Book Review: Hidden Valley Road: Inside the Mind of an American Family by Robert Kolker

Hidden Valley Road: Inside the Mind of an American Family by Robert Kolker
Publisher: Doubleday
Publication Date: April 7, 2020
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

Publisher’s Description:

The heartrending 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, where their twelve children perfectly spanned the baby boom: the oldest born 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, sudden 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?

What took place inside the house on Hidden Valley Road was so extraordinary that the Galvins became one of the first families to be studied by the National Institute of Mental Health. Their story offers a shadow history of the science of schizophrenia, from the era of institutionalization, lobotomy, and the schizophrenogenic mother to the search for genetic markers for the disease, always amid profound disagreements about the nature of the illness itself. And unbeknownst to the Galvins, samples of their DNA informed decades of genetic research that continues today, offering paths to treatment, prediction, and even eradication of the disease for future generations.

Hidden Valley Road is the story of Don and Mimi Galvin and their twelve children – ten boys and two girls. Six of their boys end up being diagnosed as schizophrenic. The diagnoses started rolling in the 1960s, when not much was known about the cause of the disease or how to treat it. It was originally thought to be brought on by being raised by an overbearing mother. Eventually, some scientists wanted to know if there could be a genetic component to the disease and that’s where the Galvin family could help, being such a large family with such a high incidence of the disease.

Robert Kolker goes back and forth between chapters on the Galvin family and chapters about theories and research related to schizophrenia. He spent hours interviewing members of the family and their friends and reading journals that various family members kept over the years. The family struggled so much. Any parent would have been overwhelmed but Mimi’s preoccupation with making sure her family looked perfect from the outside certainly didn’t help. Her two daughters were the two youngest children and had to endure horrible abuse from some of their older brothers. The family was perpetually in chaos.

The book profiles the Galvins from when Don and Mimi first started dating, right up through the present day. The work scientists are doing in the field is also followed up through today. It was interesting to see how all of the Galvin children ended up. Of course, even the healthy siblings were profoundly affected growing up in a household with so many mentally ill people. At times, I wished for a little more details about some of the siblings but I know the author could only include so much without making the book cumbersome.

Hidden Valley Road has a very readable narrative, even with all of the scientific information that’s included. Kolker’s treatment of the mentally ill brothers never seems exploitive, only informative. Recommended.