Hidden Valley Ranch: Inside the Mind of An American Family by Robert Kolker

Hidden Valley Ranch: Inside the Mind of An American Family by Robert Kolker

Read by Sean Pratt

13 hours, 8 minutes

Published April 2020 by Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group

 

Publisher's Summary: 

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.

My Thoughts: 

In the early 1990's, the University of Nebraska football team had a player whose mental health ended his playing career and eventually ended up with him being shot and paralyzed by police. At the time, the word was that he had schizophrenia (that is not the diagnosis they later gave him). By that time, I had two small boys and I spent some portion of their late teens and early twenties worrying about schizophrenia because of what I'd learned all of those years earlier, terrified that one of them might begin exhibiting signs in his early twenties. Fortunately, neither did. 

Don and Mimi Galvin were not so fortunate. Because of mental illness, one of their sons killed himself and then his girlfriend, one of them sexually assaulted their two daughters, two of them died after decades of taking medication. 

When their eldest, Don Jr., the golden child began exhibiting troubling signs of mental illness in the 1960's, the Galvins worked hard to hide his illness from the outside world. Mimi, in particular, worked hard to get him the help he needed. But help was hard to find then, as it continued to be as one and then another of the boys' mental health declined, to find the help they needed. There was very little knowledge of schizophrenia - no known cause (nature vs. nurture being an ongoing battle amongst those who did research the illness) and no effective medical treatments that didn't leave the patient a shadow of themselves. As that young football player had done, the Galvin boys repeatedly stopped taking the medication, convinced that it was not helping or that its help came at too high a cost. Through it all, Mimi continued to fight for her sick boys, at the expense of her healthy children.

Alongside the story of the Galvins, Kolker also gives readers some background on the history of schizophrenia research and treatment, introducing readers to scientists and doctors who, in an effort to prove the biological and genealogical cause of the disease, worked tirelessly to find answers. '

Eventually the two paths crossed. Because of the high incidence of the disease in the Galvin family (as well as hundreds of other families who also had high percentages of family members with the disease), the researchers were able to reach a great number of conclusions as to the biological cause of the disease and to work toward finding a medical treatment. Here's where our medical system has failed all of those who came after the Galvins - there is not a lot of money to be made in developing and marketing medications to treat schizophrenics and so pharmaceutical companies don't. 

As I read, this book reminded me very much of The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks, although the Galvins were not unwilling participants. And unlike that book, this one doesn't end with an "at least groundbreaking research resulted and so many lives have been saved." Kolker ends with us understanding that, despite everything that researchers have learned, there's still a long way to go in finding out how to treat patients with schizophrenia.