Hidden Valley Road

Donald's decline was the first and the most florid. He cycled through hospitals, religious delusions, and violence, sometimes convinced he was a saint or an alien, sometimes turning on his family. Committed and released, medicated and unmedicated, he became the fixed point of crisis around which the household orbited. For his younger siblings, he was both a beloved brother and a source of fear — a person who could be gentle at breakfast and terrifying by evening.

Then the pattern repeated, which is what makes the Galvin story so brutal. Jim, Brian, Joseph, Matthew, and Peter each fell ill in turn, each in his own register. Brian's story ended in the worst way the book records — a murder-suicide that shattered whatever composure the family had left. The others cycled through institutions, the drugs of the day with their heavy side effects, brief remissions, and relapses. Six sons, one disease, and no map for any of it.

By the time genetics could offer real tools, the Galvins had lived through decades of psychiatric fashion. The mother-blaming theories had faded; the pendulum had swung toward biology, toward the idea that schizophrenia was a brain disease with hereditary components. Researchers had long suspected the illness ran in families, but untangling nature from environment was hard. A single family with six affected brothers and six unaffected siblings was, for a geneticist, close to an ideal natural experiment.

Kolker traces how the Galvins' blood and histories reached scientists studying the illness's inheritance, including work connected to researchers such as Robert Freedman and, later, Lynn DeLisi, who spent years pursuing the genes behind schizophrenia. The family's samples fed into the long, frustrating hunt for genetic markers. One line of inquiry pointed toward a receptor involved in filtering sensory information — the notion that people with the illness cannot screen out the flood of stimuli the rest of us tune out automatically, so the world arrives as unbearable noise.

Step back from the Galvins and the book becomes an argument about how we have thought about mental illness — and how badly, for a long time, we thought about it. For most of the twentieth century, schizophrenia was a battlefield between two camps: those who blamed the family, especially the mother, and those who insisted the disease lived in the brain and the genes. The Galvins lived through both regimes. Mimi was condemned by the first and, in a sense, partly vindicated by the second, which located the illness in a biology no parenting could have prevented.

But the second camp's victory is not a clean happy ending, and this is where the story earns its weight. Biology explained the vulnerability; it did not explain everything. That six brothers fell ill and four did not, from the same parents in the same house, tells us the gene is a loaded dice, not a verdict. The disease sits at the meeting point of inheritance and life — of what the body brings and what happens to it. The Galvins are the human proof that neither pure nature nor pure blame was ever the whole answer.

Mimi Galvin spent her last years still caring for her sickest sons, still turning over the question of blame that doctors had once pinned on her. She died in 2017, having outlived her husband and several of her children, and having watched the science shift from accusing her to studying her family's blood. The healthy siblings, Margaret and Mary especially, made their own difficult peace — leaving, returning, and finally telling the story rather than hiding it. The house on Hidden Valley Road no longer holds the family, but the record it produced outlasted them all.