The Galvins are not a family like any other. If we look at them in the photos, they are the perfect embodiment of the American way of life of the 60s. But, if we delve into their history, we see that, of the twelve brothers they were, six were schizophrenic. The reporter Robert Kolker – regular signature of media such as The New York Times – has investigated the case in depth and the result is the book The Boys of Hidden Valley Road (Periscope/Sexto Piso) which alternates the family history with the explanation of the developments scientists about the disease.
In fact, the book can be read in crescendo as if it were a psychological horror novel. “The facts are so scary – admits the author, visiting Barcelona – that the scientific chapters serve the reader to take breaks”.
Schizophrenia, a genetic or social disease? The reporter advances like a detective in search of the answer, at the same pace as the scientists of the time. “I focus on two different researchers who devoted themselves to the subject. The analysis of the drama of the Galvin family has helped enormously to understand the disease, which some already associated with genetics and others with social factors such as dominant parents. Think that it is statistically very difficult for a coincidence of this type to occur”.
It is horrifying how these patients were treated not so long ago, giving them cocaine, injecting them with animal blood, lobotomizing them or inducing them into a coma. “When the Galvin children got sick, mental hospitals in the United States were closing, it was thought that medicine would replace hospitals, which obviously did not happen. The federal government and governors like that of California, Ronald Reagan, closed these centers for good reasons, because many atrocities were committed there. But then where could these people go? It was said that they would make substitute mental health centers but they never put in a ral, we are still waiting for them.” So the streets were filled with mentally ill people, sleeping rough (see San Francisco and many other big cities). Today, “it is still the main problem of serious mental illnesses, which are invisible because they end up being associated with poverty, with people who self-medicate with drugs and mix them with alcohol, we see it as a social problem, of poverty, we don’t analyze that there is a mental disorder behind it and the stigma is getting bigger and bigger”.
The book is a shellacking to the idea of ??the happy American family. We enter the privacy of the Galvins on Hidden Valley Road in Colorado Springs, where they have lived since 1963. Father Don, an Air Force captain, is often away; the mother is a charm for the neighborhood but very authoritarian inside and curiously so fond of falconry that her little birds continuously fly over the neighborhood. “In a large family, the most difficult thing is to differentiate yourself, to achieve your own identity – explains Kolker – imagine if six siblings have schizophrenia: will you be the next to fall? Some of them attack you with great violence, and this affects your development”.
The first case was that of the firstborn, Donald, who did things like break ten plates, torture cats, wash his hair with beer, throw himself on a bonfire, or attempt suicide, before calling out that the CIA watched over and even shot at him. How does the author show violent or sexual abuse scenes? “I did not want to insinuate that schizophrenia was the cause of pedophilia because no study confirms this. I wanted to focus more on the consequences than on the fact of the abuse, otherwise it would have been sensationalist”.
There are findings such as characters who change their names and identities. “A sister, Mary, is uprooted from there by a family and taken away, she will be called Lindsay, as if her whole life before was a nightmare… but it wasn’t, she felt abandoned by her family and, growing up, she kept asking herself why they sent her to another home. It looked like a Charles Dickens story, with an orphan discovering things about herself.”
Some brothers experiment with drugs. “There are those who say that people vulnerable to mental illness should not use drugs because they cause psychotic outbreaks, in this family this is true in some cases, but not in others. Michael didn’t have the disease but, because he took drugs, they sent him to the hospital anyway, which made him very angry.”
A friend of Patrick Radden Keefee, a reporter for The New Yorker who has published The Empire of Pain, about the Sackler family, the pharmaceutical millionaires behind the opioid addiction crisis in the US, Kolker says that “we talk about it a lot, of these subjects, in the 60s the entire scientific world believed that they would find a pill capable of curing any psychological illness. This idea of ??the pill as a panacea is absurd, an overconfidence in pharmacological solutions”. He admits that “medication has changed the lives of some people for the better, including some Galvin brothers, but they have many side effects, they are the same pills from 50 years ago, we have to go further”.
What has been the reaction of the brothers who remain alive? “Some – not all – read the book months before it came out. For them, the important thing was to stay calm, they saw that it was not too sensationalistic, but an attempt to understand. They are real people, with difficulties, they don’t respond to the unfair stereotypes we have, you could talk to them without it being a horror movie”.
Influenced by essays such as Todas las schizofrenias (Sexto Piso) by Esmé Weijun Wang or the books of Oliver Sacks, referring to fiction, Kolker mentions Psychosis by Robert Bloch and says that “my book argues with Someone Flew Over from Ken Lesey’s cuckoo’s nest, because he transforms a mental illness into a social problem about who fits into society and who doesn’t, while I speak, bluntly, about a sick family.”
