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Hidden Valley Road
Inside the Mind of an American Family
Robert Kolker’s narrative nonfiction account follows Don and Mimi Galvin and their twelve children, a Colorado family in which six of the ten sons were diagnosed with schizophrenia. The book examines how severe mental illness altered relationships within the household while exposing the other children to instability, secrecy, violence, abuse, and uneven burdens of care. Alongside this intimate history, Kolker traces changing explanations of schizophrenia—from theories that blamed family dynamics, especially mothers, to biological and genetic models that treated families such as the Galvins as vital research subjects. Their participation in psychiatric studies links private suffering to a much larger scientific effort. The result is both a family chronicle and a history of modern psychiatry, attentive to the distance between scientific promise and what patients and relatives experience in everyday life.
