C8| Saturday/Sunday, April 4 - 5, 2020 **** THE WALL STREET JOURNAL.
The four youngest boys were superb
hockey players and teammates. Only
one, Mark, evaded psychosis, but he, as
Mr. Kolker observes, “was given to
moments of heavy sentiment, often
prone to crying at the drop of a hat
when reminiscing about the old days.
He may not have caught the family
illness, but it had essentially marooned
him. Joe and Matt and Peter were his
teammates, the ones he spent every
waking moment with as a boy. They
were the hockey brothers, and every-
one else in the family had been little
more than background players. Once
they had their psychotic breaks, one
after the other, it was as if the three
most important people in the world
to Mark had fallen off the face of
the earth.”
Late in life, their mother, Mimi, told
Mr. Kolker how she and their father
were devastated when doctors they
visited in the 1960s and 1970s blamed
them for the illness afflicting their
children: “It made us feel terrible,” she
said. “It traumatized us....Itjust
freezes you, because you don’t know
what to do. You have nobody to talk
to. We were an exemplary family.
Everybody used us as a model. And
when it first happened we were
mortally ashamed.”
Mr. Kolker has constructed “Hidden
Valley Road” cleverly, dividing the book
into 45 brief chapters, most concerning
the Galvins. But a background narrative
traces how biological psychiatry trans-
formed our understanding of schizo-
ContinuedfrompageC7
people free of the illness. When Mr.
Freedman tested the Galvin family, he
found that those with the disorder did
poorly on the test, whereas the healthy
members did fine.
Mr. Kolker describes all this science
well, without getting lost in technical
details. His chief achievement, how-
ever, is an absorbing narrative of
persistence, adjustment and exhilara-
tion—followed by repeated disap-
pointment when discoveries fail to
replicate or yield effective treatments.
In recent years, scientists have de-
ployed emerging technologies in
computer science, neuroimaging and
genome sequencing to solve schizo-
phrenia. The more they have learned,
the more they have realized how com-
plex the puzzle is.
“Hidden Valley Road” vividly con-
veys not only the inner experience of
schizophrenia but its effects on the
families whose members are afflicted.
Growing up with parents under-
standably preoccupied by their
struggle to cope with six very ill and
often violent brothers, the unaffected
children often felt emotionally
abandoned. Mr. Kolker depicts their
confusion and terror as they ex-
perience their brothers successively
breaking down before their eyes, and
he captures the heartbreak and help-
lessness of parents who are losing
their children to mental illness.
In many ways, the Galvin family has
been a marvel of resilience. Although
both Don and Mimi are now dead,
several of their surviving healthy
children seem to have found peace and
meaning in their lives, despite often
having been haunted by the fear that
psychosis might strike them next.Mr. McNally, professor of psychology
and director of clinical training at
Harvard University, is the author of
“What Is Mental Illness?”A Family
Battles
Schizophrenia
BOOKS
‘The primary goal of the American Revolution [was] the establishment in principle of the existing conditions of liberty.’—BERNARD BAILYN
FIVE BESTON THE AMERICAN REVOLUTION
The Book of Abigail & John
Edited by L.H. Butterfield et al. (1975)
1
The letters of the Adamses are the best
way to access what once was termed
“the domestic history of the American
Revolution.” And what letters they are.
This compilation covers the years from
1762 to 1784, and encompasses the writers’
reactions to public events and family crises
alike. John predicted that the vote for
independence on July 2 would be “celebrated,
by succeeding Generations, as the great
anniversary Festival,” with “Pomp and
Parade,” accompanied by “Bells Bonfires and
Illuminations from one End of this Continent
to the other.” After learning of the victory
at Saratoga in October 1777, Abigail offered
“praise to the Supreem Being who hath so
remarkably deliverd our Enimies into our
Hands.” That same year, Abigail sadly
reported the stillbirth of “a very fine Babe,”
but noted with relief that she had been
spared. The correspondences start with
playful courtship missives (who knew the
dour John could address Abigail as “Miss
Adorable” and claim recompense for “two
or three millions” of kisses?) and continues
with Abigail’s famous disagreement with her
husband about the legal status of married
women, in which she reminded him to
“Remember the Ladies.” The collection ends
with their much-anticipated postwar reunion
in London. Living apart for extended periods
was unfortunate for them, but fortunate
for us, since the resulting correspondence
makes an invaluable contribution to our
understanding of the era’s history.
The Ideological Origins
of the American Revolution
By Bernard Bailyn (1967)
2
More than half a century old and
still in print, this book traces the
ideas set forth in pamphlets written
by Americans during the 1760s and
’70s—views dismissed by some historians as
“propaganda” meant to conceal the fact that
the colonists’ true motives for rebellion were
economic and financial. But Bernard Bailyn
argues that what seemed over-the-top
rhetoric about Britain wanting to “enslave”
Americans made perfect sense to colonists
steeped in the literature of the 18th-century
English opposition to a corrupt monarchy.
Mr. Bailyn contends that “the primary goal
of the American Revolution...wasnotthe
overthrow or even the alteration of the
existing social order but the preservation of
political liberty.” Americans, he asserts, saw
that liberty as under attack from a British
ministry seeking to profit at the colonists’
expense. Many historians disagreed with that
assertion in 1967, and many disagree with it
a strikingly unfamiliar, if compelling, view
of a war we tend to regard very differently.American Scripture: Making the
Declaration of Independence
By Pauline Maier (1997)4
Pauline Maier’s celebrated study
begins with her musings about the
extraordinary protections the National
Archives now accord to the faded
handwritten copy of the Declaration of
Independence that for years lay neglected
in drawers or hung unnoticed on the walls
of government offices. She tells a dual tale—
one of the “original making” of the Declaration,
the other of its “remaking into the document
most Americans know, remember, and revere.”
Thomas Jefferson’s initial draft underwent
repeated revisions by other congressmen.
These were not merely stylistic changes like
the substitution of “certain unalienable rights”
for Jefferson’s “inherent and inalienable rights,”
but also the excision of fully one-quarter of his
original text, including, most notably, a long
passage criticizing the slave trade. Abraham
Lincoln’s Gettysburg Address later helped to
cement our sense of the Declaration as the
basis for what Lincoln termed “a new birth
of freedom” and as what Maier describes
as a document that speaks “both for the
revolutionaries and for their descendants.”The Common Cause:
Creating Race and Nation
in the American Revolution
By Robert G. Parkinson (2016)5
In “The Common Cause,” Robert
Parkinson argues that the 37 weekly
newspapers published in cities from
New Hampshire to Georgia advanced
the cause of American unity during the war
through the propagation of “war stories”
that demonized Indians and enslaved people.
Patriot newspaper editors, Mr. Parkinson
asserts, presented both groups as internal
enemies, potentially or actually aligned with
the redcoats. Stories about planned slave
revolts started to appear in the papers
as soon as the war began. One tale that
appeared in every American newspaper in
mid-1777 lamented the killing by Indians of
Jane McCrea, ironically the fiancée of a
Loyalist, who would be memorialized in
articles, poems and eventually a painting as
a “victim of the ruthless British and their
savage allies.” Mr. Parkinson challenges
modern Americans to recognize that a
Revolution publicly proclaiming that
“all men are created equal” nevertheless
gave rise to the exclusion of many residents
of the colonies from the body politic as
revolutionaries conceived it.Mary Beth Norton
The author, most recently, of ‘1774: The Long Year of Revolution’
phrenia during the years when the ill-
ness repeatedly struck the Galvins. Mr.
Kolker organizes that scientific story
around renowned psychiatric research-
ers, including some whose careers
intersected with the Galvin family.
When the first son became psy-
chotic, many clinicians still attributed
schizophrenia to the warped maternal
instincts of “schizophrenogenic” moth-
ers whose controlling and emotionally
rejecting style supposedly caused their
children to flee into madness. These
experts also believed in the curative
powers of traditional psychotherapyas the route to recovery. No convincing
data supported either notion, and Don
and Mimi, to their credit, pushed back
against doctors who implied that Mimi
caused her children’s illness.
A major breakthrough in the treat-
ment of schizophrenia was the seren-
dipitous discovery of chemical com-
pounds that had calming and anti-
psychotic properties. Pharmacologists
synthesized a series of medications,
beginning with Thorazine in the early
1950s, that could attenuate auditory
hallucinations, delusions and agitated
behavior in people with the illness.
Although the drugs left many symptoms
untouched, such as social withdrawal
and maladjustment, they were far more
effective than traditional psychotherapy
in managing schizophrenia.
These medications figure promi-
nently in the Galvin story. The drugs
were helpful to their sons, despiteThe young men’s
siblings felt confusion
and terror as their
brothers broke down
before their eyes.now, but in the years since it was published
no one has been able to ignore Mr. Bailyn’s
brilliant and elegantly crafted book.Oliver Wiswell
By Kenneth Roberts (1940)3
This thoroughly researched, skillfully
written historical novel is, to my
knowledge, the only fictional account
of the American Revolution narrated
from a Loyalist’s point of view and published
in the United States. It tells the story of
Oliver Wiswell, a youth from Milton, Mass.—
an aspiring historian who writes a work
titled “Civil War in America” that describes,as he puts it, the “idiocy” of both sides,
but especially that of the British generals
and ministers, who would not listen to
knowledgeable Loyalists like himself. He
evacuates to Halifax, Nova Scotia, with the
redcoat army in March 1776 and accompanies
William Howe’s forces at the Battle of
Brooklyn. After the war, he becomes a leader
of the Loyalist settlements in New Brunswick.
The novel accurately reflects Loyalists’
documented reactions to the people and
events it chronicles. Wiswell detests Benjamin
Franklin, for example, whom he describes as
an “unscrupulous” forger who disseminated
“bare-faced lies” meant to destroy the
reputation of anyone antagonistic to the rebel
cause. To most Americans today this will beYANKEE DOODLEA print based on Archibald Willard’s ‘The Spirit of ’76,’ a painting first
exhibited at the 1876 Centennial Exhibition in Philadelphia.VCG WILSON/CORBIS VIA GETTY IMAGESunpleasant side effects, such as in-
voluntary movements of the tongue,
lips and jaw. But the treatments did
not prevent the repeated hospitaliza-
tions of the sons with schizophrenia.
Even during periods of lucidity, they
often struggled to hold jobs and to
have satisfactory relationships with
other people. None had a truly satisfac-
tory, lasting recovery.
As Mr. Kolker recounts, biological
psychiatrists and clinical psychologists
working outside the psychoanalytic
tradition sought clues to causality
in genetics. They found that a vul-
nerability to developing schizophrenia
ran in families as a function of genetic
relatedness. For example, nearly 50%
of identical twin pairs were concordant
for the disorder, whereas fraternal
twins and other siblings had about a
6% to 17% risk of developing it. The
risk in the general population was
about 0.7%.
Importantly, adopted-away children
of mothers who have schizophrenia
still fell ill at higher rates than did
adopted-away children of mothers
without schizophrenia, and this was
especially true when genetically at-risk
children were reared in an adverse
rather than a healthy adoptive family
environment. Taken together, the data
supported a theory (referred to as
the diathesis-stress model) that a
genetic liability for schizophrenia is
a necessary risk factor, which is ampli-fied by environmental stressors that
alone are insufficient to cause the
disorder.
One bright spot in the Galvins’ story
occurred when the family crossed
paths with scientists aiming to solve
the riddle of schizophrenia. Lynn
DeLisi, a psychiatrist at the National
Institute of Mental Health in Bethesda,
Md., was seeking families with multiple
members—some with schizophrenia,
some not. When she learned about the
Galvins, she flew to Colorado to recruit
them for her research. Her aim was to
assess the genetic profiles of family
members who had the disorder and
those who did not, aiming to identify
biomarkers that could illuminate
etiology and suggest more-effective
pharmacologic interventions. Mimi and
Don were delighted to participate, and
they convinced their children to do so,
too. The Galvins sat for interviews,
completed questionnaires and provided
blood samples for DNA analyses. Their
DNA subsequently figured in the
growing genetic database that enabled
researchers to identify genes impli-
cated in schizophrenia.
Others researchers also studied the
family over the years, including Robert
Freedman, a professor of psychiatry
at the University of Colorado. He had
devised a laboratory test that assessed
how well individuals gate out ir-
relevant stimuli; those with schizo-
phrenia failed to do this as well asFAMILY HISTORYThe Galvins at Hidden Valley Road, mid-1960s.
GALVIN FAMILY