Hidden Valley Road: Inside the Mind of an American Family

While trauma might not have been the primary factor that led six of the Galvins to develop schizophrenia, trauma and the various ways people respond to it are central to Hidden Valley Road. The experience of seeing so many of one’s children or siblings fall ill is itself traumatic; Mark, for instance, never emotionally recovered from watching his former hockey teammates slowly lose their grip on reality, which for him felt “as if the three most important people in the world […] had fallen off the face of the earth” (221). In addition, the turbulent atmosphere caused by so much mental illness was traumatic for the younger Galvin children, who grew up amidst constant chaos and confusion. At best, Lindsay and Margaret were apt to feel neglected, given the sheer amount of time their mother spent caring for their brothers; at worst, their brothers’ sometimes violent outbursts left them feeling physically endangered. Layered on top of all of this were a number of stressors unrelated to the brothers’ illness: Jim’s sexual abuse of his younger siblings, the abuse Mimi herself experienced as a girl, and Don’s service in WWII.

Don and Mimi were consistently tight-lipped about their own traumas, which perhaps explains why they initially responded to their children’s illness the way they did: “blot[ting] out the darker aspects of [...] life” was a coping strategy they were both well versed in (54). The most obvious downside of this kind of denial is that it potentially allows problems to fester, and this was certainly the case for the Galvins. Not only did Don and Mimi delay seeking medical treatment for their eldest son, but their own unresolved emotional issues contributed to the more broadly dysfunctional dynamics within the family; Mimi’s desire to maintain the image of a perfect family, for instance, seems directly tied to her parents’ divorce and her stepfather’s subsequent abuse of her.

With that said, Kolker also suggests that a certain amount of denial can be beneficial: “[The] romantic view of his father [as a spy] was helpful to Richard. At the very least, it was preferable, for instance, to the story of a father whose military career stalled out” (305). Although Kolker calls Richard’s belief a “self-delusion” (305), there’s a sense this kind of delusion is psychologically protective; as Freedman’s work on sensory gating demonstrates, “healthy” people cope with reality by automatically tuning much of it out. Even those who are most determined to face hard truths often approach them indirectly. Lindsay, for instance, remarks that she now “laughs” when telling the story of how she wanted to burn Donald at the stake (xvi), using humor to deflect from the pain of the episode.

It is also Lindsay who embodies what Kolker suggests is perhaps the “best” response to trauma: using it as a means to better empathize with others. For Lindsay, this has meant working to connect with and improve the lives of Donald, Peter, Matt, and (while he was still living) Joe. What’s more, she generally found that doing so helped her heal as well, since her earlier resentment of her brothers had, in her words, been “gut-wrenching” and “tor[n] at [her]” (312). Nevertheless, Hidden Valley Road avoids passing judgment on the Galvin siblings who chose a different route in making sense of their childhood; ultimately, Kolker suggests that coping with trauma is a highly personal experience, and that each person must decide for themself what coping strategies work best for them at any given moment.

Kolker’s decision to refer to the Galvins specifically as an “American” family in the book’s subtitle is significant. Although schizophrenia occurs throughout the world, the Galvins’ experiences with it are inseparable from 20th century US culture and, in particular, the ethos of the American dream: the idea that anyone who works hard and plays by the rules can achieve success in life.

Don and Mimi began their life together at a time when belief in this dream was arguably at its strongest, and they themselves were no exception: “In the best of times, Mimi and Don seemed to embody everything that was great and good about their generation: a sense of adventure, industriousness, responsibility, and optimism” (xix). What’s more the Galvins’ lives did resemble the American ideal for many years: while Don ascended through the ranks of the Air Force, Mimi raised a household of star athletes, musicians, and chess players. However, when the Galvins’ sons began to develop schizophrenia, it dramatically illustrated the limits of the American dream; not only did it upend the family’s domestic life, but the very unpredictability and apparent senselessness of the disorder’s course and symptoms undercut the Galvins’ faith “that if you did all the right things in all the right ways, then good things would come to you” as a matter of course (40).

Hidden Valley Road implies that the boys’ sickness simply exposed the American dream as having always been a false promise. Even before the children fell ill, the Galvins’ lives hadn’t gone according to plan; Don, for instance, had struggled to advance in the Navy because he lacked connections. The Galvins might thus have seemed well-positioned to recognize how hollow the American dream could be, but there was enormous social pressure at the time to maintain at least a pretense of the ideal. As the conversation surrounding “schizophrenogenic” mothers demonstrates, women who didn’t conform to their designated role as homemakers were judged harshly by society, as were men who failed to achieve professional success. Don and Mimi therefore spent years projecting an image of themselves and their family that was at odds with the reality: “The Galvin home became a place where two different realities existed at the same time: the wrestling pit and the church choir; the wildness of the boys and the model family Don and Mimi believed they had” (46-47).

The situation Kolker describes above echoes theories of schizophrenia that frame the condition as “a split between a patient’s exterior and interior lives—a divide between perception and reality” (17) It’s not surprising, then, that the Galvins’ attempts to maintain a façade of normalcy only exacerbated the children’s symptoms; in a sense, Hidden Valley Road suggests that the American dream, at least in its more rigid forms, constitutes a kind of societal delusion that flies in the face of observable reality.

Schizophrenia and other psychotic disorders are among the most stigmatized mental illnesses. The symptoms of these disorders tend to be severe and (particularly prior to the invention of antipsychotics) difficult to control; this can be disturbing to the average observer in and of itself, but it has also historically meant that people with schizophrenia are locked away in institutions, no doubt causing them to seem even more alien in the public imagination. The worst phase of this dehumanization took place before the Galvin brothers became sick; in the early 20th century, the basic rights, dignity, and agency of psychiatric patients were routinely violated by means of dangerous injections, lobotomies, and forced sterilization. A basic disregard for the humanity of those with schizophrenia persisted well into the lifetimes of the Galvin children. In Lindsay’s estimation, even several of her own siblings see their sick brothers as less than fully human.

This problem of dehumanization isn’t easily solved, in part because, as Kolker notes, the features of schizophrenia virtually by definition make it difficult for those who are unaffected to relate to those who are: “Schizophrenia’s inaccessibility may be the most destructive thing about it—the thing that keeps so many people from connecting to the people with the illness” (329). This “inaccessibility” stems not only from the condition’s most widely known symptoms—the hallucinations and delusions that can come to constitute an alternate reality for those with schizophrenia—but also subtler traits and behaviors associated with the disease, such as social withdrawal and blunted emotions. The fact that even the more dramatic symptoms of schizophrenia occur with relative frequency in psychologically “normal” individuals suggests one possible starting point for empathy and understanding: “One meta-analysis, published in 2013, found that 7.2 percent of the general population has experienced hallucinations or delusions” (321).

In making the case for normalizing schizophrenia, Kolker is careful to draw a distinction with outright denial of the disorder. The latter can serve as a barrier to empathy; at least as a young man, Michael was so certain that his brothers’ condition was on some level “a choice” that he grew frustrated when his attempts to snap them out of it went nowhere (186). Hidden Valley Road instead suggests that it’s possible to acknowledge the sometimes disabling realities of schizophrenia while still respecting the personhood of those with the condition. Notably, several of the Galvin brothers seem to fare better when approached from this perspective; Kolker at one point describes, for instance, how flashes of Donald’s old personality would emerge when Mimi would take him bird watching.

Kolker is clear that the main reason to treat those with schizophrenia respectfully and empathetically is not because doing so might, medically speaking, produce good results, but simply because they’re people. The events of Hidden Valley Road are a testimony to Kolker’s message, in the sense that they offer psychologically complex portraits of all the Galvin siblings, drawing out the differences not only between those with schizophrenia and those without it, but also amongst Donald, Jim, Brian, Joe, Matt, and Peter.