Read Hidden Valley Road: Inside the Mind of an American Family Online
Authors: Robert Kolker
Hidden Valley Road
is a work of nonfiction drawing from hundreds of hours of interviews with every living member of the Galvin family (including Mimi Galvin, before her death in 2017), as well as dozens of friends, neighbors, teachers, therapists, caregivers, colleagues, relatives, and researchers. No scenes have been invented. All dialogue was either witnessed and recorded by the author or based on published accounts or the recollections of sources who were present at the time.
Additional resources were used to assemble the family narrative—including, most notably, extensive interviews with the schizophrenia researchers Lynn DeLisi, Robert Freedman, and Stefan McDonough; all available medical records for the Galvin brothers and Don Galvin; Don’s military service records from the Navy and Air Force; personal correspondence written by Mimi and Don; a series of brief recorded interviews with Mimi, conducted by her daughter Margaret in 2003 and 2008; and several entries from Margaret’s personal diaries and autobiographical essays. The text itself makes it clear when any of these sources are being utilized.
For all material requiring further citation—including all passages and chapters about the science of schizophrenia, genetics, and psychopharmacology—notes are provided below.
Epigraph
:
Charles McGrath, “Attention, Please: Anne Tyler Has Something to Say,”
New York Times,
July 5, 2018.
Marshall Field, Oscar Wilde, and Henry Ward Beecher
:
Sprague,
Newport in the Rockies.
Don got his hands on a copy
:
Husam al-Dawlah Timur Mirza,
The Baz-nama-yi Nasiri: A Persian Treatise on Falconry
, trans. Douglas C. Phillott (London: B. Quaritch, 1908).
All descriptions of Daniel Paul Schreber’s illness are from his memoir,
Memoirs of My Nervous Illness
.
King Saul
:
Freedman,
The Madness Within Us,
5.
Joan of Arc
:
Ibid.
Kraepelin used the term
dementia praecox
: Arieti,
Interpretation of Schizophrenia,
10.
Kraepelin believed that dementia praecox was caused by a “toxin”
:
McAuley,
The Concept of Schizophrenia,
35, 27.
Eugen Bleuler created the term
schizophrenia:
Gottesman and Wolfgram,
Schizophrenia Genesis,
14–15; DeLisi,
101 Questions & Answers About Schizophrenia: Painful Minds,
xxiii.
When Sigmund Freud finally cracked open Schreber’s memoir
:
Bair,
Jung: A Biography,
149.
he had never thought it was worth the trouble to put any of them on the analyst’s couch
:
Thomas H. McGlashan, “Psychosis as a Disorder of Reduced Cathectic Capacity: Freud’s Analysis of the Schreber Case Revisited,”
Schizophrenia Bulletin
35, no. 3 (May 1, 2009): 476–81.
“a kind of revelation”
:
The Freud/Jung Letters,
214F (October 1, 1910).
“director of a mental hospital”
:
Ibid., 187F (April 22, 1910).
Freud’s
Psycho-Analytic Notes
: Reprinted in Freud,
Complete Psychological Works,
Vol. 12.
psychotic delusions were little more than waking dreams
:
Lothane,
In Defense of Schreber,
340, cited in Smith,
Muses, Madmen, and Prophets,
198.
All the same symbols and metaphors
:
The Freud/Jung Letters,
214F (October 1, 1910).
a fear of castration
:
Ibid., 218F (October 31, 1910).
“Don’t forget that Schreber’s father was a doctor”
:
Ibid.
“uproariously funny” and “brilliantly written”
:
Ibid., 243J (March 19, 1911), cited by Karen Bryce Funt, “From Memoir to Case History: Schreber, Freud and Jung,”
Mosaic: A Journal for the Interdisciplinary Study of Literature
20, no. 4 (1987): 97–115.
Jung fundamentally disagreed with him
:
Karen Funt, “From Memoir to Case History”; and Zvi Lothane, “The Schism Between Freud and Jung over Schreber: Its Implications for Method and Doctrine,”
International Forum of Psychoanalysis
6, no. 2 (1997): 103–15.
sparring about this on and off for years
:
The Freud/Jung Letters,
83J (April 18, 1908) and 11F (January 1, 1907).
“In my view the concept of libido”
:
Ibid., 282J (November 14, 1911).
Jung made that same case again and again
:
Ibid., 287J (December 11, 1911).
“Your technique of treating your pupils”
:
Ibid., 338J (December 18, 1912).
“cannot be explained solely by the loss of erotic interest”
:
Jung,
Jung Contra Freud,
39–40.
“He went terribly wrong”
:
Bair,
Jung: A Biography,
149.
schizophrenia affects an estimated one in one hundred people
:
Most available analyses of the prevalence of schizophrenia drift around this one percent figure. One recent example: Jonna Perälä, Jaana Suvisaari, Samuli I. Saarni, Kimmo Kuoppasalmi, Erkki Isometsä, Sami Pirkola, Timo Partonen, et al., “Lifetime Prevalence of Psychotic and Bipolar I Disorders in a General Population,”
Archives of General Psychiatry
64, no. 1 (January 2007): 19–28.
A more nuanced breakdown of the estimates follows, from Michael J. Owen, Akira Sawa, and Preben B. Mortensen, “Schizophrenia,”
Lancet
(London, England) 388, no. 10039 (July 2, 2016): 86–97: “Schizophrenia occurs worldwide, and for decades it was generally thought to have a uniform lifetime morbid risk of 1% across time, geography, and sex. The implication is either that environmental factors are not important in conferring risk or that the relevant exposures are ubiquitous across all populations studied. This view of uniform risk was efficiently dismantled only in 2008 in a series of meta-analyses by McGrath and colleagues [
Epidemiologic Reviews
30 (2008): 67–76]. They provided central estimates of an incidence per 100,000 population per year of roughly 15 in men and 10 in women, a point prevalence of 4.6 per 1000, and a lifetime morbid risk of around 0.7%. These estimates were based on fairly conservative diagnostic criteria; when broad criteria—including other psychotic disorders such as delusional disorder, brief psychotic disorder, and psychosis not otherwise specified—were applied, the rates were higher by 2–3 times.”
a third of all the psychiatric hospital beds in the United States
:
“U.S. Health Official Puts Schizophrenia Costs at $65 Billion.” Comments by Richard Wyatt, M.D., chief of neuropsychiatry, National Institute of Mental Health, at a meeting of the American Psychiatric Association. Available online at the Schizophrenia homepage (
http://www.schizophrenia.com/news/costs1.html
), May 9, 1996.
about 40 percent of adults
:
NIMH statistic, cited in McFarling, Usha Lee, “A Journey Through Schizophrenia from Researcher to Patient and Back,”
STAT,
June 14, 2016.
One out of every twenty cases of schizophrenia ends in suicide
:
Kayhee Hor and Mark Taylor, “Suicide and Schizophrenia: A Systematic Review of Rates and Risk Factors,”
Journal of Psychopharmacology
(Oxford, England) 24, no. 4, supplement (November 2010): 81–90.
Jacques Lacan, the French psychoanalyst
:
Jacques Lacan, “On a Question Preliminary to Any Possible Treatment of Psychosis,”
Ecrits: A Selection,
trans. Alan Sheridan (New York: W. W. Norton, 1977), 200–201, cited by Martin Wallen, “Body Linguistics in Schreber’s ‘Memoirs’ and De Quincey’s ‘Confessions,’ ”
Mosaic: A Journal for the Interdisciplinary Study of Literature
24, no. 2 (1991): 93–108.
By the 1970s, Michel Foucault
:
Foucault,
Discipline and Punish,
194; and Noam Chomsky and Michel Foucault,
The Chomsky-Foucault Debate,
33.
“Schizophrenia is a disease of theories”
:
Author’s interview with Edward Shorter.
Frieda Fromm-Reichmann
biographical information and Chestnut Lodge historical information, except where specified, is drawn from Fromm-Reichmann,
Psychoanalysis and Psychotherapy,
Foreword by Edith Weigert, v–x.
the young man who assaulted Fromm-Reichmann
:
Fromm-Reichmann, “Remarks on the Philosophy of Mental Disorder” (1946),
Psychoanalysis and Psychotherapy,
20.
the man who kept silent for weeks
:
John S. Kafka, “Chestnut Lodge and the Psychoanalytic Approach to Psychosis,”
Journal of the American Psychoanalytic Association
59, no. 1 (February 1, 2011): 27–47.
the woman who threw stones
:
Fromm-Reichmann, “Problems of Therapeutic Management in a Psychoanalytic Hospital” (1947),
Psychoanalysis and Psychotherapy,
147.
anyone who said differently might not care enough about the people they were treating
:
Fromm-Reichmann, “Transference Problems in Schizophrenics” (1939),
Psychoanalysis and Psychotherapy,
119.
the so-called “gas cure”
:
Heinz E. Lehmann and Thomas A. Ban, “The History of the Psychopharmacology of Schizophrenia,”
The Canadian Journal of Psychiatry
42, no. 2 (March 1997): 152–62.
Insulin shock therapy
:
W. C. Shipley and F. Kant, “The Insulin-Shock and Metrazol Treatments of Schizophrenia, with Emphasis on Psychological Aspects,”
Psychological Bulletin
37, no. 5 (1940): 259–84.
Then came the lobotomy
:
McAuley,
The Concept of Schizophrenia,
132.
Kraepelin…turned up little to nothing
:
Gottesman,
Schizophrenia Genesis,
82.
Ernst Rüdin, became a major figure in the eugenics movement
:
Martin Brüne, “On Human Self-Domestication, Psychiatry, and Eugenics,”
Philosophy, Ethics, and Humanities in Medicine
2, no. 1 (October 5, 2007): 21.
Kallmann called for sterilizing even “nonaffected carriers”
:
Müller-Hill,
Murderous Science,
11, 31, 42–43, 70.
“Every schizophrenic has some dim notion”
:
Fromm-Reichmann, “Transference Problems in Schizophrenics” (1939),
Psychoanalysis and Psychotherapy,
118.
a new vanguard of American psychoanalysts soon embraced
:
Silvano Arieti, “A Psychotherapeutic Approach to Schizophrenia,” in Kemali, Bartholini, and Richter, eds.,
Schizophrenia Today,
245.
Joanne Greenberg
:
Greenberg,
I Never Promised You a Rose Garden
.
“There were other powers”
:
Ibid., 83–84.
“The sick are all so afraid”
:
Ibid., 46.
“Many parents said—even thought”
:
Ibid., 33.
“the dangerous influence of the undesirable domineering mother”
:
Fromm-Reichmann, “Notes on the Mother Role in the Family Group” (1940),
Psychoanalysis and Psychotherapy,
291–92.
It was “mainly” this sort of mother
:
Fromm-Reichmann, “Notes on the Development of Treatment of Schizophrenics by Psychoanalytic Psychotherapy” (1948),
Psychoanalysis and Psychotherapy,
163–64.
“a perversion of the maternal instinct”
:
Rosen,
Direct Analysis,
97, 101, cited by Carol Eadie Hartwell, “The Schizophrenogenic Mother Concept in American Psychiatry,”
Psychiatry
59, no. 3 (August 1996): 274–97.
“American women are very often the leaders”
:
Fromm-Reichmann, “Notes on the Mother Role in the Family Group.”
“cold,” “perfectionistic,” “anxious,” “overcontrolling,” and “restrictive”
:
John Clausen and Melvin Kohn, “Social Relations and Schizophrenia: A Research Report and a Perspective,” in Don D. Jackson,
The Etiology of Schizophrenia,
305.
“prototype of the middle class Anglo-Saxon American Woman”
:
Suzanne Reichard and Carl Tillman, “Patterns of Parent-Child Relationships in Schizophrenia,”
Psychiatry
13, no. 2 (May 1950): 253, cited by Hartwell, “The Schizophrenogenic Mother Concept in American Psychiatry.”
the “double-bind”
:
Gregory Bateson, Don D. Jackson, Jay Haley, and John Weakland, “Toward a Theory of Schizophrenia,”
Behavioral Science
1, no. 4 (January 1, 1956): 251–64.
These descriptions seemed to lack a certain coherence
:
Hartwell, “The Schizophrenogenic Mother Concept in American Psychiatry,” 286.
“became dangerous figures to males”
:
Lidz,
Schizophrenia and the Family,
98, 83, cited by Hartwell, “The Schizophrenogenic Mother Concept in American Psychiatry.”
Geological information about the Woodmen Valley
derives from John I. Kitch and Betsy B. Kitch,
Woodmen Valley: Stage Stop to Suburb
(Palmer Lake, Colo.: Filter Press, 1970).
“a wastebasket diagnostic classification”
:
McNally,
A Critical History of Schizophrenia,
153–54.
The second edition of the DSM, published in 1968
:
Seymour S. Kety, ed., “What Is Schizophrenia?,”
Schizophrenia Bulletin
8, no. 4 (1982): 597–600.
Except where noted
, all material on NIMH’s study of the Genain family is from Rosenthal,
The Genain Quadruplets
. Specific citations from that text follow.
Every bit as consequential…as the case of Daniel Paul Schreber
:
Irving I. Gottesman, “Theory of Schizophrenia,”
The British Medical Journal
1, no. 5427 (1965): 114.
Researchers in Europe and America conducted and published many major twin studies
:
Mads G. Henriksen, Julie Nordgaard, and Lennart B. Jansson, “Genetics of Schizophrenia: Overview of Methods, Findings and Limitations,”
Frontiers in Human Neuroscience
11 (2017).
1928
:
H. Luxenburger, “Vorläufiger Bericht über psychiatrische Serienuntersuchungen an Zwillingen,”
Zeitschrift für die gesamte Neurologie und Psychiatrie
116 (1928), 297–326.
1946
:
F. J. Kallmann, “The Genetic Theory of Schizophrenia; an Analysis of 691 Schizophrenic Twin Index Families,”
American Journal of Psychiatry
103 (1946), 309–22.
1953
:
Eliot Slater, “Psychotic and Neurotic Illnesses in Twins” (1953), in Slater,
Man, Mind, and Heredity,
12–124.
“When one first learns”
:
Rosenthal,
The Genain Quadruplets,
7.
Nora was the firstborn
:
Ibid., 362.
Iris, meanwhile
:
Ibid., 16–17.
Hester was quiet
:
Ibid.
Myra had a more “sparkling
” personality:
Ibid., 364.
the girls’ mother had tried to separate Nora and Myra from Iris and Hester
:
Ibid., 73.
“It is easy to see that”
:
Ibid., 567.
the “extreme situation
” concept:
Ibid., 548.
“an atmosphere of fear, suspicion and distrust”
:
Ibid., 566.
“We must be more circumspect yet more precise in our theory-building”
:
Ibid., 579.