Hidden Valley Road - Inside the Mind of an American Family - Robert Kolker Page 0,162

PETER

MARGARET

LINDSAY

KATE

JACK

CHAPTER 45

Lindsay’s daughter, Kate, grew up to look just like her mother—the same bright eyes, the same relaxed smile. Before having children, Lindsay and Rick, like Margaret and Wylie, had been assured by Dr. Freedman that the chances of passing along mental illness from parent to child—even in the extraordinary case of the Galvin family—were still very small. But parents always worry. And Lindsay had never been one to leave anything to chance.

When she was a little girl, Kate started to flinch and melt down in loud environments like playgrounds and classrooms. These were sensory processing issues. Kate needed occupational therapy, that much was clear. But when you have six mentally ill brothers and your child starts having temper tantrums that you can’t control, there is very little to keep you from wondering if this is the beginning of a story that will not end well.

Lindsay thought the worst. She hurled every possible solution she could think of at Kate. She sent her to therapy to learn self-soothing techniques. She bought a hammock for her room, to help her de-stress. She stocked up on essential oils to keep her calm. Was this hyper-vigilance—or just being a proactive, responsible mother? Lindsay didn’t know. But something about it worked, or at least it didn’t hurt.

Kate thrived. She took all advanced placement classes in her senior year of high school and got straight As in them all—including an art class in which she won an award for a series of works about mental health. Kate got into Berkeley but turned the offer down. Instead, in the fall of 2016, she enrolled at CU Boulder as a sophomore, where she continued to get straight As and spent her summers taking classes. She was, like her mother, a grind—not romantic in the least about childhood, eager to become a grown-up as soon as possible.

In fact, when Kate looked back on her childhood, what she recalled most vividly was how, as soon as she moved past her sensory issues and started doing well, her mother diverted her worry and attention away from her and toward her little brother, Jack.

Jack got therapy as a child, too—prophylactically, just to be on the safe side. He later told his parents that it was all the therapy and testing that made him the most tense. Jack felt put on the spot, like he was being watched all the time. He wasn’t wrong: Lindsay and Rick both knew that the Galvin disease affected neither of the girls and six of the boys. Jack was Don and Mimi Galvin’s grandson. How could his parents not be watching?

During his freshman year of high school, Jack started skipping class and hanging out in the skateboarding park with a new set of friends. He had been diagnosed with attention deficit disorder, and he’d supplemented his medication with pot. As a teenager, he was engaging in attention-seeking behavior, probably out of boredom; like their mother, Jack and Kate both were academically precocious and had trouble being challenged in a classroom.

For Lindsay and Rick, a pot-smoking male child of the Galvin family was the equivalent of a five-alarm fire. They went searching for people to advise them, and they found just two who understood both the challenges of childhood disorders and the particular issues of their family: Sam and Nancy Gary.

Just after Labor Day in 2015, Jack enrolled in Open Sky, a ninety-day, wilderness-based youth therapy program. One of the most expensive programs of its kind, Open Sky is designed to pull kids out of toxic or dysfunctional environments and reframe their perspective. Its approach is Buddhist, teaching meditation and other techniques to help young people with oppositional disorders and substance issues. The bill was paid by the Garys. “I would not let anything happen to Mary, or Margaret for that matter,” Nancy said. “I would help her do whatever she has to do.”

Short programs like Open Sky often serve as a prelude to longer-term treatments. When Jack completed his ninety days, he enrolled in a therapeutic boarding school called Montana Academy. Sam and Nancy paid for that, too—$8,300 a month for twenty-one months. Montana Academy attracts kids with a variety of substance