Chapter 1
A Family's Struggle Becomes Science's Breakthrough
In the quiet town of Colorado Springs in 1972, a seven-year-old girl named Mary walked alongside her twenty-seven-year-old brother Donald, who wore a monk-like bedsheet and recited endless religious prayers. This wasn't an isolated incident of eccentricity but a glimpse into the extraordinary story of the Galvin family - a family with twelve children, six of whom would develop schizophrenia. Their saga would eventually transform our understanding of one of humanity's most devastating mental illnesses. "Hidden Valley Road" became an instant bestseller and Oprah's Book Club selection, praised by The New York Times as "a feat of empathy and narrative journalism." The book's cultural impact extends beyond literary acclaim - it has sparked crucial conversations about mental health stigma and inspired researchers worldwide to reconsider genetic approaches to schizophrenia treatment. What makes this family's journey so compelling isn't just the statistical improbability of their situation, but how their lives would become intertwined with the entire evolution of schizophrenia treatment in America.
Chapter 2
The Perfect American Family Unravels
Don and Mimi Galvin appeared to embody the American dream of the 1950s and 60s. Don, a charismatic Air Force Academy instructor who ran the falconry program, and Mimi, a refined daughter of Texas aristocracy who converted to Catholicism to please her husband, created what seemed to be the perfect family. They moved to a newly built split-level house on Hidden Valley Road in Woodmen Valley, where Mimi tied ropes around every tree and bush to prevent contractors from cutting them down - a small act of control that foreshadowed her later desperate attempts to preserve what she could of her family.
As their family grew to an astonishing twelve children - ten boys followed by two girls - Mimi ran the household with military precision. She assigned chores, enforced dress codes, and demanded excellence in everything. The children were exposed only to intellectual pursuits, with Mimi correcting even neighborhood children's artwork. She maintained this facade of perfection even as cracks began to appear, shopping twice weekly for massive quantities of groceries, enforcing military-like discipline with bed inspections, and preparing meals for eleven people daily. The Rocky Mountain News even published her recipe for lamb curry with the headline "SHE SERVES EXOTIC FOODS TO FAMILY OF NINE BOYS."
Behind this veneer of domestic bliss, however, a different reality was unfolding. Donald, the eldest son and seemingly his father's heir - a track star, all-state football player, and state wrestling champion - exercised a disturbing authority over his younger brothers when parents were absent. What began as innocent mischief escalated to bullying and orchestrated violence, forcing brothers to fight each other and threatening those who wouldn't participate. Despite complaints, Don and Mimi either couldn't or wouldn't believe their eldest capable of such behavior.
As Donald approached seventeen, troubling signs emerged - including an incident where he smashed ten dishes at once. Though his parents dismissed this as teenage moodiness, Donald himself recognized something was wrong. He felt trapped between his father's expectations and his own limitations, seeing people as "IBM cards he sorted through his own computer." Increasingly, he became a stranger to his own motivations and actions. Above all, he was afraid - a fear that would soon manifest in ways that would forever change the family's trajectory.
Chapter 3
The Descent into Madness Begins
Donald's freshman year at Colorado State coincided with the family's move to Hidden Valley Road. Though he maintained a veneer of confidence and told his family he wanted to become a doctor, he kept his inner fears hidden. By early 1967, he was desperately trying to reclaim normalcy despite his deteriorating mental state. Though still handsome and athletic, he felt increasingly disconnected from others. When his relationship with his girlfriend Marilee ended, he spiraled further, running up phone bills and hiding in an abandoned fruit cellar.
A psychiatric evaluation revealed disturbing behaviors - he had placed a noose around his neck, turned on gas, priced caskets, and harbored delusions about murdering people. Most alarmingly, he admitted to two suicide attempts at age 12 that his parents likely never knew about. Despite these red flags, Don and Mimi avoided sending Donald to mental institutions, fearing both the brutal conditions of state hospitals and the psychoanalytic approach that might blame Mimi as a "schizophrenogenic mother" - a term coined by refugee therapist Frieda Fromm-Reichmann that had become psychiatry's industry standard by the 1950s and 1960s, with virtually all mental disorders blamed on mothers.
While Donald struggled, his younger brother Jim embraced the James Dean rebel spirit - leather jacket, fast car, defiant snarl. After failing to outperform Donald in football and falconry, Jim stopped trying to compete directly and instead harbored deep resentment toward his older brother. This sibling rivalry manifested in constant physical confrontations throughout the house. By Halloween 1969, Jim began experiencing psychotic episodes - hearing voices, becoming paranoid about people spying on him, and harming himself by ramming his head into walls or jumping fully clothed into lakes.
The family's facade of normalcy was crumbling. A rare family photo from Don's PhD graduation ceremony in 1969 captured all twelve Galvin children together, with Mimi later noting this was when she first truly recognized Jim was "losing his mind - like Donald." What no one yet realized was that this was just the beginning of an unimaginable family tragedy that would eventually claim six of the ten Galvin sons.
Chapter 4
The Medical Establishment Fails a Family in Crisis
By June 1970, Donald Galvin's marriage had deteriorated completely. During a session with psychiatrist Tom Patterson, Donald presented as detached and controlled, hiding explosive emotions beneath a rehearsed exterior. Days later, following another fight where Donald threatened to drown his wife, he took mescaline and formulated what he considered the perfect solution. He returned with cyanide tablets, dropped them in hydrochloric acid, and attempted to force both himself and his wife to inhale the gas in a murder-suicide attempt. She escaped and called police.
Rather than staying home to support their troubled son, Don and Mimi continued their social engagements, helping Donald find work at a business school in Denver. They maintained appearances, with Mimi writing cheerful letters about family life that completely omitted Donald's hospitalization and divorce. Donald's condition deteriorated. In one disturbing incident, eight-year-old Margaret came home to find Donald naked and shrieking, having removed all furniture from the house. Mimi locked herself and her youngest daughters in the master bedroom until police arrived to take Donald away, only for him to return home again later.
The psychiatric establishment of the time offered little help. Throughout its history, the Colorado State Hospital in Pueblo had employed controversial treatments: sterilization of female patients in the 1920s during the eugenics movement, electroshock therapy, insulin coma therapy, hydrotherapy, and eventually pharmaceutical interventions. By the 1960s, exposes revealed the brutality within such institutions, leading to a 1962 Colorado grand jury investigation that confirmed neglect, abuse, and unlicensed doctors at Pueblo.
Though neuroleptic drugs like Thorazine were hailed as miraculous, they merely sedated patients rather than curing them, with serious side effects including tremors and muscle disorders. Even today, scientists don't fully understand how these medications work, though the "dopamine hypothesis" suggested Thorazine treated schizophrenia by blocking dopamine receptors.
As more Galvin sons began showing symptoms, the family's troubles spilled into the neighborhood. During Thanksgiving 1972, tensions escalated throughout the day with the brothers' constant sniping. The breaking point came when Jim and Donald began wrestling in the living room. Their fight moved toward the dining room where Donald either tipped over or threw the entire table, destroying Mimi's meticulously prepared meal. Devastated, Mimi retreated to the kitchen and smashed her own gingerbread house, crying "You boys don't deserve this."
Chapter 5
The Shadows Behind Closed Doors
While the Galvin family's mental health crisis was becoming increasingly apparent, darker secrets lurked beneath the surface. Jim Galvin stepped in to protect his youngest siblings from Donald, offering them refuge at his home. When tensions ran high, Mimi and Don allowed the girls to spend entire weekends at Jim's house. But this apparent sanctuary masked a horrific reality - Jim was sexually abusing his young sisters.
His approaches followed a pattern - late at night, usually drunk after his bar shift, he would sexually assault Margaret while his wife slept. Margaret remembered vivid details: the fish tank bubbles, the damask pattern of the hand-me-down couch, and the national anthem playing as television stations signed off. The abuse began when Margaret was about five years old, and she was too young to understand it as violence. When she turned twelve, she began refusing him, but told no one - not even Mary, who Jim had also begun to abuse.
The tragedy deepened on September 7, 1973, when police discovered Brian, the fourth Galvin son, and his girlfriend Noni dead in her apartment - he had shot her in the face before turning the gun on himself. The murder-suicide devastated the family, with the younger children initially told Brian died in a bicycle accident. What Don and Mimi kept secret for decades was that Brian had been prescribed Navane, an antipsychotic medication that treated conditions including schizophrenia.
The family began to fragment, with several sons moving away, fearing what John's wife Nancy first voiced aloud - that whatever afflicted the Galvin boys might be contagious. Don Galvin, who had spent years distancing himself from his children's troubles, suffered a devastating stroke in June 1975 while preparing to take Peter to hockey practice. The stroke left him paralyzed on his right side and without short-term memory, forcing his retirement and hospitalizing him for six months.
Fourteen-year-old Peter, the youngest of ten brothers, began exhibiting serious behavioral problems after witnessing his father's stroke. Already rebellious, he started stealing, setting fires, and eventually had a breakdown in his ninth-grade algebra class, speaking gibberish and behaving erratically. His final placement at University of Colorado Hospital revealed the family's growing crisis, as doctors learned about Donald, Jim, Brian's suicide, and potential symptoms in Joe - making Peter the fifth son showing signs of mental illness.
Chapter 6
The Sisters' Escape and the Scientific Breakthrough
Ten-year-old Mary Galvin stood at the front door of Hidden Valley Road, crying uncontrollably as her parents drove away with her thirteen-year-old sister Margaret. Nancy Gary, a wealthy family friend, had offered to take Margaret after Mimi broke down during a phone call, recognizing the girls needed to escape the increasingly chaotic household. Left behind with her mentally ill brothers, Mary felt completely abandoned and helpless.
Margaret's new life with the Gary family in Cherry Hills represented an almost unimaginable leap in privilege - a staffed household with seven employees, private planes, luxury cars, and a home filled with masterpiece paintings. Despite these luxuries, Margaret struggled to fit in at the exclusive Kent Denver School. Meanwhile, she kept her family's mental illness history secret, inventing explanations for why she lived with the Garys.
Mary coped with her chaotic home life by creating order where she could, organizing her bedroom closets and drawers for hours, and avoiding home as much as possible. She maintained a busy schedule of school, soccer, ballet at Colorado College, and visits to the Hefley family's horse stall - presenting a cheerful, popular facade while hiding her true feelings. When overwhelmed, she retreated to her secret sanctuary in the Woodmen Valley called "Fairy Rocks," where she pretended to have her own home.
In 1979, Mary gained acceptance to elite boarding school Hotchkiss, with her tuition covered by a scholarship and additional expenses paid by the Garys. Shortly after being accepted, Mary attended a high school party where she got drunk with older boys who took advantage of her in a closet. Overcome with shame, she blamed herself and told no one, promising herself she would never live in Colorado Springs again. At Hotchkiss orientation, when told there was already a Mary Galvin enrolled, she spontaneously adopted her middle name "Lindsay," seeing it as a way to erase her traumatic past and create a new identity.
Meanwhile, at the University of Colorado Medical Center, researchers Robert Freedman and Lynn DeLisi were approaching schizophrenia from different angles - DeLisi focused on genetic components while Freedman sought physiological understanding. Freedman developed a groundbreaking method to measure "sensory gating" - the brain's ability to filter incoming information. His simple yet effective double-click test revealed that while normal brains showed a reduced response to the second of two identical clicks, schizophrenia patients' brains responded with equal intensity to both clicks, suggesting an inability to inhibit responses to repeated stimuli.
Chapter 7
A Family Becomes a Scientific Resource
By 1982, Joe - the mild-mannered seventh son - suffered a psychotic break after losing a job at United Airlines. His descent began with threatening letters to bosses and the White House, then progressed to hallucinations. Lindsay, visiting him in the hospital, was horrified to see him drugged and unresponsive - her first real glimpse of what institutional care meant for her brothers. Joe became the sixth Galvin son to develop schizophrenia.
Lynn DeLisi visited the Galvin home, recognizing the immense burden Mimi had been bearing. By the 1980s, the psychiatric field was consolidating around biological explanations for schizophrenia, with the schizophrenogenic mother theory losing credibility. DeLisi began collecting genetic material from families with schizophrenia in 1984, when advances in molecular biology made it possible to copy DNA thousands of times. Many colleagues considered her nationwide search for multiplex families a fool's errand, but DeLisi remained convinced these families held the answers.
Walking into Hidden Valley Road, she recognized what might be "the most mentally ill family in America" - a perfect research sample. DeLisi collected blood samples from all family members, even those without diagnoses, believing genetic markers might be present in everyone. Mimi appeared almost beatific - after decades of waiting, someone like Lynn DeLisi had finally arrived to investigate her family's tragedy scientifically.
Robert Freedman visited the Galvins shortly after DeLisi, recording brain waves, drawing blood, and administering questionnaires. He was struck by Mimi's determination to care for her sons despite their medication-induced stiffness and unresponsiveness, essentially "running a rooming house." The Galvins, with their "unfathomably profound manifestation of schizophrenia," offered an unprecedented opportunity to locate the specific brain mechanisms responsible for sensory gating.
In 1987, Daniel Weinberger published a theory that transformed schizophrenia research, proposing schizophrenia as a "developmental disorder" where abnormalities present at birth gradually derail brain development. Adolescence becomes a crucial period of brain "housecleaning" when genetic potential for schizophrenia may be fulfilled. This explains why identical twins share only a 50% concordance rate for schizophrenia yet have equal chances of passing the condition to future generations. Weinberger's bowling ball analogy illustrated how slight deviations at the start only become apparent near the end - "whether you get the disease or not depends on what happens once the bowling ball hits the lane."
Chapter 8
The Sisters Confront Their Past
When Lindsay finally sought help at the campus counseling center, the therapist's skeptical reaction when she described her family - ten brothers with six suffering from schizophrenia - made her feel invalidated and misunderstood. Her therapist Silvern helped Lindsay recognize how her childhood coping mechanisms - a mask of self-reliance and perfectionism - had served her well but were now limiting her as an adult. The therapy focused on helping Lindsay integrate difficult parts of her psyche rather than cordoning them off.
A breakthrough came when Lindsay discussed the "incident with some boys" from eighth grade. Silvern helped her work through the self-blame, finally naming what happened: "They raped you." Lindsay found relief in this naming, recognizing parallels between this violation and Jim's abuse - both situations where someone more powerful made it impossible for her to escape.
The therapy prepared Lindsay to confront her family about Jim's abuse. When she told her mother Mimi about being sexually abused by Jim, Mimi responded by revealing she too had been molested by her stepfather Ben Skolnick. While this created a moment of connection, Lindsay felt denied her own experience when Mimi used Jim's mental illness as an excuse for his behavior. During a family dinner that Jim unexpectedly attended, Lindsay finally confronted him directly, screaming "You fucking asshole! You sexually abused me!" While Jim denied everything, Lindsay's father ordered him to leave, and her brother Joe comforted her saying, "You're not lying. I know you're not lying."
The Galvin sisters finally broke their silence about the abuse they had suffered. When Lindsay broached the subject with Margaret, her sister responded with surprise: "You, too?" They discovered they had endured parallel traumas from Jim, each without the other knowing. After years of avoidance, they found comfort in sharing their experiences, cooking together, exercising together, and deconstructing their childhoods.
Margaret began to reexamine her relationship with her mother, questioning why Mimi had so many children and why she protected the sick ones at the expense of the well ones. She developed a new theory that Mimi couldn't see the sexual abuse happening because she had never acknowledged her own abuse, and that Mimi kept having children as a way of "binging on family" - running from her past while trying to build something flawless.
Chapter 9
Scientific Breakthroughs and Family Legacies
Freedman's lab discovered that the 7 nicotinic receptor in the hippocampus controlled the on-off circuit for inhibitory neurons. These receptors needed acetylcholine to function properly, leading Freedman to hypothesize that schizophrenia patients might have faulty 7 receptors or insufficient acetylcholine. In 1997, Freedman identified CHRNA7 as the first gene definitively associated with schizophrenia. His research showed the Galvins and other affected families had about half the normal number of 7 receptors.
In 1997, Freedman gave nicotine (via Nicorette gum) to schizophrenia patients and found they temporarily passed the double-click test. This led him to develop DMXBA, a synthetic version of anabaseine that mimicked nicotine's effects. In 2004 clinical trials, the results seemed miraculous - patients reported reduced hallucinations and improved concentration. Several pharmaceutical companies attempted to create their own versions of the drug, but these efforts ultimately failed due to side effects or marketing considerations.
By 2009, neurobiologist Stefan McDonough had spent seven years at biotech giant Amgen, recently turning his focus to schizophrenia research. After connecting with Lynn DeLisi at Harvard Medical School, McDonough found an ideal collaborator. Together they navigated bureaucratic hurdles to access DeLisi's collection of DNA samples from some three hundred families. They focused on nine families with at least three affected members, with the Galvins being the largest sibling group in their sample.
After the disappointment of watching drug trials targeting his discovered CHRNA7 gene fail, Freedman developed a revolutionary hypothesis: schizophrenia might originate during fetal development when the CHRNA7 gene helps install the brain's final "operating system." His breakthrough came when he discovered that what the gene needed during fetal development wasn't a synthetic drug at all, but choline - a common, non-toxic nutrient available in any vitamin shop. In a double-blind study, pregnant women who received high doses of choline showed remarkable results: 76 percent of their babies had normal auditory gating, compared to just 43 percent in the control group. After thirty years of research, much of it involving the Galvins, Freedman had discovered a potential game-changing strategy for preventing schizophrenia.
Chapter 10
The End of an Era and New Beginnings
In her final days, Mimi struggled with aphasia after another stroke, her words slurring but her smile intact. Despite communication difficulties, she maintained her characteristic humor and determination. Donald visited occasionally, bringing flowers, and with Mimi unable to control the conversation as she once did, he spoke more freely, showing surprising awareness of family details before drifting into his familiar delusions. On July 17, 2017, Michael heard Mimi's breathing change, watched as she took her final breaths, and then woke Lindsay. The next day, as rain fell, Lindsay and Michael stood in the front yard, arms outstretched, getting soaked and laughing together.
The night before Mimi's funeral, the Galvin family gathered at Hidden Valley Road. As the evening progressed, the well siblings reminisced about family road trips and childhood memories, including their epic journey to the 1964 World's Fair. Meanwhile, Donald sat alone in the living room, mostly silent. When asked if he'd had a chance to say goodbye to his mother, he replied with delusional thoughts, explaining that Mimi was now "bred as a triplet" living at sea with an octopus. Despite his disconnection from reality, Donald seemed pleased when they surprised him with a birthday cake, smiling softly as everyone sang to him.
After Mimi's death, Lindsay found herself returning to Hidden Valley Road more frequently than she had in years, managing the house sale while checking on Donald, Matt, and Peter. At the state mental hospital in Pueblo, Lindsay discovered shocking family secrets in her brothers' medical records, including Donald's attempted murder-suicide with his wife using cyanide and acid, and his suicide attempt at age twelve. She also learned their father had been receiving ECT treatments for depression before his death - all facts Mimi had concealed.
In summer 2017, Kate, Lindsay's daughter, began an internship in Robert Freedman's Denver laboratory studying schizophrenia. She walked through the same lab where her mother, aunt and uncles had participated in auditory gating tests years before her birth, where genetic material from her family had been analyzed for the CHRNA7 irregularity, and where data from choline trials was studied. The Galvin family's extraordinary tragedy had transformed into a scientific legacy that continues to offer hope to millions affected by schizophrenia worldwide.
