley Road: Inside the Mind of an American Family I highly recommend this book to readers who are fascinated by the human mind.An EXCLUSIVE AUTHORLINK interview with Robert Kolker Kolker did an amazing job at taking us into the whirl of the Galvin family, showing us the good, the bad, the strong, and the destructive. To her credit, Mimi did everything she could to get her sons help at the time she would just never, ever talk about schizophrenia and its terrible ripple effects. Nothing, not even six schizophrenia diagnoses, would ever convince her that things were really wrong with her children. Mimi had clear ideas about what a family should be and what was appropriate to talk about. I was fascinated by Mimi Galvin, the mother left to raise her dozen children by a husband who was always somewhere else (physically or mentally because he was always working). I also felt for the brothers affected by schizophrenia because there seemed like nothing doctors could do for them other than drug them into submission. I really felt for the two Galvin girls who got lost and hurt in their home. That said, Kolker reveals that there have been advances in our understanding of schizophrenia in the last few decades. We learn that, because Thorazine is seen as “good enough” by pharmaceutical companies (and because schizophrenia doesn’t have a clear cause that can be treated), there seems to be no plans to find something better. He glosses over the early years of lobotomy to talk about Thorazine and its clones. Kolker also dives, briefly, into treatments for schizophrenia. Over time, the argument has gone from biology to “schizophrenogenic mothers” to a dual nature/nurture cause to genetics and back. Psychologists and psychiatrists have argued for more than 100 years about what schizophrenia is and what causes it. We got back all the way to Freud and the first cases of what we now know as schizophrenia. The daughters grew up in a chaotic household and were sexually abused by one of their brothers-whose behavior was excused by his diagnosis.Īs we watch the Galvin family implode and their mother struggle to maintain a sense of normalcy and order, Kolker takes us through the psychological history of schizophrenia. Neither of the daughters had schizophrenia, but that doesn’t mean that they didn’t wrestle with their mental health. Chapters in the book jump from sibling to sibling, mostly focusing on the daughters. Eventually, they all had run-ins with police in Boulder, Colorado and wherever they happened to stop for a while before being turned over to the state hospital in Pueblo, Colorado and other mental health facilities. One after another, six of their ten sons started to act out, become fixated on things, start violent fights with each other. To be fair to these parents of twelve, their sons rarely showed signs that there was anything wrong until their sons hit their mid-teen years. Robert Kolker’s fascinating book, Hidden Valley Road, looks at the lives of a family in which six of twelve children developed schizophrenia, played out against psychology’s quest to understand and treat the illness.ĭon and Mimi Galvin lived in denial for a long time. A diagnosis of schizophrenia can seem like the end of normal life forever. There are drugs, but they mostly suppress the symptoms and can have dangerous physical side effects. What makes the illness so frightening is that we don’t have a good treatment for it. It can send people into deep catatonia or drive them into mania. This mental illness is frightening because it can completely erase the boundary between reality and fantasy. ![]() One of the scariest things, I think, that can ever happen to a person is to develop schizophrenia.
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