The result, a heartfelt love letter to the outdoors, feels especially urgent in these days of confinement.

Reading that soil bacteria acts as an organic antidepressant, she decided to investigate the link between nature and mental health. ‘We are human,’ writes Kolker, ‘because the people around us make us human.’ĭigging in her first allotment, Lucy Jones noticed that her baby daughter liked eating soil. This grippingly told and brilliantly reported book is also a tribute to the relationships that helped to hold them together. On the flip side, there are those who kept on working regardless of the difficulties and whose discoveries could help other families like the Galvins. Progress in treating or preventing schizophrenia has been held back by the complexity of the disease, inflexible researchers and drug companies reluctant to invest in a cure that may not be profitable. The latter is a story that exposes the best and the worst of medicine. A family as large as this one, with so many sufferers, provided an incredible resource for exploring the genetic origins of schizophrenia.Ĭould the Galvins help to settle the nature/nurture question? Hidden Valley Road tells two stories with care and compassion: first, the story of the Galvins, and second, the story of efforts to understand schizophrenia. The available treatments were ineffective, or came with dreadful side effects, or (in the case of therapy that claimed mothers caused the illness) sometimes just cruel.īut as terrible as the Galvins’ situation was, it also offered hope for those trying to make sense of the disease. The expected roughhousing between so many boys tipped over into something much worse, and the Galvins’ lives were littered with the most appalling acts, with girls and women often the victims. Surrounded by delusions, life in the Galvin home was often disturbing, especially for the two young girls: it is not easy to grow up with an older brother who prays to you as the Virgin Mary.Īnd it was violent. But, explains Robert Kolker, the split isn’t within the affected person but between them and the world: ‘It is about walling oneself off from consciousness, first slowly and then all at once, until you are no longer accessing anything that others accept as real.’ One researcher said the Galvins ‘could be the most mentally-ill family in America’ – still notable but in a wholly unwelcome way.įew diseases are as frightening as schizophrenia, which has been sorely abused by horror-movie ideas of the split personality. Mother Mimi was a devoted homemaker (above with two daughters and ten sons, six of whom suffered from schizophrenia)īeginning in the mid-Sixties, six of the Galvin boys in turn were diagnosed with schizophrenia. All rights reserved.Father Don had an admirable military background. Use of this site indicates your consent to the Terms of Use.

Now available in paperback, we are pleased to share the Hidden Valley Road book club kit, which includes discussion questions, Q&A with the author, a recipe from Mimi Galvin, and more. Click here or on the image below for your digital kit.

In the new book from the award-winning author of Lost Girls: An Unsolved American Mystery, Robert Kolker uncovers the heartrending true story of one family that became science’s great hope in the quest to understand schizophrenia. “ Hidden Valley Road is a riveting true story of an American family that reads like a medical detective journey and sheds light on a topic so many of us face: mental illness.” -Oprah WinfreyĪn Oprah’s Book Club pick, People magazine’s #1 Book of 2020, and a #1 New York Times bestseller, the list of reasons to pick Hidden Valley Road for your next book club discussion goes on and on.

Hidden valley road