Hidden Valley Road - Inside the Mind of an American Family - Robert Kolker Page 0,40

and Kathy ought to try to resolve on their own.

The most remarkable thing, in hindsight at least, might have been what Don and Mimi did not say: that Jim’s brother Donald had been exhibiting strange behavior, too. They weren’t telling anyone about Donald, and they weren’t going to start with her.

After talking with them, Kathy took Jim to visit with a priest—something Don and Mimi had recommended—but nothing came of that. One night, when Jim seemed completely helpless, Kathy finally took him to the University of Colorado Hospital in Denver. He stayed for two months, then came home. Jim agreed to get counseling on an outpatient basis at Pikes Peak Mental Health Center in Colorado Springs. A doctor prescribed medication for him, and he stabilized long enough for there to be some hope.

Only now and then would he lose his temper and hit Kathy again. Once, a police officer showed up, and Kathy declined to file charges. Another time, one of their neighbors called the police, and the cop escorted Jim out of the house. But he came back eventually. For better or for worse, he always did. And in the years to come, Don and Mimi never intervened. “Except the times Jim would leave, and he would go back and live with them,” Kathy recalled, “which was fine with me. And then he would show up on my doorstep again.”

* * *

—

ON A SPRING day in 1969, all twelve Galvin children gathered together in relative peace and harmony to honor their father at a commencement ceremony at the University of Colorado. At the age of forty-four, Don had finally earned his PhD. The snapshot documenting this day is one of the only photographs in the Galvin family’s collection in which all dozen children and both parents are pictured. Don is in a cap and gown, his hair already going gray. Mimi is by his side in a cream-colored spring dress with a canary-colored scarf, her hair back. The girls, Margaret and Mary, are in front of their parents in matching white dresses, most likely handmade by their mother. And the ten boys are all together to their right, lined up in two rows, standing straight as bowling pins.

All twelve children and Mimi with Don, receiving his PhD, 1969

Jim is in the back row, second from the left, his dark hair flopped over to one side, face pale and sweaty. In the years to come, Mimi would point at this picture and say that this, one of the family’s last uncomplicatedly happy days, was the moment when she first really absorbed the idea that Jim was in deep trouble—not just a maverick, the way he’d always been, but losing his mind. Like Donald.

CHAPTER 9

1964

National Institute of Mental Health, Washington, D.C.

On a spring day during the Great Depression, in a bustling town somewhere in America, a squabbling, unhappy married couple welcomed into the world four identical girls—quadruplets. The press rushed to cover the story of the births, and the parents, whose resources were severely limited, allowed one of the local newspapers to hold a contest to name the four sisters. They also fielded offers of sponsorships from local dairies eager to use the girls to sell milk, and charged admission to visitors hoping to catch a glimpse of the babies at home.

Money did not solve the family’s problems. One of the daughters had a psychotic break when she was twenty-two. The others followed, one after another. By the time they were twenty-three, all four sisters were diagnosed with schizophrenia. And in the early weeks of 1955, these four women—quadruplet sisters, twenty-five years old with identical DNA—were referred to the National Institute of Mental Health in Washington, D.C.

The psychiatrists at NIMH understood the rare opportunity that these sisters presented. By their calculations, quadruplets with schizophrenia were likely to occur only once in every 1.5 billion births. They entered the care of David Rosenthal, a psychologist and researcher at NIMH who, thanks in part to the quadruplets, would go on to become one of the century’s most prominent schizophrenia researchers focused on the genetics of the illness.

The sisters stayed at NIMH for three years and