Hidden Valley Road: Inside the Mind of an American Family (15 page)

By the late 1960s, the anti-psychiatry movement was no longer concerned just about the treatment of the mentally ill, or even about creativity or art—it was about politics, justice, and social change. In his 1967 book,
The Politics of Experience,
Laing argued that the insane people were sane all along—and that to call someone schizophrenic was, in essence, an oppressive act. “
If the human race survives, future men will, I suspect, look back on our enlightened epic as a veritable age of Darkness,” he wrote. “They will presumably be able to savor the irony of the situation with more amusement than we can extract from it. The laugh’s on us. They will see what we call ‘schizophrenia’ was one of the forms in which, often through quite ordinary people, the light began to break through the cracks in our all-too-closed minds.”

MICHAEL DECIDED THAT
the only thing wrong with him was the repressive way he had been raised. “There was some kind of suppression,” he would say. Michael believed conformity had corrosive power. He blamed practically all of his brothers’ troubles on that. But even he had no idea how to help them. To him, they seemed trapped in prisons of their own making, and no one, not even he, had the keys to the locks.

In 1972, the authors Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, in their Marx-meets-Freud mashup,
Anti-Oedipus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia,
called the family structure a metaphor for authoritarian society. Both the family and society, they wrote, kept their members under control, repressed their desires, and decided they were insane if they worked against the organizing principles of the larger group.

Schizophrenia had become a metaphor now. The theoreticians had left the idea of illness behind entirely, fixating completely on revolution. Families like the Galvins, meanwhile, were also left behind—collateral damage in a culture war—waiting for someone who actually knew how to help.

1967

Dorado Beach, Puerto Rico

At a tropical hotel, under a blazing late-June sun, David Rosenthal—the researcher from the National Institute of Mental Health who had studied the Genain quadruplets and concluded that heredity and the environment must be working together—joined some of the most prominent thinkers in psychiatry at an academic summit about the continuing debate over nature and nurture and schizophrenia. Nothing like this had happened before, but a meeting seemed necessary now.

By the 1960s, the Thorazine revolution had raised the stakes in the debate. To those favoring genetics, or nature, the impact of neuroleptic drugs proved, at the very least, that schizophrenia was a biological process. But for the therapists on the nurture side, Thorazine and the like were just symptom suppressors—glorified tranquilizers—and there could be no substitute for probing the unconscious impulses that must have caused the disease. This conference, then, was a cautious attempt to break the impasse. While Rosenthal, as NIMH’s chief researcher of schizophrenia, was one of the event’s organizers, the psychotherapy camp was well represented, too—by, among others, Theodore Lidz, the Yale psychiatrist and pioneer in the study of family dynamics. The conference title, “The Transmission of Schizophrenia,” was diplomatically worded;
transmission
was thought not to tip the scales in favor of one side or the other, the biologists or the talk therapists. Even the setting—Dorado Beach, Puerto Rico—seemed meant to ease tension and, just maybe, help build a lasting peace.

In the three years since he had published his book on the Genain family, Rosenthal had been approaching the nature-nurture question from a different angle. Toward the end of his work with the quadruplets, he had begun to see all too clearly the limitations of studying siblings who grew up in the same environment. Instead, he started to wonder what would happen to a child with a family history of schizophrenia if you raised that child away from her family environment. Who, in other words, would be more likely to develop schizophrenia: a genetically vulnerable child who grew up among her blood relatives, or a similar child who had been adopted and raised by people who did not share her genes? Now, in Dorado Beach, he was ready to announce the first of his findings. Here, it seemed to him, was proof that nature, not nurture, won the argument.

Rosenthal and Seymour Kety, NIMH’s director of research, found a sample population for
their study in Denmark—a nation that many genetics researchers had come to adore, thanks to that country’s excellent medical record-keeping and willingness to contribute those records to scientific research. They were able to search the records for people who were adopted and then developed schizophrenia. Then they dug into the health records of the families who had adopted them, searching for correlations—to eliminate the possibility that an outsized number of the mentally ill adoptees happened to be adopted into families with a lot of mental illness. Finally, they compared their adoptees to a control group—schizophrenia patients who grew up in their own families. The end goal: See which scenario, nature or nurture, seemed to produce a greater incidence of schizophrenia.

It wasn’t even close. At Dorado Beach, Rosenthal declared that biology, not proximity to people with a history of schizophrenia, appeared to explain nearly every single documented instance of the illness. Where you grew up, or the people who raised you, seemed to have nothing to do with it at all. On the whole, families with a history of schizophrenia seemed more than four times as likely as the rest of the population to pass along the condition to future generations—even if, as ever, the illness rarely passed straight from parent to child.

This conclusion spoke volumes about how the disease wandered and meandered through families—and that, alone, would have been stunning. But in their analysis of adoption cases, Rosenthal and Kety also found no evidence to support the opposing, “nurture” view—that schizophrenia could be transmitted from a mentally ill parent to an adopted child who did not share the adoptive family’s genetic history. Schizophrenia, he concluded, simply can’t be imposed or inflicted on someone who is not genetically predisposed to develop the condition.

Rosenthal thought he’d finally settled the argument—and, for good measure, discredited the idea that bad parenting created the disease. At the conference, he found at least one kindred spirit: a young psychiatrist named Irving Gottesman, who, with his coauthor, James Shields, had just published
a study that reached a very similar conclusion. Their completed work, “A Polygenic Theory of Schizophrenia,” argued that schizophrenia could be caused by not just one gene but a chorus of many genes, working in tandem with, or perhaps activated by, various environmental factors. Their proof involved twins, but with a twist: Instead of conceiving the illness as the handiwork of one dominant gene or two recessive genes, they proposed that there exists a “liability threshold” for genetic illnesses—a theoretical point beyond which some people might develop the illness. The causes that would collaborate to bring someone close to this threshold might be genetic or environmental—a family history of the disease and a traumatic childhood, perhaps. But without the critical mass of these factors, a person might live their entire life with a genetic legacy of schizophrenia and not become symptomatic.

Gottesman and Shields’s theory became known as the “diathesis-stress hypothesis”—nature, activated by nurture. Decades later, their work would be seen as phenomenally prescient, the real beginning of the end of the great argument that had stretched back to Freud and Jung. Seen one way, the diathesis-stress hypothesis might even be interpreted as a compromise between the nature and nurture camps: If the theory held, then it seemed logical that Thorazine and other neuroleptic drugs, regardless of how they functioned, could only be one part of any lasting treatment of the illness.

But at Dorado Beach, the idea met with the usual resistance. Even one of Rosenthal’s own colleagues from NIMH argued instead that
a childhood spent in chaos or poverty could be one cause: The larger the city, new studies suggested, the more social class had a relationship to schizophrenia. But that same colleague acknowledged a causality question: Does poverty cause schizophrenia, or does congenital mental illness throw families into poverty?

The schizophrenogenic mother was back, too. A speaker from the University of Helsinki used his time to pillory mothers “
embittered, aggressive and devoid of natural warmth” and “anxious and insecure, often with obsessive features.” And yet the Helsinki therapist could not explain why, if the mother was to blame, some children of the same mother fall ill with schizophrenia while others do not. He had only his belief that bad mothering must be the answer.

Then came Theodore Lidz with his family dynamics explanation: A child can fail to mature adequately, he declared, if “
he perceives very faulty nurturance in his first few years, or he is seriously traumatized.” The Yale psychiatrist cited no data to support this position, just his personal work with families affected by schizophrenia.

A week went by like this until, on July 1, the conference’s last day, it fell on Rosenthal, the organizer, to sum up the state of the field. He treaded lightly, opening with a joke. The heredity-environment controversy in schizophrenia, he said, reminded him of a “
white-shirted French duel,” in which the duelers “managed to avoid each other so thoroughly that they never exposed themselves even to the danger of catching cold.” Remaining diplomatic, Rosenthal said that he saw it as a positive sign that everyone was able to come together at all. “This week we have been able to sit here day after day and listen to people expounding ideas both compatible and contrary to our own,” he said, “and far from catching any dread affliction, the only thing we have caught, I hope, is the spirit of earnest concern about the other man’s data and opinions.”

There would be no real reconciliation anytime soon. Three years later, the chief of the family studies section at NIMH, David Reiss, also a participant at Dorado Beach, would still be referring to the geneticists and the environmentalists as “
warring camps.” Families like the Galvins, meanwhile, continued to live at the mercy of a mental health profession still caught up in a debate that came nowhere close to helping them. But there was a good reason for this impasse, one that Rosenthal acknowledged in his closing remarks—a mystery that would take another generation to even start to be solved.

The good news, Rosenthal said, was that “all the reasonable doubts that had been raised in past years have now been answered, and
the case for heredity has held up convincingly.” This conference, he predicted, “could be remembered as the time when it was definitely and openly agreed by our foremost students of family interaction that heredity is implicated in the development of schizophrenia.”

But that concession only raised a more puzzling question. “
In the strictest sense, it is not schizophrenia that is inherited,” he said. “It is clear that not everybody who harbors the genes develops schizophrenia.” Schizophrenia was definitely genetic, but not always passed down. And so they all were still left wondering: How could this be?

“
The genes that are implicated,” Rosenthal said, “produce an effect whose nature we have not yet been able to fathom.”

Nothing may have been more important to Mimi than a flawless Thanksgiving. She spent all day on the meal, and beforehand she usually made a gingerbread house in time for it to be on display. In recent years, as Mimi had been forced to look past the food fights and dish-towel whippings between the brothers, each November still filled her with hope, offering one more chance for a beautiful experience.

This year, 1972, Joseph and the other three hockey boys were all still at home with the two girls. Donald, too, was home from Pueblo. As the day wore on, Jim and Kathy and baby Jimmy joined them, along with Brian and Michael and Richard. Only John was away, with his wife Nancy’s family. With this many Galvins in one place, the chances for an explosion were high. The sparring started early and continued up until mealtime—the boys sniping at one another over who took how much to eat, who did their share of cleaning up, who was a pansy, who was an asshole.

You took too much!

What are you going to do about it?

You didn’t leave me any

Too bad for you

Move over

You stink

You suck

Fuck you

You asshole

It’s not my turn to do the dishes

You never help around here

Pansy

You are such a girl

Take it outside

Grow up

Margaret braced herself. On Thanksgiving, it fell on her, now ten years old, to iron the linens and place the silver and the napkins on the table. These chores kept her close to her mother and away from the boys. Keeping with the family tradition, there were assigned seats. Don, the patriarch, was at the east end of the table, with Donald to his immediate right, where he could be closely monitored. Mimi’s place was on the table’s north side, with a view out the window, with chess-playing Mark and introspective Joe nearby, and rebellious Peter closest of all, so that she could keep an eye on him. Margaret always sat at an end because she was left-handed, and little Mary, still just seven, not far away. Matt sat across from them, near Jim and Kathy. But they weren’t seated yet this year when the worst happened.

Jim and Donald were more at odds than ever. They fought every time they were in the same room now. Jim looked at Donald and saw a weakened foe, someone he could finally defeat; he also might have seen an unwelcome image of himself, suffering from delusions just as he was. Either way, Donald had to be expunged, and Jim had to be the one to do it. Donald, meanwhile, looked at Jim and saw a pest who never seemed to go away. He’d been humiliated enough—by a wife who would not agree to stay married to him, by brothers who did not obey him the way he’d once hoped. For Jim to walk through the door and assume that he was in charge was, for Donald, the final insult.

So they fought—wrestling, like in the old days, in the living room, the usual spot. Donald used to have the advantage, but not anymore; Donald had been in the hospital, and was weakened by neuroleptic drugs. They seemed evenly matched now. As someone got little Mary safely out of bounds, the fight escalated.

It wasn’t long before they could not be confined to one room.

The living room at Hidden Valley Road opened out to the dining room. If you wanted to take a fight out into the backyard, you would have to cross through the dining room to get there. On this Thanksgiving, the brothers started to move in that direction. The only thing in their way was the table.

Donald ran to the far side of the dining room. He lifted up the table, with Jim on the other side, coming closer. In Margaret’s memory, he tipped the table over onto its side, and everything on it came crashing down onto the floor. In Mark’s, Donald actually picked up the whole table and threw it at Jim. In either case, Mimi’s perfect Thanksgiving was destroyed.

Mimi looked at the house now, at the table keeled over, at the plates and silver everywhere, the linens crumpled in a heap. There may have been no better, more precise manifestation of her deepest fears than this, no clearer way of illustrating the way she felt just then—that every good thing she had done, all the work, all the attention to detail and love, yes, love, for her family was in pieces. There was no sugar-coating this. Her mother, Billy, if she’d been there to see it, would have known without a doubt how bad things were—how profoundly Mimi had failed. Anyone would.

She turned her back on everyone and walked back into the kitchen. That was when everyone heard another noise, softer this time: the gingerbread house, being smashed to bits by the woman who had made it.

“You boys don’t deserve this,” Mimi said, in tears.

Running almost as a dividing line between the Galvin and Skarke properties at the end of Hidden Valley Road was a small trail that had gone unused, seemingly, for years. One day, the Skarkes bought a Honda 90 minibike. Carolyn Skarke, who was about Margaret’s age, would ride up the trail between her house and the Galvins’ house to visit one of her other friends. The trail was technically on the Skarkes’ property, but no one had ever talked much about it until Carolyn started to use the motorbike on it.

One day, Carolyn was riding down the hill on the trail and had almost made it to the bottom and home when, by a stroke of luck, she noticed a cable, thin as a wire, strung across the path, blocking access to the Hidden Valley Road cul-de-sac. She was able to veer away from the cable at the last second, just before she got clotheslined. Frightened nearly to death, Carolyn told her mother, who, as soon as she determined what had happened, marched out of her house, past the trail, and toward the Galvin house, searching for Mimi.

Carolyn remembered watching the two women, who had always been civil, standing outside on that little road, facing off like a fuming baseball manager and a stubborn umpire.

“Why did you do this?” her mother shouted.

“I don’t like the noise,” Mimi said.

That was all that Carolyn’s mother could take.

“We put up with all the
sheriff’s
cars
coming to your house?
And you don’t like a Honda 90??
”

Everyone knew something was happening at the Galvins’. Their closest neighbors pulled out of their driveways with care because they knew there was a good chance that Donald would be loitering on the cul-de-sac, offering prayers to everyone who drove by. The younger boys were becoming well known, too. Matt got caught taking things from a neighbor’s house when the family came home in time to see him. And Peter had developed a haunted, menacing look that some of the girls would comment on. Soon enough, it was more than his looks that worried them. Once Peter stuffed a girl’s face in the snow and kept it there until she couldn’t breathe, then insisted it had all been just a joke.

Practically no one visited anymore. The Hefley kids weren’t allowed to come and play there. And anytime anything happened in the neighborhood—if someone’s mailbox was vandalized, or a house broken into—plenty of people were ready to blame it on the Galvins.

Mimi made a practice of denying everything. “My boys would not do anything like that.” No one believed her. She was silently drowning, left alone to manage a situation for which she had no tools and no training and no natural aptitude. Both she and Don had taken to falconry because it made sense. Their children did not make sense. They had tried to instill procedures and routines to train their children. But children aren’t falcons.

What did change was that Mimi became embittered. If a child stepped out of line now, she was no longer the happy warrior—she was the angry general. Her frequent refrain to Michael or Matt or Richard or Peter, whenever they disobeyed, was, “You’re just like Donald.” She might not have realized how lethal that phrase could be. To accuse the boys of being like Gookoid was probably the worst thing she could say—a reminder that they shared blood with this man, this stranger, who was turning their home into an unbearable place, who was ruining all of their lives.

THERE WERE STRETCHES,
a week or a month, when Donald would show flashes of lucidity, and even hold on to jobs—dog catcher, land salesman, construction worker. In 1971, he was switched to a related antipsychotic drug, Stelazine, and his outlook dramatically changed. “He realized in the space of one weekend that much of his spiritual musing was simply his imagination and not reality,” a Pueblo psychiatrist named Louis Nemser wrote. “He described how his desire to build a church was related to him being more like his ex-wife’s father—and the magical wish that if [Donald] were more like him, she would take him back.”

His progress lasted several months, until, in April 1972, after yet another failed mission to see Jean in Oregon, Donald visited a priest at the Catholic chancery to talk about his marriage. The priest told Donald in no uncertain terms that his union with Jean was now null and void in the eyes of the Church—a pronouncement that sent him straight back to Pueblo, where, Dr. Nemser sympathetically reported, “it seemed like his tears would never stop.”

The psychiatrist, taking a page from Freud and Frieda Fromm-Reichmann, seemed to believe that Donald somehow had the ability to climb out of this state on his own—“It seemed that Donald had chosen to become psychotic again,” Nemser wrote—and so he decided the staff should do what they could to help Donald choose wisely. They went out of their way to empathize with him, holding his hand and telling him how sad they were for him. The strategy did have some effect on Donald. “He began to express himself more freely about Jean,” he wrote, “saying that he still really cared for her and hoped that she might one day contact him, but that he refused to contact her anymore since every time he did this, it ended in disaster for himself.”

Donald worked his way toward being discharged again, finding a job lead while out on a one-day furlough. He would be a vacuum cleaner salesman—good money, flexible hours, everything he could reasonably want. He got out on May 2, 1972, and the cycle started again. This time his behavior became so menacing—threatening both of his parents’ lives, they said—that Don and Mimi petitioned a local court to order Donald back into Pueblo in August. When the staff decided to place him in seclusion, he grabbed the keys from the door, pushed the attendant into the seclusion room, and locked him in. Donald didn’t try to escape, however. He just sat there outside the room, saying he wanted to teach the attendant a lesson. The doctors gave him a high dose of Thorazine and a smaller dose of Stelazine. Gradually, he climbed out of psychosis again, and he was discharged on August 28 with a guarded prognosis.

The following spring, 1973, Donald was admitted to Oregon State Hospital after trying once more to see Jean. His intake notes described him as “very uncooperative and unmanageable” and “both confused and disoriented”—saying, for example, that he had no memory of ever being at this hospital, despite this being his third time there.

BETWEEN HOSPITAL STAYS,
Donald was home in time for another family wedding, this one a less pleasant affair than John’s a year earlier. Richard, son number six, had been the Galvin family’s schemer—ambitious and gutsy, entrepreneurial, and more than a little willing to bend the rules to get what he wanted. As a freshman at Air Academy High, he found a way to sneak into the school commissary by applying chewing gum to the lock of a door. For months, he and his friend stole jeans and food and anything else they could get their hands on. Once he was caught, he was suspended for a year and forced to go to another high school, which had infuriated his father. “You’re going to mess up if you keep going this route,” Don would say.

In 1972, Richard was back at Air Academy High, completing his senior year, when he scored the winning goal in the state hockey championship. After the game, a girl from the opposing team’s cheerleading squad asked Richard if he was going to the victory party. He was, and she got pregnant that night.

Their wedding took place a few months later, somewhat under duress, at the Garden of the Gods, the geological marvel in Colorado Springs. Richard was high on mushrooms during the ceremony. His friend Dustin played “The Times They Are a-Changin’ ” on the guitar. Still, all seemed to be going smoothly until a voice cut through everything. Donald had climbed to the top of the rocks. Now he was shouting:
“I’m not allowing this marriage! This marriage is not in the truth of God!”

Jim and Don subdued Donald, and the ceremony went on.

IN MAY
1973, Don and Mimi agreed to take Donald back from Pueblo one more time. This time he lasted four months.

On September 1, a member of the sheriff’s office brought Donald back to the state hospital on another “confine and treat” order, requested by his parents. Donald told the intake staff that he’d taken his Stelazine, as instructed, but when he asked Mimi for some Benadryl, she refused to give it to him; she was worried it would make him too sleepy to drive safely. That was when Donald lost control, grabbed her by the throat, and began to shake her. Yet again, it took a few of the other boys to keep Donald from strangling his own mother.