by Robert Kolker, 2020
This book was the 3rd book selection for Old Town Library Book Club 2023-2024. Karen selected it. It’s about a family that had 12 children and 6 of them end up with schizophrenia. They lived on Hidden Valley Road, in Woodmen Valley, right next door to the Skarke’s! That was a huge surprise! When we were visiting the Skarke’s, who knew there was a family next door with 12 children and 6 of them schizophrenic!
The Galvin family, Don and Mimi, and their 12 children; 10 boys and then Margaret and Mary, the last two girls. Six of the boys become schizophrenic. The trials and tribulations of this family would have killed me. What a nightmare! One of the boys (Brian William Galvin) ends up murdering his girlfriend and killing himself in California on September 7, 1973.
The youngest girl, Mary, ends up being the rock of the entire family. She cares for her oldest brother (Donald) even though he tormented her endlessly when they lived on Hidden Valley Road. When she was 7 and he was 27, he’d follow her around dressed in a bed sheet, like a monk, spouting religious nonsense. She would lead him up into the hills and tie him up and leave him there. Her 2nd oldest brother would molest her and her sister when she was sent to his house for the weekends. His name was Jim and he was married to Kathy and they had a little boy, Jimmy. Margaret and Mary didn’t know for sure that what he was doing was wrong, and they didn’t know he was doing it to both of them. It finally came out when they were adults and they confronted their Mom and Dad. How could they send them there when they knew he also was becoming sick. When she was 13, Mary finally was able to leave the madness. Wealthy friends of her parents paid for her to attend boarding school on the east coast. That was her ticket out. But she eventually comes back to Colorado and helps her family. At the end of the book (published in 2020), she is still helping her brother, Don, living in assisted living. She’s also helping her other brothers that are still living – 3 of them, I think, in various stages of dependence.
The author varies the chapters on the individual members of the family with the gradual progress of research on schizophrenia. Over the 50 years of history of this family, the research hasn’t progressed much. It’s painstakingly slow, and we still don’t really know what causes schizophrenia. Sad but true.
I remember when Cherie had her first psychotic breakdown, when she was paranoid about neighbors spying on her, I had a dream/vision from God. God first made me understand how close we all are to being mentally ill. It is only a very fine line separating us and them. Then, He told me not to talk about Him to Cherie at this stage of her life. She was dabbling in witchcraft because of Chris’s mother being a pagan witch. He told me that to associate Him with that world would ruin Him in her eyes.
Thankful to God for sparing me from this particular illness. Pray for Him to reveal answers to the researchers and caregivers and sufferers of this distressing illness.
Here are a few moments from the book I want to remember in particular:
In the Prologue, page xiv: “Mary’s sister, Margaret–the only other girl, and the sibling closest to Mary in age–might be with the Skarke girls next door, or down the road at the Shoptaughs’.” That’s the line that shocked me. This was 1972. Mom’s best friend was Wanda Skarke when we were living at the Air Force Academy from about 1963-1968. She used to take us to visit the Skarke’s in Woodmen Valley on Hidden Valley Road. We would play with Carolyn and Catherine. We would hike all over the hill that was their backyard. It was wonderful. Who knew there was this family next door.
The father of the family, Donald William Galvin, started the falconry program at the Air Force Academy and is responsible for their mascot being the falcon. I wonder if Dad knew him. He taught at the Academy, might have been while Dad was teaching.
Page 17: “Twelve years later [1908], the Swiss psychiatrist Eugen Bleuler created the term schizophrenia to describe most of the same symptoms that Kraepelin had lumped into dementia praecox. He, too, suspected a physical component to the disease.
“Bleuler chose this new word because its Latin root–schizo–implied a harsh, drastic splitting of mental functions. This turned out to be a tragically poor choice. Almost ever since, a vast swath of popular culture–from Psycho to Sybil to The Three Faces of Eve–has confused schizophrenia with the idea of split personality. That couldn’t be further off the mark. Bleuler was trying to describe a split between a patient’s exterior and interior lives–a divide between perception and reality. Schizophrenia is not about multiple personalities. It is about walling oneself off from consciousness, first slowly and then all at once, until you are no longer accessing anything that others accept as real.”
Page 40: “A year before the Academy had even opened, Don had written to the commander in charge of the Academy’s organization and construction, General Hubert Harmon, to propose that the Air Force adopt the falcon as its mascot–the same way the Army had its mule and the Navy its goat…he was the first to suggest the falcon, something he and Mimi would always point to, once the Air Force took up the idea, as a lasting accomplishment, their contribution to American military history.”
Page 122: “Running almost as a dividing line between the Galvin and Skarke properties at the end of Hidden Valley Road was a small trail that had gone unused, seemingly, for years. One day, the Skarkes bought a Honda 90 minibike. Carolyn Skarke, who was about Margaret’s age, would ride up the trail between her house and the Galvins’ house to visit one of her other friends. The trail was technically on the Skarke’s property, but no one had ever talked much about it until Carolyn started to use the motorbike on it.
“One day, Carolyn was riding down the hill on the trail and had almost made it to the bottom and home when, by a stroke of luck, she noticed a cable, thin as a wire, strung across the path, blocking access to the Hidden Valley Road cul-de-sac. She was able to veer away from the cable at the last second, just before she got clotheslined. Frighted nearly to death, Carolyn told her mother, who, as soon as she determined what had happened, marched out of her house, past the trail, and toward the Galvin house, searching for Mimi.
“Carolyn remembered watching the two women, who had always been civil, standing outside on that little road, facing off like a fuming baseball manager and a stubborn umpire.
“Why did you do this?” her mother shouted.
“I don’t like the noise,” Mimi said.
“That was all that Carolyn’s mother could take.
“We put up with all the sheriff’s cars coming to your house? And you don’t like a Honda 90??”“
Page 247: “In 1997,Freedman devised an experiment: He gave nicotine to people with schizophrenia, usually many pieces of Nicorette chewing gum, and then measured their brain waves with his double-click test. Sure enough, people with schizophrenia who chewed three pieces of Nicorette passed the test with flying colors. They responded to the first sound and didn’t respond to the second, just like people without schizophrenia. The effects didn’t last after the nicotine wore off, but Freedman still was stunned.”
Page 252 about the Human Genome Project: “Human beings have more than twenty thousand genes that, by encoding the proteins that build our bodies and keep them functioning, play a crucial role in making us who we are–quite a massive haystack to go searching for needles in. But in theory, once the Human Genome Project collected and mapped out the genetic information of enough people, that haystack would suddenly become much easier to search. Now, all one would have to do is compare the genomes of a sampling of sick people–for any genetic disease, take your pick–with a control group, and whatever abnormality existed in the genome of the sick people would be impossible not to notice.” The scientists collaborating around the world completed the Human Genome Project in 2003, ahead of schedule.
Page 269-270: “Sure enough, with the Galvins, DeLisi and McDonough found something tantalizing: a mutation shared by every Galvin brother for whom DeLisi had collected samples back in the eighties, in a gene called SHANK2. The mutation they found was connected to an important process in the brain–a process that seems vitally related to schizophrenia. SHANK2 is a communications assistant for brain cells.”
Page 276, Freedman’s CHRNA7 discovery: “Freedman’s study about choline was published in 2016, the same year as the Broad Institute’s C4A study and DeLisi’s SHANK2 study. In 2017, the American Medical Association approved a resolution that prenatal vitamins should include higher levels of choline to help prevent the onset of schizophrenia and other brain developmental disorders. It had taken thirty years, and he’d hit at least one dead end along the way. Only time can say for sure what difference choline might make over a matter of decades. But thanks in part to his work with the Galvins, Freedman had arrived at a game-changing strategy for the prevention of schizophrenia.”
Page 318 talks about Margaret and her painting. She has used her family in abstract paintings: “Donald is red and white; Jim is a spectral black and white; John, Brian, Michael, and Richard are variations on greenish yellow; Joseph is yellow with red seeping through; Mark, Matthew, and Peter are all studies in red, with only Peter’s including flashes of blue.
“Mary is a cross-hatch of thick streaks of soft pink, inflected here and there with black….“
“When, a few years before Mimi died, Margaret helped relocate Peter to his assisted living facility, that inspired another piece, Moving Peter…
“This was the painting Nancy Gary bought, snapping it up before an old classmate of Margaret’s from the Kent Denver School had the chance to buy it.”
Chapter 43: “Our culture looks at diseases as problems to solve. We imagine every ailment to be like polio: hopelessly incurable, until a miracle drug comes along that can wipe it off the face of the earth. That model, of course, only works some of the time. Too often, scientists get lost in their own silos, convinced their theory works to the exclusion of everyone else’s. Whether it’s the Freudians and the Kraepelinians or the family dynamics specialists and the geneticists, the unwillingness to collaborate leaves everyone vulnerable to confirmation bias–tunnel vision. …”
Page 320 and 321: “Neurodiversity–a term used more often for other conditions, like autism–is a concept that was never considered when treating any Galvin brother decades ago. There is a robust anti-medication movement now–activists armed with studies showing that many schizophrenia patients experience favorable long-term outcomes without prescription drugs….
“Each passing year brings more evidence that psychosis exists on a spectrum, with new genetic studies showing overlap between schizophrenia and bipolar disorder, and bipolar disorder and autism. The most recent research suggests that a surprising number of us may be at least a little bit mentally ill…
Page 327: “Lindsay [Mary] repeated something she learned from Louise Silvern, her old therapist, and also from Nancy Gary, and, if she’s being honest with herself, from her own mother. “They taught me to embrace the cards you are dealt or it will eat you alive. If you go to the heart of your own matter, you will find only by loving and helping do you have peace from your own trauma.”
On page 338 in the Acknowledgements: “…Catherine Skarke McGrady,…Carolyn Skarke Solseth…”