Robert Kolker

Inside the Mind of an American Family

Hidden Valley Road

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 the other, 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 Institutes 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 amidst 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. With clarity and compassion, bestselling and award-winning author Robert Kolker uncovers one family's unforgettable legacy of suffering, love and hope.

Super interesting but extremely sad read. I will say, the portions focusing on schizophrenia research felt like a textbook read and did not peak my interest. 

Alicia Evans

Patrick Book

armoni mayes

This is a story about a family of twelve children to which six of the children ended up developing schizophrenia later on in their adult lives. Weaved throughout the story is the journey through the psychiatric field trying to diagnose and look for the causes of schizophrenia, which this family was a a perfect case study. The author did an amazing job of keeping the reader hooked, as well as being informational and well-researched. I have gained a lot of knowledge on the topic of schizophrenia and other mental disorders while also peering into the family dynamics of how a mental illness such as this has such a rippling effect through a large family.

“Bleuler was trying to describe a split between a patient’s exterior and interior lives—a divide between perception and reality. 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.”

The heartrending story of a mid-century American family with twelve children, six of them diagnosed with schizophrenia, that became science's great hope in the quest to understand--even cure--the disease. Don and Mimi Galvin seemed to be living the dream. After World War II, Don's work with the US 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 were diagnosed as schizophrenic. How could all this happen in 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 Institutes of Mental Health. Their shocking story also offers a shadow history of the science of schizophrenia, from the era of institutionalization, lobotomy and the premise of the schizophrenogenic mother, to the search for genetic markers for the disease, always amidst profound disagreements about the nature of the illness itself. Unknown to the Galvins, samples of their DNA informed decades of genetic research that continues today, offering paths to treatment and even the possibility of the eradication of the disease for future generations. With clarity and compassion, bestselling and award-winning author Robert Kolker uncovers one family's unforgettable legacy of suffering, love and hope.

Briar's Reviews

If you want your mind completely blown away then grab this book!

Hidden Valley Road: Inside the Mind of an American Family has been sitting on my shelf for probably too long. I've looked at it, thought about reading it, and then just decided otherwise. I wanted more fiction in my life! Or so I thought. This non-fiction book is as enticing and intriguing as a lot of the fiction books I've been picking up (if not more). Honestly, this book will open your eyes to a world you probably never thought much of. What happens to families where multiple family members have schizophrenia? And what if that family was way back in the 1940s-1960s?

This story makes my heart ache. It's not an easy story to hear but it's an important one to tell. Not only is it important, it tells you a lot of history about mental health and mental illnesses. With mental health becoming further into the forefront and actually being taken seriously (well, some of the time... unfortunately), this is an important story to learn about and tell. Lindsay and Margaret and the rest of the gang deserve so much better. Hopefully their story will help change the course of history and help many families and their loved ones in the future.

We have a picture perfect family from the 1940s, right? Two loving parents and their twelve children (which sounds like a lot now, and was a bit of a lot back then... but it's a big family). They all seem perfect and happy and it's exactly what you want, right? The duo finally get two beautiful girls and all seems right in the world. Until their sons start unravelling... Six of their sons get diagnosed with mental health issues (schizophrenia, maybe bipolar or other issues as well - diagnosing mental illnesses wasn't a perfect science back then). The family struggles with these issues. What are you supposed to do when your son dresses up like a monk and spouts out religious nonsense to the world and then tries beating everyone up? It's not like there's a rule book or a play book to help you with that sort of thing. Especially in a time when mental health was a topic we didn't like to talk about.

Things weren't easy (and that's putting it lightly). The story goes into some brutal and harsh details about the Galvin family's life and social circle. It will hurt your heart but it will also let you inside a very scary world. Especially one for young girls and children! Can you imagine how it would feel to feel like you're losing your siblings? To have history covered up? The painful memories. My heart aches and I have so much empathy. 

The one good take away? This family helped with a lot of research. Their blood samples and medical history has given the science world something to start and go off of when dealing with schizophrenia. It's awful cases like these that can sometimes change the views of the world. Luckily, their story is helping shape the medical community.

This is a must read book. I honestly couldn't believe how eye opening, how incredible and how strange this book was. It reads like a really well written fiction, and sometimes you get so lost in the story you forget it's real. Pick this book up! It's high on my recommendation list! Especially for lovers of non-fiction.

Five out of five stars.

I received this book for free through Goodreads First Reads.

What a deep story.. unfortunate to hear parts of this story and then heartbreaking to know that this is a true story. Really makes you consider both genetics and the conditions in which you raise children, and how both affect them. 🫡🫣

Kyra Cracchiola

Jessica

This is a fascinating but rough read. The trials that this family goes through are not easy to stomach, but it is a fantastically empathetic window into the experience of growing up around mental illness, particularly at a time when it was even less understood than it is now. The story is largely woven together via anecdotes and documents from the members of the Galvin family that were never diagnosed with mental illness, so it doesn't provide as much of a window into the mind of those experiencing schizophrenia (or, in one case, bipolar disorder), which feels like a missed a opportunity, but an understandable one, given that many of the still living brothers had been institutionalized and heavily medicated for decades by the time this author found them, making parsing their experiences incredibly challenging.

Additionally, there are some really interesting insights into how institutional misogyny, ableism and a touch of a classism contributed to the decades of hardship the family experienced.

Shan

Wow. The story of the Galvin Family was eye-opening and gave a different perspective on psychological disorders and how it impacts not just the individual but their loved ones. This book also explains how patients were treated in the 50s and 60s. I hope that we can continue to broaden our understanding of not just schizophrenia but all psychological disorders.

Celeste Richardson

Hidden Valley Road is another one of those cases where fact is stranger than fiction. I can’t even fathom enduring this kind of childhood. It’s a dark corruption of the American Dream. Imagine being one of the youngest of twelve siblings, and one of only two girls. Now imagine that, of your ten brothers, six of them are very mentally ill, with the vast majority of them being schizophrenic. Schizophrenia is still such a mysterious and misunderstood affliction, and it’s wild to think that something so unusual could possibly invade one family to such an extent. The things the family had to endure at the hands of one another is both horrifying and heartbreaking. While I sometimes got lost in the scientific details, it was a compelling story. This is another nonfiction work that made me ridiculously grateful for my very stable family life, and makes me appreciate my wonderful brother even more.

Queena Li

Read if you like: medical sleuths, that abnormal psychology 201 class you took in uni, the way Forrest Gump's life spanned defining moments of 20th century US history.

Mariane Ferrantino 

Wow! I picked this up through my library’s ebook app because it just looked interesting, but this was an intense, awesome read about a family dealing with mental illness and all the repercussions and life experiences related to it. Had to put it down early on to complete other reading, and I flew through the last 300 pages in two days to get it done before it was due tomorrow! Definitely worth checking out.

G. Jason Head

As a book about mental health and schizophrenia, you won't get a better study.  That said, it's still a book about schizophrenia - and this is long book.  It's a great book, but near the middle and end it starts to get a little long-winded to me.   Don't let my opinion deter you, however. If this is a subject you are interested in, I highly recommend this.

Caitlyn Baldwin

4.5 ⭐

Some of the material in this is hard to digest, but it is a fascinating read. I think it balances science with personal accounts well.

Cindy Lieberman

Very well done non-fiction book about research into schizophrenia and how one family in particular - with 12 children, a good 50% of them suffering from severe mental illnesses (schizophrenia, bipolar disorder, etc) — helped researchers with the nature/nurture debate. The book is mostly about the family’s life and the parents’ denial that endangered the children and may have created situations that led to psychic breakdowns. An unbelievable true story and difficult to put down.

Shelby Doherty

** spoiler alert **
           3.5 stars

Likes:
- Goes really in-depth into the family life but also talks about the science and research going on at the same time
- Such a crazy story and how amazing that the family is so cooperative and supportive of the research into this (and into their more personal lives for this book as well)
- The kindness of the family that took in the girls is very refreshing after hearing about a family who has been through so much.
- Author does a good job at showing both sides of the coin (i.e. when Mimi dismisses her daughters sexual assault, it looks into why this is the possibly the case)

Dislikes:
- Don't really like this style of writing
- Not what I was expecting going into it - I did not expect to have a whole study of the family's personal lives.
- Nothing to do with the writing but the description of how to tame falcons was so sad.

Jeremy Anderberg

The quality of empathy in a writer—whether in fiction or non-fiction—is something that I’ve come to look for more and more as a reader. In my interview with Paul Tremblay, who takes the idea seriously, he said this:

“Sympathy is shallow, easy, and akin to rooting for the home team. Sympathy too often boils down to ‘I sympathize with that character because they look and act like me.’ Empathy is harder but it's more rewarding, more human, and more humane; the want to understand someone who isn't you.”

Hidden Valley Road weaves history, science, crime, and biography into a majestic story about schizophrenia and the powerful, infuriating, unbreakable bonds of family.

The Galvin family of Colorado Springs was always a little quirky. They were avid falconers, made friends with alcoholic priests, and kept cranking out kids. There were 12 children born between 1945 and 1965—10 boys to start, with two girls coming at the end. Though there were warning signs in childhood, it was when they reached adulthood that the mental health problems became most obviously apparent. In fact, six of the Galvin boys would be diagnosed with schizophrenia, a disease which ultimately came to define the life of everybody in that household.

With a topic like this, it would be easy for the family trials to become something to leer at. But Kolker digs deep and explores the inner workings of nearly every family member and even schizophrenia itself, which manifests as a particularly nefarious constellation of symptoms that aren’t the same between any two patients. Kolker worked especially hard to respect the Galvins, let the living children process their life in real time, and not pass judgment on anyone’s choices. This is among the most empathetic books I’ve ever read.

Hidden Valley Road admittedly carried extra significance for me. My grandmother was diagnosed with schizophrenia in her 20s; I’ve seen the impact it has on a family, and I’ve not seen an author be able to capture that reality in a more meaningful way that Robert Kolker. It was an easy choice to include in my list of 2020 favorites.

The author himself writes a better summation than I could hope to:

“[This book] is about, even after the worst has happened in virtually every imaginable way, finding a new way to understand what it means to be a family.”

Reader warning: There is a bit of physical/sexual abuse within the family. Perhaps skip this one if that sort of content is triggering.

Rachel Benton

5 stars. This is one of six books for the Octafinals in the BookTube Prize that I was judging for this year. I actually read this book last , but this ended up being my favorite book out of the bunch. So I ranked it #1 ( 6 the worst, and #1 the best). I was pleased to learn that this has moved onto Quarterfinals. This book tells the story of the Galvin Family. Mimi and Don Galvin met as teenagers and fell in love. Mimi ended up getting pregnant, and they got married. That didn’t stop Don from trying to fulfill his own career goals, which was to get into the Military. I can’t remember which branch he was in when he first started out. But I do remember that he eventually ended up in the Air Force. Despite the fact that he was away for most of the time, this didn’t stop him and Mimi from having more children. They ended up having 12 children, ten boys, and two girls. The oldest born in 1945, and the youngest in 1965. Spanning the baby boom. Glavin’s were seen as this all American family. By the mid 1970’s all that began to change for the worse, six of the Galvin boys, one after another were all diagnosed with schizophrenia. I liked this book because Kolker was talking about the family and their dynamics, but another part of this book was a very detailed history of Schizophrenia. Before reading this book, I heard of Schizophrenia, but I’m not expert on it. So it was nice to read the history of it, along with reading about the Galvins. I kind of wish that Kolker would have talked more about how the Galvins came to be test subjects for one of the studies being conducted on families who have one then more family members who have schizophrenia. Considering how detailed he was about everything else, this had me scratching my head. I thought that the relationship between the sister was another interesting aspect. Though they experienced some of the same things they dealt with it in totally different ways. Overall, I thought this story was really good, and that's why I ranked it #1

Jan Talkington

Wow! What an interesting read. It's hard to believe that anyone in the Galvin family survived life at Hidden Valley Road. While the medical-psychological aspect is a large part of the story, there is also the emotional, living day by day side. It's interesting how much this family through their trials have contributed to understanding so much about mental illness.

Heather Ellis

I received this book via Netgalley in exchange for an honest review.

I was really excited to read this book. As a historian of psychiatry, I am always looking for new books on diagnosis and psychological treatment. What initially drew me to this book was the fact that this was a story about an American family who had a high rate of schizophrenia. I thought that this book would offer a unique perspective, and it did not disappoint.

Kolker is masterful in his ability to combine both a family saga and medical history of the disease. He was able to make the medical history of schizophrenia accessible for the reader and a drama in its own right. Both of these stories were needed to show how the Galvins are such an integral family not only because of their story but their contribution to schizophrenic research.

Each chapter highlights particular individuals in the family which I though was really smart. There is such a large cast of characters throughout the book and keeping them straight was sometimes hard to do, but this was a useful tool.

There are many dark moments in this book and Kolker doesn't shy away from them. He's really good at describing these sensitive issues and showing their importance. While these details were hard to read at times, they were clearly important to the narrative and showed how schizophrenia affects families.

Overall I would highly recommend this book to anyone who is interested in the history of psychiatry and how certain mental illnesses affect families.

Hidden Valley Road Inside the Mind of an American Family

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