Hidden Valley Road: Inside the Mind of an American Family

Hidden Valley Road: Inside the Mind of an American Family is a nonfiction work published in 2020 by journalist Robert Kolker, author of the 2013 bestseller Lost Girls: An Unsolved American Mystery. Hidden Valley Road tells the story of the Galvins, an American family with 12 children, six of whom were diagnosed with schizophrenia. Using the family as a lens, Kolker traces the history of schizophrenia research, from its early misunderstandings to the search for the disease’s genetic markers, a search in which the Galvins became central. The book has been likened to Rebecca Skloot’s The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks, as both explore how a single family's story intersects with groundbreaking medical research.

The study guide uses the 2020 Doubleday edition of the book.

Summary

Hidden Valley Road tells the story of Don Galvin, his wife Mimi, and their 12 children. The couple married in 1944, just prior to Don’s first naval posting. Mimi had their first son, also named Donald, before World War II ended, and when Don returned home, the couple was optimistic about the future. Don’s work took the growing family to Colorado Springs, where he completed a PhD in political science and eventually became the director of the Federation of Rocky Mountain States.

Don and Mimi’s family continued to expand, and their final child, Mary, was born 20 years after their first. By this point, however, there were indications that something was amiss. The Galvins’ 10 boys fought constantly, and the eldest, Donald, had a series of breakdowns while at college. After a short-lived marriage, Donald attempted to kill himself and his wife, which led to his diagnosis of schizophrenia.

The Galvins’ second son, Jim, also married. Although he experienced psychotic symptoms, Jim was more functional on a day-to-day basis than Donald, so Mimi and Don continued to allow their younger children to spend weekends at his home. This proved to be a tragic mistake, as Jim sexually abused at least three of his siblings.

Six of the Galvins’ sons—Donald, Jim, Brian, Matt, Joe, and Peter—eventually experienced psychotic breaks of varying severity, with Brian killing both himself and his girlfriend during one such episode. Some of the sons (most notably Matt and Joe) responded well enough to treatment to live more or less independently, but others, like Donald, became increasingly detached from reality as time went on.

Life was also difficult for the Galvins’ healthy children—particularly Margaret and Mary (who later adopted the name Lindsay). Both women spent much of their young adulthood trying to come to terms with their past and their family.

Hidden Valley Road concludes shortly after Mimi’s death in 2017; her husband predeceased her, having died of cancer in 2003, and her sons Jim and Joe died of heart failure associated with antipsychotic drugs in 2001 and 2009, respectively. By the time of Mimi’s death, researchers had determined that the schizophrenia in the family was likely the result of a mutation in a gene called SHANK2, and not—as many doctors once claimed—the result of bad parenting.

The family’s experiences inspired one of Lindsay’s children, Kate, to study the origins of mental illness. In 2017, Kate began an internship with schizophrenia researcher Robert Freedman, one of the scientists who studied the Galvin family over the years.