Hidden Valley Road - Inside the Mind of an American Family - Robert Kolker Page 0,137

IN THE FALL of 2015, Freedman traveled to New York for an annual symposium sponsored by the Brain and Behavior Research Foundation, the group once known as NARSAD, which raised millions of dollars for research into new mental illness treatments. The results of Freedman’s choline work had already made the rounds, and Freedman was there to receive one of the highest honors in his field: the Lieber Prize for Outstanding Achievement in Schizophrenia Research.

In New York to celebrate with him was Nancy Gary, who, along with her husband, Sam, had funded a chair in Freedman’s psychiatry department at the University of Colorado. The choline study had captured Nancy’s imagination. Years earlier, she and Sam had funded the construction of a pavilion at the university’s hospital for children with psychiatric disorders. Now, with Nancy in her eighties and Sam in his nineties, they had pledged to support Freedman’s next project, to trace children who’d received choline supplements in utero over several decades of their lives. They understood what might happen if choline really made that much of a difference: Some varieties of schizophrenia could go the way of the cleft palate. “The man is brilliant,” Nancy said. “I would support him in whatever he does, because he’s that good.”

Nancy brought a guest with her on her plane to New York—someone Freedman hadn’t seen in several years, not since she’d been living with her brother Peter in Boulder. Until Nancy reintroduced Lindsay to Freedman, the doctor had no idea of their connection. This felt like a This Is Your Life moment for him: One of his most generous benefactors had also been helping the largest family ever to have contributed to his research.

After many years in Boulder, Lindsay and Rick had moved to Vail, where Lindsay still ran her corporate event business and Rick worked as a ski instructor. Together they were raising their children—a girl, Kate, and a boy, Jack, both now teenagers. Lindsay and Nancy had fallen out of touch for several years, until one day they ran into each other on the slopes of Vail, where Jack was in the same ski group as one of Nancy’s grandsons. Nancy was thrilled to reconnect with both Lindsay and Margaret, inviting the sisters to family gatherings in Denver. Mimi did not take part in the reunion—her days of socializing with Nancy Gary were long behind her—but both sisters were excited to be back in regular touch with the family that had made such a difference in their lives.

Lindsay brought her daughter with her to the symposium in New York. Nancy put them up at the Pierre Hotel, and they all sat together to watch Freedman deliver his acceptance speech. “Now, one of the unfortunate things about doing human research on the life cycle is it’s the same as your life cycle,” Freedman said, getting a chuckle out of the audience. “I’ll be one hundred and thirty-five years old by the time we finish this study. A young investigator will have to call me in the nursing home and let me know if this works out just the way I planned.”

Afterward, when the doctor had more time to talk, Nancy beamed as she told Freedman that she’d been the one to send Lindsay to Hotchkiss—air-lifting both her and her sister out of the Galvin family home when things were at their worst.

Lindsay smiled silently, opting not to get into how technically it wasn’t Nancy who paid her Hotchkiss tuition, and that there had been three years when her sister had been pulled out of that house by the Garys and she had not. And she smiled some more as Nancy began praising Lindsay and all she’d done. Here was the one she rescued, Nancy said, the one who survived—the Girl Who Lived.

* The double-click test, remember, is not a foolproof test for schizophrenia, but a measurement of sensory gating, which is just one of an unknown number of aspects of schizophrenia. Which is why 57 percent of a control group can fail the test, but still not have schizophrenia.

MIMI

DONALD

JOHN

MICHAEL

RICHARD