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Hidden Valley Road: Inside the Mind of an American Family
An Oprah's Book Club pick and #1 New York Times bestseller, Hidden Valley Road is the true medical detective story of an American family who became science's greatest hope in the quest to understand schizophrenia.
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Community Reviews
A honest, empathetic account of the Galvin family. Extraordinary resilience by the two sisters who advocated to preserve their family history. Having relatives with schizophrenia, I have a newfound understanding of the disease. The hope of research and medicine and mental health counseling is indelible.
Fascinating account of one family who was just decimated by schizophrenia. Don and Mimi Galvin had 12 (!) children and had dreams of raising an all-American family. But 6 of the 12 ended up with schizophrenia, leading to violence, stress, and destruction of the family unit.
The book goes between the heartbreaking chronology of each new case of a brother becoming schizophrenic to descriptions of the studies that have been done in the medical-psychiatric-scientific community to try to understand it, treat it, and hopefully prevent it. There's so much we still don't understand about how the brain works.
The book goes between the heartbreaking chronology of each new case of a brother becoming schizophrenic to descriptions of the studies that have been done in the medical-psychiatric-scientific community to try to understand it, treat it, and hopefully prevent it. There's so much we still don't understand about how the brain works.
Given my interest and career in forensic psych, schizophrenia is obviously a disease that I am likely to work with often in the future. This book was a really nice look into the world of research into and development of the disease known as schizophrenia, but more than that, I really enjoyed the personal story of how schizophrenia has affected the Galvin family and how they subsequently became involved in genetic research. I really can't imagine what it would be like to grow up in a family like that, and learning about all the hidden abuses and denial in the family was sobering and painful.
I found myself incredibly frustrated by the parents in the book, and although I also knew that they were very much a product of their time in terms of understanding schizophrenia and all that, the fact that they even chose to have twelve children without being able to handle them all felt incredibly irresponsible, schizophrenia aside. It sounds like there was a lot of physical violence and fighting in the family even before any psychotic symptoms showed themselves, and the younger children were pretty much neglected because there were so many of them. It made me pretty angry at the parents - and of course, once the brother became mentally ill, the parents just gave up on taking care of the other children mostly completely.
Even years later, when it came out that some of the brothers had been sexually abusive, the parents just sort of denied things or tried to wave it off. It seems like even in the years before schizophrenia, everyone was always beating each other up, bullying each other, etc. and not just in a typical sibling manner. There is a lot of discussion about the diathesis-stress model of schizophrenia, and although genetics clearly played a role here, I wonder if the children had grown up in less stressful family situations, if they would have ended up developing schizophrenia.
I also took some issue with the discussion of abuse (physical and sexual) to be a sort of result of Jim's schizophrenic symptoms. There is actually research that shows that most people with schizophrenia are the victims of crime rather than the perpetuators of it, and most people with schizophrenia obviously don't become child molesters. It really felt like the author was conflating the sexual abuse with Jim's psychosis, and I don't know how true that is. It feels like a disservice to the schizophrenia community to equate those things.
It appears that the family were largely disturbed in sort of antisocial ways to begin with, what with the beating up of others, violence (I think the older brother killed a cat or something which is in the antisocial triad moreso than schizophrenia), and other red flags, none of which are inherently schizophrenic. Given their many demonstrations of antisocial and oppositional behavior, I would be very curious about whether they were or could be diagnosed with some sort of personality disorder - and how much the chaotic environment played into it.
This book is one that really made me think about the impact of nature vs. nurture throughout the entire reading. How much did the family "cause" the brothers' illness (or at least contribute), and how much could not have been avoided? Could they have been helped? How much were the parents to blame? If they had only had two or three children, would they have grown up to avoid mental illness (or at least illness to this severity)? I was pretty bummed out at the end of the book just because we're left with so many questions and no answers except for the people left behind to suffer, both the patients and their family members who were affected by the illness just the same.
I found myself incredibly frustrated by the parents in the book, and although I also knew that they were very much a product of their time in terms of understanding schizophrenia and all that, the fact that they even chose to have twelve children without being able to handle them all felt incredibly irresponsible, schizophrenia aside. It sounds like there was a lot of physical violence and fighting in the family even before any psychotic symptoms showed themselves, and the younger children were pretty much neglected because there were so many of them. It made me pretty angry at the parents - and of course, once the brother became mentally ill, the parents just gave up on taking care of the other children mostly completely.
Even years later, when it came out that some of the brothers had been sexually abusive, the parents just sort of denied things or tried to wave it off. It seems like even in the years before schizophrenia, everyone was always beating each other up, bullying each other, etc. and not just in a typical sibling manner. There is a lot of discussion about the diathesis-stress model of schizophrenia, and although genetics clearly played a role here, I wonder if the children had grown up in less stressful family situations, if they would have ended up developing schizophrenia.
I also took some issue with the discussion of abuse (physical and sexual) to be a sort of result of Jim's schizophrenic symptoms. There is actually research that shows that most people with schizophrenia are the victims of crime rather than the perpetuators of it, and most people with schizophrenia obviously don't become child molesters. It really felt like the author was conflating the sexual abuse with Jim's psychosis, and I don't know how true that is. It feels like a disservice to the schizophrenia community to equate those things.
It appears that the family were largely disturbed in sort of antisocial ways to begin with, what with the beating up of others, violence (I think the older brother killed a cat or something which is in the antisocial triad moreso than schizophrenia), and other red flags, none of which are inherently schizophrenic. Given their many demonstrations of antisocial and oppositional behavior, I would be very curious about whether they were or could be diagnosed with some sort of personality disorder - and how much the chaotic environment played into it.
This book is one that really made me think about the impact of nature vs. nurture throughout the entire reading. How much did the family "cause" the brothers' illness (or at least contribute), and how much could not have been avoided? Could they have been helped? How much were the parents to blame? If they had only had two or three children, would they have grown up to avoid mental illness (or at least illness to this severity)? I was pretty bummed out at the end of the book just because we're left with so many questions and no answers except for the people left behind to suffer, both the patients and their family members who were affected by the illness just the same.
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