Hidden Valley Road: Inside the Mind of an American Family

The tragic tale of a mid-century American family of twelve children, six of whom were identified as having schizophrenia, which emerged as science's greatest hope for understanding the illness.

It seemed as if Don and Mimi Galvin were living the American dream. Don's employment in the Air Force took them to Colorado after World War II, and their twelve children—the eldest born in 1945 and the youngest in 1965—perfectly spanned the baby boom. The Galvin family put a lot of effort into playing their roles in the established screenplay of that era, which called for ambition, hard labour, upward mobility, and household peace. However, the scenario behind the scenes was very different: covert abuse, unexpected, frightening violence, and psychological disintegration. Six of the 10 Galvin boys received schizophrenia diagnoses one after the other by the middle of the 1970s. How could one family experience all of this?

The events that transpired within the Hidden Valley Road home were so remarkable that the Galvin family was among the first to be examined by the National Institute of Mental Health. From the age of institutionalisation, lobotomy, and the schizophrenogenic mother to the hunt for genetic markers for the illness, their narrative provides a shadow history of the science of schizophrenia, all the while taking place in the midst of intense debates on the nature of the illness itself. Unbeknownst to the Galvin family, DNA samples from them have influenced decades of ongoing genetic study, providing avenues for future generations to be treated, predicted, and even completely eradicated from the illness.

Bestselling and multiple award-winning author Robert Kolker reveals one family's remarkable heritage of pain, love, and hope with compassion and clarity.