Hidden Valley Road: Inside the Mind of an American Family

Tue, 01 Apr 2025 00:00:00 +0000

Between the 1960s and the 1980s, six of the twelve Galvin children — all of them boys — developed schizophrenia. That single, staggering fact turned an ordinary Colorado family into one of the most important case studies in the history of mental illness. Robert Kolker tells two stories at once: how the Galvins’ shared DNA helped drag schizophrenia research away from decades of mother-blaming folklore and toward genetics and brain science, and how the healthy children paid for that contribution with childhoods and adult lives shaped entirely by the illness around them.

Robert Kolker on SummaryShelf

Hidden Valley Road: Inside the Mind of an American Family