Hidden Valley Road: Inside the Mind of an American Family

Don Galvin was born in New York City in 1924 to middle-class, Catholic parents. He met his future wife Mimi when he was just 14, and the two married in 1944, shortly after Mimi discovered she was pregnant. The couple would eventually have 12 children together. Meanwhile, Don transferred out of the Navy to the Air Force, attaining the rank of colonel before taking a civilian position as “a sort of domestic diplomat” overseeing the Federation of Rocky Mountain States (56).

Although charming and charismatic in company—his nickname was “Romeo,” and he allegedly had several affairs over the course of their marriage—Don was reserved and scholarly by nature. Between his career, his academic interests, and his passion for falconry, Don was a good-natured but somewhat detached figure in his children’s lives: “Don, when he was at home, was the good cop, a subdued presence” (30). The fact that this left Mimi in charge of day-to-day discipline—something she would later be criticized by both doctors and her own children for—likely contributed to the tension between the two.

The last few decades of Don’s life were marked by health problems that left him less equipped than ever to take an active role in the family. In 1975, he suffered a stroke that forced him into early retirement and left him with ongoing memory problems; by the 1990s, he was also struggling with heart disease and cancer. As Lindsay would later discover, he also received ECT treatments for depression in the period leading up to his 2004 death. Nevertheless, the relationship between Don’s struggles with mental illness and his sons’ schizophrenia remains unclear.

Donald Galvin, born in 1945, is the oldest of Don and Mimi’s 12 children. While young, he shared many of his father’s interests, and as he grew older, it was generally expected that he would follow in Don’s footsteps:

When he wasn’t parachuting out of C-47s with the Air Explorer Scouts or studying classical guitar or practicing judo or playing hockey or rappelling down cliffs with his father, the Galvins’ oldest son, Donald, was a track star and all-state guard and tackle […] Donald was, by many measures, his father’s son—handsome, athletic, popular (43).

Even in high school, however, there were warning signs: Donald struggled academically, had difficulty connecting with others, and was prone to lapses in self-control during which he could be violent, particularly with his younger siblings.

During and after college, two breakups (including one with his wife, Jean) led to a gradual deterioration in Donald’s mental state; he experienced at least two psychotic breaks and was diagnosed as schizophrenic. Since then, Donald has been in and out of psychiatric institutions and on a variety of neuroleptic drugs. Many of his delusions are religious in nature, which his mother attributed to the fact that a priest molested him as a teen. He also tends to see himself in grandiose terms, which perhaps speaks to the pressure he felt while young to live up to his father’s reputation: “In all of his stories, Donald seem[s] heavily invested in being the head of the family—the role designed for him before he got sick, and the role he cannot take on now except in his most Freudian daydreams” (291). Nevertheless, traces of his former personality remain; he continues to enjoy birdwatching and the opera, for example. As of 2017, Donald was 72 and living in an assisted living facility.

Jim, born in 1947, was the second of Don and Mimi Galvin’s children. He was rebellious from a young age, partly in reaction to his elder brother Donald’s all-American aura; Jim “embrac[e]d the James Dean and Marlon Brando spirit of the time—the leather jacket, the fast car, the defiant snarl” (45). More than anything, he fiercely resented Donald’s privileged position as the firstborn son and spent years physically brawling with him.

Consequently, when Donald began showing signs of mental illness, Jim seized on the opportunity to prove his own superiority. Jim was by this point married and working, and he made himself useful to his parents by offering to take care of their younger children while they were busy dealing with Donald’s problems. However, Jim’s own family life was troubled from the start; he had affairs, abused his wife, and was increasingly experiencing schizophrenic symptoms of his own, including auditory hallucinations. Worst of all, he sexually abused at least three of his younger siblings—Peter, Margaret, and Mary—for years. When Mary (now Lindsay, and an adult) finally revealed the abuse, it led to Jim’s expulsion from the family. His own wife had by this point left him as well, making Mimi his only real human contact in the final years of his life. Jim died alone in 2001 of heart failure, likely worsened his drug regimen. 

John, the third of the Galvins’ children, was born in 1949. He grew up quiet, studious, and unassuming; deeply interested in classical music, he studied music at the University of Colorado and eventually taught it at a school in Idaho. Together with his wife Nancy (also a music teacher), John went on to have two children. As of the time of the book’s writing, both are retired and living in Boise, where they go fly fishing and bottle their own wine, while also taking cross-country trips in their RV: “John [is], in his way, the embodiment of the dual nature of the Galvin family: outdoorsy but scholarly, athletic and capable, but drawn to a life of the mind” (219).

As a boy and young man, John believed himself to be a disappointment to his father; Don had, for instance, at one point criticized him for studying music on the grounds that it was a “selfish profession” (103). Although his non-confrontational nature would eventually win him Don’s praise—he described John to Nancy’s mother as the “best of the litter” (103)—it also led him to steer clear of involvement in his siblings’ problems and medical care.  

Brian Galvin was the fourth of Don and Mimi’s children, having been born in 1951. Though always somewhat reserved, his good looks and exceptional athletic and musical abilities made him a favorite with his parents: “Once Don and Mimi saw that Brian could listen to a piece of music on the radio and play it perfectly on the piano moments later—classical, jazz, blues, rock ‘n’ roll, anything—they invested in private piano lessons for him” (104). As the years went by, Brian’s success grew; he formed a locally popular cover band in his teens, moved to California to begin writing his own music, and even opened for Jethro Tull at one point.

However, like many of his brothers, Brian was secretly troubled. He sexually abused his two sisters when they were young children, and he used drugs heavily (even by the standards of the era) throughout his childhood and adolescence. This “darkness” culminated in 1973 (128), when Brian was prescribed an antipsychotic and, some months later, shot and killed his girlfriend Lorelei and himself. Although his parents concealed much of this from their other children at the time, the event was a turning point in the Galvins’ life, likely contributing to Don’s 1975 stroke and generally making the other boys’ problems impossible to ignore.

Michael is the fifth of the Galvin children, born in 1953. As a teen, he was a self-described hippie and chafed at the strict atmosphere within the Galvin household: “At home, Michael became bolder, rejecting the Galvin family’s dress code, cutting the heels off his Bass Weejuns so that they looked more like moccasins” (108). His nonconformist tendencies persisted into adulthood, when he declined to go to college and instead spent several months traveling the country, occasionally running into trouble with the law. He would go on to work a series of odd jobs and marry twice, always retaining his free-spirited approach to life: “Still wearing his hair in a ponytail, Michael assisted Becky [his second wife] with her horticulture business and still played gigs at local restaurants” (288).

Michael’s attitude towards his sick brothers was strongly shaped by his own experience with psychiatry; shortly after he graduated from high school, his parents—by then hyperalert to signs of mental illness—had him hospitalized and prescribed antipsychotics. The episode left him permanently suspicious of his brothers’ diagnoses and treatment; to the extent that his brothers are sick, he views their strict upbringing as responsible and medication as more harmful than good. Partly as a result, Michael is one of the most empathic of the Galvin siblings where his brothers are concerned.

Richard, born in 1954, is the sixth of Mimi and Don’s children. From a young age, he was “the Galvin family’s schemer—ambitious and gutsy, entrepreneurial, and more than a little willing to bend the rules to get what he wanted” (125). As a teen, he was suspended for repeatedly stealing from the school commissary, and during his senior year, he got a girl pregnant and was forced to marry her. The marriage didn’t last, and Richard continued to act out in young adulthood, becoming involved in various risky and sometimes disastrous business ventures through his job with a mining company. A fear of becoming schizophrenic was at the heart of much of Richard’s reckless behavior; this was also what drove him to avoid everyone in the family except Mimi and to decline to take part in the scientific research on the Galvins.

Although Richard did eventually settle down, he remains, as of the time the book was written, deeply concerned with maintaining an image of himself as more successful than he truly is: “Richard seemed to take more after his mother than his father, determined to speak about pleasant subjects only, like his trips to Pebble Beach and Cabo, and his business deals in Dubai.” (304). There is some friction between him and the other healthy Galvin siblings, in part because Richard—having previously relied on Mimi and Don to save him from bankruptcy—was left out of their mother’s will.

Joe, born in 1956, was the seventh of the Galvins’ children, and the oldest of the four “hockey brothers” who “formed their own little unit within the larger family” (95). “Mild-mannered and introspective” by nature (95), Joe pursued his own path after finishing high school: he took a job with an airline company, moved to Chicago, and eventually became engaged. However, when Peter experienced his first psychotic break in 1975, the doctors treating him became concerned that Joe was in danger of developing schizophrenia as well. Over the next seven years, Joe became more socially withdrawn and eventually developed full-blown psychosis after a string of professional and personal setbacks.

Joe was the last of the sick brothers to develop schizophrenia, and in some ways retained more insight into his condition than the others. Like Jim, Joe gained a great deal of weight and developed heart problems as a result of antipsychotics, dying in 2009. 

Mark, the eighth of the Galvins’ children, was born in 1957. As a child, Mark played hockey with Joe, Matt, and Peter, and he demonstrated a great aptitude for chess. His obvious intelligence led those around him to believe he would thrive academically, but he chose to drop out of college.

This decision to, in Lindsay’s words, “lead a very simple life” likely stemmed from the experience of seeing so many of his siblings fall ill (221); he had been emotional and empathic as a boy, and while those traits had some upsides—he often tried to smooth over the conflicts that would arise between his brothers—they made him particularly sensitive to the trauma. As a result, while Matt stayed in touch, he struggled to cope with the reality of his brothers’ illness and became “given to moments of heavy sentiment, often prone to crying when thinking about the old days” (221). Now retired from his job working at a university bookstore, Mark lives in Boulder with his wife Lisa, with whom he has three children.

Matt, born in 1958, is the ninth of Don and Mimi’s children. Although he was prone to misbehavior as a child and adolescent, he was especially loved by his younger sisters for protecting them from their older brothers’ bullying. He was also a talented artist with an interest in pottery, which he planned to study in college. However, during his freshman year at Loretto Heights, he experienced a psychotic break that forced him to drop out of the program.

Matt was deeply delusional for some time after this, believing, among other things, that he was Paul McCartney. This changed in 1986 when Matt was put on a new atypical antipsychotic that kept his symptoms under control. Since then, he has been able to live independently, experiencing psychotic symptoms only during periods of acute stress, although prone at all times towards paranoia and resentment. Having become friends with several veterans, Matt also volunteers at a soup kitchen for homeless vets: “‘His little bit of responsibility to other people keeps him going,’ his brother Michael once observed. ‘I think that’s true for all of us.’” (216). His burly appearance and “scraggly beard” lead Lindsay’s children to affectionately liken him to Hagrid from the Harry Potter series (219). 

Peter, born in 1960, is the tenth of the Galvins’ children and the youngest of all their sons. As a boy, he was also the most stubborn and contrary of the children: “As the youngest of ten brothers, […] Peter seemed to have so much authority weighing over him that he chose to disregard it all, starting arguments and defying orders every chance he could” (132). These behavioral problems only increased as Peter entered his teens; although he could be engaging and talkative, at other times he would act out, stealing things and trying to set fires. He experienced his first psychotic break at just 14, which at the time his family attributed to the shock of his father’s stroke. However, as Lindsay later discovered that Jim had abused Peter, it’s possible the trigger for Peter’s illness was more complex.

Since his teenage breakdown, Peter has spent time in and out of psychiatric hospitals, his parents’ house, and assisted living (with occasional episodes of homelessness whenever his behavior caused Don or Mimi to kick him out). Because Peter tended to go off his medication as soon as he felt relatively normal, he developed a tolerance to many drugs and eventually had to begin receiving weekly ECT to achieve any kind of stability. These medication problems were exacerbated by the fact that Peter spent much of his youth misdiagnosed as schizophrenic, when he was likely suffering from bipolar disorder. At of the time of the book’s writing, Peter is living in a nursing home, still prone to bouts of psychosis but retaining much of his cheerfulness and charm: “On the wards, Peter would serenade patients and doctors with his recorder, playing ‘Yesterday,’ ‘Let It Be,’ and ‘The Long and Winding Road’” (296).

Margaret, born in 1962, is the Galvins’ eleventh child but first daughter. Her late place in the birth order proved decisive in shaping her development, personality, and later attitude towards her parents and siblings. From a young age, she bore witness to the breakdown of the family as her brothers fought more and more viciously with one another, and eventually began developing psychotic symptoms: “Margaret was tender, empathic, and emotional; she would witness her family’s difficulties and internalize them, hardly able to bear the pain” (148). Further complicating matters was the fact that her mother had little time to spend on Margaret with so many other children, many of them sick, vying for her attention. Lastly, the size of the family and the chaos caused by the boys’ illness made it easy for Brian and Jim’s sexual abuse to slip under the radar.

As a young girl, Margaret tried to distance herself from the abuse and neglect by throwing herself into activities like dance. During her teenage and college years, she did a lot of drugs, traveled the country with other Deadheads, and briefly married the son of a wealthy oil executive. After her marriage fell apart, she began to work through her childhood trauma, though in a less methodical way than her younger sister. Through yoga, rock-climbing, painting, and a relationship with her eventual husband, Wylie—Margaret was eventually able to find some peace with her past. Margaret’s recovery has hinged on keeping her distance from the rest of the family, which has at times caused friction between her and Lindsay. She and Wylie have two children.

Lindsay is the youngest of the Galvins’ 12 children. Baptized as “Mary,” she was necessarily tough, self-reliant, and resourceful from a young age; at around the same time she was born—the autumn of 1965—her eldest brother was pulled from classes for the first time as the result of early symptoms of schizophrenia. Mary thus grew up surrounded by mentally ill siblings and developed a great deal of resentment towards them—particularly Jim, who, like Brian, sexually abused her. By the time she left to attend Hotchkiss boarding school, Mary was determined to leave her past behind her for good, which was partially responsible for her decision to take a new name.

Lindsay’s attitude towards her family gradually changed after she began attending therapy. The process of working through her trauma allowed her to better empathize with (if still not entirely excuse) family members she’d previously been angry with—most notably, her mother. It also awakened a need to help her sick brothers. As a result, she became more involved in their care as her parents grew older, despite also being, by this point, a business owner, a wife, and the mother of two children.

In Lindsay's role as a caretaker, she has at times felt frustrated with those siblings (particularly Margaret) who have taken a more hands-off approach to family life. Broadly speaking, however, Lindsay recognizes that she needs to allow her healthy siblings to “muddle through life and deal” in their own ways (330).

Lynn DeLisi is a psychiatrist and researcher whose studies of the Galvins and other “multiplex” families has helped transform the conversation surrounding schizophrenia. In conducting this research, DeLisi was fighting an uphill battle, both because of the obstacles she faced as a woman practicing medicine in the 1970s and because the psychiatry of the time leaned heavily on environmental theories of mental illness. DeLisi, by contrast, was sure there was a genetic component to schizophrenia, and by persevering in the face of many setbacks, she and McDonough identified the SHANK2 mutation as a contributor to some cases of schizophrenia, including the Galvins’. In Hidden Valley Road, DeLisi’s stubborn determination to uncover the roots of schizophrenia parallels Mimi’s (and later Lindsay’s) dogged advocacy on behalf of the Galvin siblings. 

Robert Freedman is a psychiatrist and researcher specializing in the study of schizophrenia. Early in his career, he became interested in the idea that schizophrenia might develop due to problems with “sensory gating”: the brain’s ability to process, organize, and in some cases filter out the information the senses relay to it. Working off this theory, Freedman developed a test that involved measuring the brain’s response to hearing two identical clicking noises and found that patients with schizophrenia (and, in some cases, asymptomatic family members) were hyperresponsive to sensory input most people automatically disregarded. Freedman was connected this gating difficulty to an abnormality located on the gene CHRNA7, but his attempts to develop a drug to counteract the mutation were thwarted by marketing concerns. Undeterred, Freedman went on to hypothesize that having expectant mothers supplement their diets with choline might have a protective effect; although his research on this subject is ongoing, the initial results found that children born to these women had fewer warning signs associated with the development of schizophrenia later in life.

The Garys were acquaintances of the Galvins that the family met through Don’s work with the Federation. Sam was a Coast Guard veteran from New York who had moved to Denver to drill for oil; “entrepreneurial” and “a natural risk-taker” (158), he was undeterred by a string of failures, and eventually discovered a huge reserve in 1967. Now multimillionaires, he and his wife Nancy were able to treat the Galvins to luxuries they would never have been able to afford otherwise, and when she learned about the circumstances of the Galvin boys’ illness, Nancy even offered to take Margaret in and raise her as one of her own children. Later, the Garys also covered some of the expenses associated with Lindsay’s time at Hotchkiss.

The friendship between the families likely stemmed in part from the similarities between them. Not only were they both large in size (with eight children), but both were struggling with hereditary diseases. The Garys’ battle was with myotonic dystrophy, which effects the muscles. Four of the Gary children would die from the disease in young adulthood. The Garys used some of their wealth to advance schizophrenia research by donating to the University of Colorado psychiatry department.

Stefan McDonough is a neurobiologist and researcher who became interested in neuroscience while developing new forms of painkillers. His investigation into the genetics of schizophrenia—and, in particular, his interest in studying families affected by the disorder—soon brought him into contact with Lynn DeLisi, and the two were finally able to complete the research she had begun in the 1980s, identifying a mutation in the SHANK2 gene as a potential cause of the mental illness in the Galvin family. Since then, McDonough continues to work with the genetic material DeLisi collected in the hopes of identifying other mutations associated with the development of schizophrenia.

Fromm-Reichmann was an influential psychotherapist in mid-20th century America. After emigrating from Germany in 1935, she established herself at the Washington D.C. Chestnut Lodge mental hospital, where she achieved remarkable results using talk therapy with patients diagnosed with schizophrenia. Fromm-Reichmann's apparent success played a pivotal role in ensuring the dominance of the psychoanalytical model of schizophrenia for the next several decades. As such, her legacy is mixed. On the one hand, Fromm-Reichmann's belief that people with schizophrenia weren’t beyond reach helped humanize them in the eyes of the medical establishment, leading to the decline of more overtly abusive forms of psychiatric “treatment.” However, many of Fromm-Reichmann's success stories were likely not schizophrenic to begin with, while her ideas about "schizophrenogenic” mothers were largely unsubstantiated and played into the era’s often stifling expectations surrounding gender and the family. 

Schreber was a late 19th-century German lawyer and judge who experienced a psychotic break at the age of 51 and was subsequently diagnosed with schizophrenia. While hospitalized, he wrote a book about his experiences entitled Memoirs of My Nervous Illness; although intended to serve as evidence of his recovery, the work reflects Schreber’s delusional thinking and consequently became a flashpoint for debates surrounding the nature of the disorder. Most notably, Schreber’s belief that God had made him female and then impregnated him dovetailed with Freud’s theory of the Oedipus complex and consequently led him to conclude that schizophrenia was the result of unresolved childhood trauma.

David Rosenthal was a psychologist at NIMH whose study of the Genain sisters secured his place as “one of the century’s most prominent schizophrenia researchers focused on the genetics of the illness” (75). Rosenthal believed that cases like the Genains’ strongly implicated heredity in the transmission of mental illnesses, but suggested that environmental factors likely played a role as well. He anticipated the growing consensus that both nature and nurture play a role in causing schizophrenia. Rosenthal went on to recruit DeLisi to a second study on the Genain sisters, helping to further her career.

Jack Rauch is Lindsay’s younger child. Although academically gifted, Jack struggled in school as a result of ADD, and as a teen, he began skipping classes and smoking marijuana. This terrified his parents, who sent him to a wilderness therapy program and then a special boarding school in the hopes of nipping any predisposition to schizophrenia in the bud. Because it’s unclear whether Jack was ever at risk of developing the disorder, it’s also an open question whether these interventions served their intended purpose. However, they did noticeably benefit Jack, if only because they gave him an opportunity to express how “tense” his parents’ vigilance had made him feel throughout his life (332); his story therefore illustrates the delicacy required in mental health intervention. Jack ultimately returned home with his behavioral issues resolved and graduated high school in 2017 with plans to become a youth therapist.