Hidden Valley Road: Inside the Mind of an American Family

“There was quite likely another, deeper explanation as well—that the children filled a need in Mimi that perhaps even she had not anticipated. From an early age, Mimi had a way of glossing over the more painful disappointments in her life: the loss of her father; the forced exile from Houston; the husband who remained so distant from her. Even if she didn’t admit it, these losses hurt, and took their toll. Having so many children, however, offered Mimi a brand-new narrative” 

It’s never entirely clear whether Don or Mimi was the driving force behind the decision to continue having children; Mimi often said it was her husband who wanted a large family, but she also resisted medical advice when doctors warned her that the continued pregnancies were jeopardizing her health. Regardless, Kolker suggests that having such a large family was a way to sidestep the traumas of her past—not just those outlined here, but also the sexual abuse she suffered at the hands of her stepfather. Notably, Kolker describes this in terms of the motif of “narrative”: being the mother of twelve children was a new story Mimi could tell others (and herself) about who she was, thus avoiding a too painful engagement with the realities of her life. This supports Margaret’s contention that, for both her parents, “there was a lack of consciousness” involved in having so many children (285), and while the size of the family wasn’t itself the cause of the boys’ schizophrenia, it contributed to the dysfunctional dynamics.

“[I]n the postwar years, the dawn of a new era of American prosperity, many therapists had something new to worry about: mother who refused to behave like the mothers of a previous generation.”

The impulse to look to environment and upbringing as the cause of schizophrenia was in many ways progressive for its time; if nothing else, it pushed back against a eugenics movement that argued for the sterilization of people with hereditary “defects.” As this passage demonstrates, however, proponents of environmental theories weren’t immune to reactionary politics—in this case, about women’s “proper” societal role, which was a particular flashpoint at a time when domesticity and the nuclear family were so celebrated. Although hard evidence tying mothering style to schizophrenia was always lacking, the idea remained popular for decades, heightening the social pressure to conform to gender norms and (ironically) making mothers like Mimi more likely to respond to their children’s illness with harmful secrecy and repression: “If something seemed off about your child, the last thing you should do is tell a doctor about it” (37).

“The private and public faces of the family were sometimes hard for others to reconcile, too. Visiting their cousins in Queens, the boys seized every unsupervised moment to break every rule in the house […] Then, months later, the cousins would get Christmas cards of Don and Mimi and the kids, a saintly family tableau, everyone dressed perfectly in pajamas around a tree. The disconnect seemed strange to them, even then.” 

Years before any of the Galvin children had a psychotic break, Kolker notes a “disconnect” between the image the family presented to the world at large and the reality of life on Hidden Valley Road. This gap was in part the result of unrecognized warning signs of the boys’ later illness; Donald in particular had persistent social difficulties and problems relating to those around him. In a broader sense, the highly romanticized image of domestic life in postwar America made this disconnect almost inevitable; families like the Galvins could try to conform to the ideal but would inevitably fell short. Kolker thus implies that the Galvins were victims of a kind of symbolic, cultural schizophrenia in which dramatic splits between a family’s outer persona and inner world were commonplace.

“More than Don, she saw how her nose was pressed up against the windows of this world. She had no college education, and she and Don had no wealth.” 

Although their children’s schizophrenia played a pivotal role in derailing the Galvins’ “dream life” (57), Hidden Valley Road is also about how fragile the American dream always was. For many years, Don had struggled to advance in the military because of the preferential treatment given to those with social connections. Meanwhile, his relationship with Mimi difficult; Mimi was consistently frustrated by her husband’s choices and seeming lack of ambition, and Don had (according to Mimi) several affairs over the years. Finally, as the above passage notes, the Galvins were never full participants in high society, once again underscoring the limits of hard work and determination.

“She wanted nothing more than for Donald to right himself. How could she be opposed to the idea—the hope—that Donald might settle down, find direction in life, become predictable, grounded, successful, even happy? Wasn’t this how the story was supposed to go?” 

Mimi’s response to the news of Donald and Jean’s engagement is a good example of the way denial, in this case intertwined with the social pressures of midcentury American life, exacerbated the Galvin children’s condition. Deep down, Mimi knew that Donald hadn’t recovered enough from his prior breakdown to be thinking of marriage; what’s more, the couple’s differing opinions on whether to have children promised future conflict. Given the cultural expectations of the time, however, it was hard for Mimi (or Donald himself) to imagine Donald “righting himself” outside of the framework of the American dream: a nuclear family, a successful career, etc. Mimi and her husband deluded themselves about the likely outcome of Donald’s marriage, the stress of which would ultimately contribute to a far worse psychotic break than anything Donald had previously experienced.

“[H]e came away from his time with the Genains determined to prove that the wellspring of madness might not be nature or nurture, but a fateful combination of the two.”

David Rosenthal was among the first to put forward the idea that schizophrenia might stem from a combination of environmental and genetic factors. This certainly seems relevant to the Galvin family’s experience, since the brothers’ first psychotic breaks tended to follow close on the heels of some kind of change or upset: Donald’s after leaving for college and experiencing two breakups, Jim’s after marrying, Brian’s after a breakup, Peter’s after witnessing his father’s stroke, Matt’s after a head injury and enrollment in college, and Joe’s after problems at work and a breakup. 

“Donald told the doctor that for years he had not been himself at all, but rather a mirror of what other people wanted him to be. He said he made a practice of reading people’s facial expressions, gestures, and words for hints of the best way to react. […] It often seemed to Patterson that Donald was about to cry, but then gathered himself and stopped before the tears came.” 

Donald’s admissions to the psychiatrist in the weeks leading up to the attempted murder-suicide illustrate the way pressure to conform exacerbated the symptoms of schizophrenia for many of the Galvin children. Problems with social interaction and a sense of alienation from both the outer world and oneself are relatively common in schizophrenia, and Donald had been experiencing both for years. However, he was so determined to live up to his parents’ and society’s expectations that he kept these symptoms under tight control. This not only prevented him from getting help at a time when his condition might have been more manageable but perhaps also contributed to the violence with which his sickness ultimately surfaced; during this same appointment, the psychiatrist noted that Donald seemed to be “trying to keep the lid on something explosive inside of him” (79), implying that Donald’s longstanding efforts to suppress what he was experiencing only intensified his symptoms.

“Teasing Donald felt better than avoiding him, which drained them of all agency. Making Donald the brunt of their jokes gave them a sense of power over a situation they had no explanation for—and reassured them that whatever Donald was, he was not them.” 

For Donald’s siblings, much of the impulse to dehumanize him stemmed from their secret fear of ending up like him. It’s telling that the brother who first began calling Donald “Gookoid” was Jim, not just because the two had long been rivals, but also because Jim was, at that point, the only other Galvin experiencing symptoms of schizophrenia; for Jim in particular, the nickname and the teasing therefore served as a way to deny any commonality existed between himself and Donald.

“Both she and Don had taken to falconry because it made sense. Their children did not make sense. They had tried to instill procedures and routines to train children. But children aren’t falcons.”

Early in Hidden Valley Road, Kolker establishes that Mimi and Don saw their falconry hobby as akin to parenthood; the patience and discipline required to train the birds mirrored qualities they viewed as essential for childrearing, while the soaring flight of the birds themselves perhaps spoke to the couple’s lofty ambitions for their children’s future. For Mimi and Don, the boys’ development of schizophrenia was therefore all the more upsetting for the way it challenged this underlying philosophy. It wasn’t simply the boys’ symptoms that “made no sense”; rather, the very fact that they had become ill made no sense given what the couple thought they knew about the world—that hard work would inevitably pay off in good results. 

“There were many days when Lynn DeLisi felt she was in the wrong place at the wrong time—that she didn’t belong in science, and that she’d been foolish to think she ever did. But the worst might have been the day she was told she might be driving her own children crazy.” 

Of all the researchers and psychiatrists whose work Kolker discusses, DeLisi is perhaps the one whose life he follows most closely. This is in part because of her importance to the Galvins: it was DeLisi’s research that identified the SHANK2 mutation specific to their family. However, it’s also because her life story paralleled that of Mimi in certain respects. DeLisi was herself a working mother, so the idea that “bad” mothering—that is, mothering that didn’t conform to traditional gender norms—was to blame for schizophrenia was personal for her as it was for Mimi as well. In addition, DeLisi’s determination to identify the genetic roots of the disorder mirrored Mimi’s stubborn advocacy on behalf of her sons—first to secure treatment for them and later to ensure their experiences received scientific attention.

“This was a Watergate-style inquiry: The denial and suppression and cover-up of a problem were as bad as the problem itself.”

Michael’s time on the Farm, and particularly in the “Tumbler,” proved transformative. Michael had long had complaints about the environment in which he was raised; to his mind, the emphasis on order and conformity had as much to do with his brother’s sickness as anything (an idea that his own brush with psychiatric hospitalization solidified). This attitude is perhaps unfair to Don and Mimi, given what the book reveals about the role of heredity in mental illness. Nevertheless, there’s a kernel of truth to it, in the sense that the Galvins’ attempts to maintain a veneer of blissful family life undoubtedly made the situation worse, delaying intervention and contributing to a generally dysfunctional atmosphere at home. For this reason, Michael was particularly impressed by the Farm’s emphasis on thoroughly talking through problems rather than suppressing them.  

“She had to do something, to make some sort of gesture that would wipe away everything that had happened to her in the first thirteen years of her life.

‘Lindsay,’ Mary said.”

When Mary was admitted to Hotchkiss, she saw an opportunity to make a clean break with her past and her family. Thanks to the presence of another student named Mary Galvin, this reinvention of herself and her life extended even to her name. Lindsay would eventually reconsider the wisdom of trying to “wipe away” her childhood; memories of the trauma she had endured made this next to impossible, but even beyond that, Lindsay slowly came to empathize with the plight of several of her sick brothers. 

“What if the problem with schizophrenia patients wasn’t that they lacked the ability to respond to so much stimuli, but that they lacked the ability not to? What if their brains weren’t overloaded, but lacked inhibition—forced to reckon with everything that was coming their way, every second of the day?”

The distinction Kolker draws here had important implications for schizophrenia research. Prior to Freedman, scientists interested in sensory gating had largely assumed that people with schizophrenia were unable to cope with large amounts of information in the way that a psychologically healthy person would. Freedman, by contrast, speculated that the “normal” brain actually filtered out much of the information it received, whereas those with schizophrenia did not—an idea that led him to design his double-click tests and ultimately identify CHRNA7 as a contributor to schizophrenia. For Kolker, the distinction is also symbolically important, in the sense that it calls into question the idea that people with schizophrenia are uniquely detached from reality; whether through the automatic processes described here or through more elaborate forms of self-deception, most humans operate at a certain remove from the real world.

“This was her [Margaret’s] chance to have a new family.”

Growing up, Margaret felt that family was either something that was foisted on her against her will or something that was absent in any meaningful sense. The presence of so many siblings made her feel overlooked even before she was sent to live with the Garys—an event she saw as “an expulsion, or exile” (157)—and what attention she had received from her brothers was often unwelcome, deepening her sense that that they were strangers to her. Consequently, Margaret spent much of her early adulthood searching for an escape from her family of origin and a family she could truly feel she belonged to; one result of this was her disastrous first marriage. 

“But there are all sorts of coping mechanisms, some more self-limiting than others. Lindsay was a tough kid, donning a mask of self-reliance and stubbornness that served her well through childhood, and then eventually that mask fused to her real face. The question was how well that mask was still working for her now: hypervigilant, uncomfortable with failure, terrified to present herself to others as anything less than perfect.” 

The idea that a coping mechanism might be helpful at one time and not at another is in keeping with the way Kolker depicts recovery from trauma. In Hidden Valley Road, healing is a complex, non-linear, and deeply personal process; what’s right for one person may not be right for another, or even for that same person once they’re in a different place in life. As a result, while Kolker suggests that Lindsay’s façade of toughness had, by the time she began therapy, become more of a hindrance than a help, he avoids passing judgment on her for developing that persona. 

“At home all day now, Don collected maps of Alaska and sat for hours planning expeditions to find goshawks with his old falconry friends. The plans were a fantasy. […] But Don talked on the phone with those friends, and wrote them cards and letters, holding on to the idea of falconry as a shorthand for the man he’d been, envisioning himself in the ranks of the kings and ornithologists and naturalists who turned the taming of a wild bird into something sublime. Without that, he might have had nothing at all.” 

Don’s retreat into memory and “fantasy” is just one of several moments in the book in which generally healthy individuals harbor some form of delusion. In many instances, including this one, this kind of self-deception is a coping mechanism; for Don, admitting that he was no longer physically capable of his old hobby would have been painful and would likely also have called to mind all the other ways his life had unraveled. Kolker illustrates a common response to trauma while highlighting a point of connection (and perhaps sympathy) between people with schizophrenia and those without.

“[W]hen it came to her brother’s treatment, Lindsay believed […] that there was a piece of the puzzle missing, and that what her therapist had given her—the chance to tell her own story and to recover—had never been made available to the boys on Hidden Valley Road.” 

Although Lindsay’s attempt to keep Peter out of any sort of psychiatric institution ultimately failed, her assessment of the shortcomings of traditional psychiatry was generally accurate. In many ways, doctors and hospitals had treated the Galvin brothers as the problem. Peter, for instance, had gained a reputation for noncompliance, but there never seemed to be any attempt to ascertain why he was acting the way he was, or to find a way to work with him; instead, decisions about his treatment were entirely in the hands of those around him. This was both dehumanizing and misguided; Peter’s gratitude when given the chance to air his concerns in joint therapy with Lindsay suggests he would probably have responded well to a more collaborative approach to care.

“What if post-traumatic stress disorder from the war had seeped into everything their father did before their childhoods? Did he somehow pass along his own traumas to the boys? And the most troubling question of all: Could Don have been the source of the violent streak in the family that culminated in what Donald did to Jean, and Brian to Noni—and Jim to them?” 

Although sympathetic to the many ways people may respond to trauma, Hidden Valley Road does suggest that unacknowledged trauma tends to compound on itself. When Mimi revealed Don’s history of psychiatric hospitalization to her daughters, they began to wonder whether their father, who virtually never talked about his wartime service, might have parented his children in a way that was shaped by its trauma; Don was, for instance, disconnected from the daily goings-on of his family in a way consistent with PTSD. Mimi was also dealing with unresolved trauma, which Margaret at least saw as intertwined with her own: “She began to think that Mimi hadn’t been capable of seeing the sexual abuse going on right under her own nose because she, Mimi, had never really acknowledged her own abuse” (227).  

“In 1997, Freedman identified CHRNA7 as the first gene ever to be definitively associated with schizophrenia.”

Freedman’s discovery of the role CHRNA7 played in schizophrenia was pivotal for several reasons. It constituted concrete proof that heredity was partly responsible for schizophrenia. Based on what Freedman now knew about CHRNA7’s function, he developed a drug that produced nicotine-like effects in subjects’ brains, and, when progress on that front stalled, investigated the effects of choline supplementation during pregnancy. The latter study found that higher levels of choline did in fact translate into infants with fewer sensory and social difficulties, which suggests that Freedman might have found a way to prevent some cases of schizophrenia from ever developing.

“Jim Galvin had been in and out of the emergency room at Penrose Hospital in Colorado Springs for weeks complaining of headaches and tingling in his extremities. The staff sent him home again and again, writing off what he was saying as signs of his usual paranoia.” 

The circumstances of Jim Galvin’s death are a prime example of society’s dehumanization of people with schizophrenia. Jim’s diagnosis ought to have raised alarm bells since heart failure is a well-documented side effect of long-term antipsychotic use. Kolker, by contrast, works to elicit the reader’s sympathy even for Jim: a man who abused his younger siblings for years. Whatever Jim’s crimes, Kolker implies, he didn’t deserve to die the way he did.

“And so I was crushed […] Because I thought I was such a good mother. I baked a cake and a pie every night. Or at least had Jell-O with whipped cream.” 

Mimi’s description of the shame she felt being blamed for her children’s sickness is notable for several reasons. The Galvin parents (and Mimi in particular) shouldered an unfair amount of blame for their sons’ schizophrenia; theories about “schizophrenogenic” mothers were generally “informed not by experimentation and verification, but by anecdote and bias” (142), and yet Mimi often felt, in her words, “crucified” by the medical establishment when seeking help for her sons (284). At the same time, Mimi’s definition of being a “good mother” is significant, in that it has more to do with maintaining appearances and following an established set of guidelines than anything emotional or personal. Mimi’s faith in these values was so strong that even here, she seems in disbelief that her model parenting did not ensure that her children would grow up happy and healthy.  

“As a child and for years into my young adulthood, I deeply wished that my brothers with mental illness would just die. But that was a gut-wrenching wish—it tore at me.” 

Lindsay’s words here lend insight into her decision to take an active role in her brothers’ care. For Lindsay, part of what was traumatic about her childhood was the anger it inspired in her. She realized that the only way for her to heal from her past was to approach her brothers from a position of sympathy, and in an effort to help them improve.

“Anti-psychiatry, in its latest incarnation, has become a movement concerned with legitimizing and normalizing the concept of hallucinations—a Hearing Voices Movement, not unlike the movements to legitimize deafness and blindness not as disabilities but as differences. Neurodiversity—a term used more often for other conditions, like autism—is a concept that was never considered when treating any Galvin brother decades ago.”

Kolker mentions the anti-psychiatry movement, which was in its infancy around the same time the Galvin brothers were becoming sick, in more than one chapter of Hidden Valley Road. Although Kolker is skeptical of anti-psychiatry's more extreme claims—namely, that what we call “mental illness” is actually just nonconformity to prevailing social norms—he implies that there is much to be learned from the movement, beginning with its normalization of symptoms like hallucinations. This is important, Kolker suggests, both because there are cases where medical intervention does more harm than good, and because it avoids the dehumanization that medicalization often carries with it; conceiving of mental illnesses and their symptoms as “differences” rather than “disabilities” allows people with those symptoms to retain the agency and dignity that traditional psychiatry sometimes denies them.