4.5 stars

My favorite nonfiction read of the year, so far!

I learned more about schizophrenia and the search for a cause, treatment, or cure, which was really interesting.

The Galvin family was incredibly dysfunctional, even apart from the mental illness, which was sad. There is a lot of sexual abuse recorded.

Note: There's some profanity, and a brief reference to evolutionary theory as fact. The sexual abuse of children is referenced very frequently, and was sometimes a bit too detailed, in my opinion. ( )

Hidden valley road.
This book is extremely interesting and very well written. It describes the lives of the Galvin family from Colorado Springs, Colorado. Mimi and Don Galvin had 12 children, 10 boys and 2 girls between 1945 and 1965. Six of the boys developed schizophrenia in their late teens and they became the perfect laboratory for studying the effects of this disease on the brain and the development of drugs and procedure to treat the disease.
Family life for the Galvin was full of hard work, hockey, music, ballet, socializing and achievement. Mimi worked very tirelessly at raising her children and maintaining a social status within the community. Don became the director of a national foundation which allowed him to hobnob with the rich and famous. Behind the scenes, their family was disintegrating. Donald, the eldest was the first son to exhibit signs of schizophrenia. Five others followed. All were patients at the Pueblo Medical Hospital in Colorado.
Mary and Margaret and the sons at home felt abandoned and neglected by parents who were preoccupied by their sick boys or their social life. The girls were molested by older brother Jim and the boys were unsupervised as teenagers.

A parallel narrative to the family story is a history of psychiatry and mental illness, whether it is caused by nature or nurture. As the decades pass, new technology and the human genome project allows for greater research and analysis into the far reaches of the brain. Finding the right gene and developing the right pharmaceuticals are not quite there. ( )

Hidden Valley Road isn’t a book to judge by its cover. The photo on its front shows a family of fourteen - Don and Mimi Galvin and their twelve children - lined up on a staircase without a hint of the roller coaster ride their lives would become. Robert Kolker balances the story of this family and the six boys in it who went on to develop schizophrenia, with a well‑written account of the disorder, the theories about its cause, and the search for effective treatments. One thing in it that struck me was the idea that schizophrenia might be part of a neurodiversity spectrum along with autism and bipolar disorder. There is so much to unpack in this I know I’ll be thinking about it and rereading the parts I underlined for some time to come. ( )

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. ( )

This almost unbelievable saga of a family with twelve children, six of whom are afflicted with schizophrenia, is almost as important a clinical study as The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks. The main question for me is: why on earth would you choose to have so many children? Even under the best of circumstances, without the brain disease, there is the fact that no child under those conditions ever gets enough attention, affection, and love; and here, since the girls who would have been made to be backup caretakers don't come along in the birth order until last, mother Mimi Galvin is wholly responsible for this entire family's every need, with the exception of financial, where husband Don labors in an Air Force job that is unfulfilling for him. As each of the six boys' disorders come to the surface in their late teens, daily life is a series of brutal beatings and competition between the boys and sexual molestation of the girls by one of the brothers. The book chronicles hard-won advances in medical research, which come mostly too late for the six boys, and treatment is still no guarantee of improvement, no less a cure. What's a parent to do? Avoid creating massive families where no one is safe or happy. ( )