Hidden Valley Road - Inside the Mind of an American Family - Robert Kolker Page 0,91

made this result so exciting was that a sensory gating deficiency might well be genetic—and therefore could be traced through generations. Freedman felt as if he were on the cusp of a major breakthrough not just in understanding schizophrenia, but in treating it: What if he could isolate the gene irregularity that caused people to react this way to the double-click test? If he could do that, and if those people were indeed diagnosed with schizophrenia, then he would have proven the existence of a gene related to the illness and opened the door to a genetic remedy.

No one had ever done such a thing, though many dreamed of doing it. This was a common enough strategy for other diseases: With diabetes, for instance, there may be ten or twenty different genes in play, but the first generation of medicine treating diabetes targeted just one of those genes.

All it would take, Freedman thought, was the identification of one gene. What might help him in that search, he thought, was a large group—a family—with an extraordinarily large incidence of schizophrenia.

Where Freedman would find such a family, he had no idea. But they were out there somewhere. Probably closer than he thought.

* In 1982, Irwin Feinberg of the University of California at Davis codified this idea as the “pruning hypothesis.” Schizophrenia, he proposed, often first appears during or just after late adolescence because of “a defect in the [brain] maturational process” in which “too many, too few, or the wrong synapses are eliminated.”

DON

MIMI

DONALD

JIM

JOHN

MICHAEL

RICHARD

JOE

MARK

MATT

PETER

MARGARET

LINDSAY

CHAPTER 25

The Galvin sisters were both beautiful, with long brown hair and bright eyes and dimples and high cheekbones. When they entered their twenties, they would even model a little, for print ads and outdoorsy magazines; Lindsay posed on skis, up on a mountain ridge, her hair flowing over a purple parka. They had boyfriends, plenty of them. And drugs—pot mostly—but neither of them seemed to take much pleasure in them. Drugs were more helpful for covering up the past and trying to replace it with something else.

As little girls, the sisters had never quite connected. Margaret, before leaving home, was too busy searching for somewhere else to be to entertain a sister three years younger than she was. Lindsay, shattered by Margaret’s departure, became jealous of her older sister, angry that Margaret got to leave and she did not. But all that changed as soon as both sisters found themselves on a similar course, away from Hidden Valley Road. I love that little girl so much, Margaret wrote in her diary at college, and she must know it—we have a great sisterly relationship—it’s so unbelievable that we’re so tight.

Lindsay, in turn, wrote Margaret a poem about the connection they shared now.

She is not there to pass each day

She has become a part of me

She has built, open, found me

Looked within me, found me

Become a part of me

She climbs mountains

I succeed

She inhales the air, I exhale

Nature fills her heart up

And overflows into mine

She is a part of mountains, air and trees and plants

She is part of me

Oh us

She cries as I laugh and laughs as I cry

Her joy, my sorrow

My sorrow her joy

I feel her pain her pleasure feels for me

To be two as one in two different places together

Oh us

Many of her family members were slow in coming around to calling her by her new name. Some, like her mother, never would. But that was fine with Lindsay. The new name wasn’t for