https://www.dailymail.co.uk/home/books/article-8320935/Was-disturbed-family-America.htmlWas this the most disturbed family in America? They were a vision of respectability but behind the facade lay a horrific catalogue of rape, murder, and madness
Robert Kolker has penned a fascinating new book about the Galvin family
Don and Mimi Galvin had ten boys and two girls between 1945 and 1965
Six of the American couple's sons were diagnosed with schizophrenia
Robert Kolker uncovers the link between the family and history of the condition
By Ciara Dossett For The Daily Mail
Published: 22:01, 14 May 2020 | Updated: 11:35, 15 May 2020
BIOGRAPHY
HIDDEN VALLEY ROAD
by Robert Kolker (Quercus £20, 400 pp)
Don and Mimi Galvin appeared to have the perfect all-American family: ten handsome boys followed by two pretty girls, all born in a textbook baby boomer arc between 1945 and 1965. The Catholic couple’s large, modern house, on Hidden Valley Road, was close to the Colorado Air Force Academy where Don worked as an instructor. Mimi came from a wealthy and well-respected Texan family. She was the ideal housewife, baking a cake and a pie every night. The children were talented musicians, sportsmen, and chess-players. But something darker was lurking beneath the surface: six boys would be diagnosed with schizophrenia. First, it was the eldest, Donald, a strapping medical student. Alarm bells started to ring when, during his first year at college, he threw himself on to a bonfire. Next, it was the maverick second son, Jim, who became abusive to his wife and sisters, Mary and Margaret. Brian soon followed, committing an unspeakable act that would haunt the family forever. The youngest son, 14-year-old Peter, started to wet himself because ‘the Devil was under the house’.
As their brothers toppled like dominoes, the remaining siblings wondered: ‘When will it be me?’
Two hockey-playing brothers, Matt and Joe, were the last to fall. Matt believed he was Paul McCartney and Joe heard voices. In the post-war era, one prominent theory suggested schizophrenia was caused by over-controlling mothers. So it’s not surprising that Mimi was unwilling to admit her sons were sick. Sure, her family was a little eccentric and boisterous, she’d say, but what do you expect with ten boys?
It wasn’t until the violence escalated that Mimi was forced to admit that something was wrong. First, Donald tried to kill both himself and his wife, Jean, with cyanide. Jean freed herself from his clutches and called the police. Brian’s girlfriend, Noni, wasn’t so lucky. Two bodies were found in their apartment. Brian had shot her in the face before firing a bullet into his own skull. The violence was sexual, too. Margaret, Mary, and Peter were all molested by several of their older brothers. Once, 13-year-old Mary was even raped by Jim. As in his previous book, Lost Girls, about the murder of five prostitutes on Long Island, Robert Kolker is forensic in his research, interviewing all the surviving members of the Galvin family, including Mimi, who died in 2017 following a series of strokes. Don died of cancer in 2003 before Kolker embarked on the project. Kolker expertly weaves the Galvins’ story with the history of schizophrenia. And what a horrible history it is. In the 1930s, for example, and in some cases even later, treatment included injections of animal blood, lobotomy, and even sterilisation. The family’s genetic material has been the subject of numerous studies. They are the perfect sample. According to one psychiatrist, they are potentially ‘the most mentally ill family in America’.
By studying the Galvins’ DNA and comparing it with that of the general population, scientists are taking steps towards understanding how to treat, predict, and even prevent schizophrenia. It is a slippery illness, however: difficult to diagnose, even harder to treat, and with little consensus about what causes it, or even exactly what it is. Even today, its treatment is a far cry from a perfect science. The drugs given to the Galvin boys were not so much a cure as a numbing little more than a ‘warehousing of people’s souls’.
Sometimes the medication proved as deadly as the illness itself. Both Matt and Jim died prematurely of heart failure, a side-effect of the neuroleptic drugs. A cruel catch-22: many patients can’t live without these pills, but the medication can also kill them. What caused this harrowing disorder?
Was it due to the boys’ environment, their drug-taking, their perfectionist mother, their absent father, their violent sibling rivalry?
Or was it something innate, something biological?
This nature versus nurture debate continues to divide scientists today. What’s clear is that genes play a part: those with a family history are four times more likely to pass it on. Mimi was convinced it came from Don’s side of the family, as during the 1950s he had suffered from what she called ‘an attack on the nerves’, taking sick leave and recovering in hospital. This book is as much a story about the children who escaped schizophrenia’s cruel clutches as it is about those who fell victim to it. When she was seven, Mary became so frustrated by 27-year-old Donald’s insistence that she was in fact the Virgin Mary that she tied him to a tree and half-heartedly planned to set him on fire. Mary and Margaret were used to running into their parents’ bedroom, locking the door and waiting for the sound of the police sirens as they came to take one of their brothers away. Both girls were eventually sent to boarding school, where Mary changed her name to Lindsay in an attempt to distance herself from her family’s ugly past. Despite this, Lindsay, now aged 54, continues to look after her brothers, even Donald, now 74, whom she once fantasised about burning alive. She is all too aware that it could have been her. Mimi, too, never gave up on her sons, caring for them right up until her death. Yes, this is a book about schizophrenia, but at its heart, it’s a fascinating exploration of family, what it means, and how far people will go to protect it.
A family consumed by schizophrenia: How mental disorder plagued six Galvin brothers with one raping his sisters, another murdering his wife and a third torturing a cat to death
High school sweethearts Donald Galvin and Mimi Blayney crossed the border to Tijuana, Mexico for a shotgun wedding in December 1944. The move was expertly timed - just months before Donald was set to sail to the South Pacific to serve in the Navy during WWII. In the 20 years that followed Mimi gave birth to 10 boys and two girls. Don Sr left the Navy in 1950 to join the Air Force and the family lived at a base in Colorado Springs, where the children spent most of their early years. The couple responded to the mental health crisis that befell six of their 10 sons by ignoring it until it was too severe to hide any longer with Don Sr making himself absent. Mimi, despite knowing something was 'off', tried to maintain an image of normality in the ever-increasingly disturbing home environment. Donald Jr, who was born in 1945, was by all accounts the perfect eldest son a high school football star whose girlfriend was the daughter of the general of the Air Force Academy. Schizophrenia reveals itself in the later stages of adolescence and in Don's case, it was first diagnosed after seeing a doctor when he was a sophomore at Colorado State University. Showing the doctor a cat bite, he went on to detail how he had 'killed a cat slowly and painfully'.
The physician said Donald didn't know why he'd tortured and killed the animal and that he became distressed when discussing the morbid act. Another signal of his deteriorating mental health was his rising levels of impulsive behavior. Still, at college, Don Jr ran into a bonfire on campus. Around the time of the series of bizarre acts, medical student Don Jr was diagnosed with schizophrenia. According to the Spectator, Don Jr would wander through the house naked, spouting terrifying religious delusions and was the first of the boys to be taken to a secure ward. His sister Mary, who changed her name to Lindsay to get away from the family's troubling past, said the first time she realized something was wrong with her brother was one night when he began thumping his hand into his parents' door. 'He was convinced somebody was outside, trying to hurt us,' Lindsay told PEOPLE Magazine. 'So he was yelling for everyone to get down because they were trying to shoot us.'
Mary said she would come home from school to find her brother 'pouring salt into the aquarium and poisoning all the fish' or sitting in the center of the living room 'quietly, completely naked', the Washington Post reported.
His physician's notes referred to him as 'assaultive, destructive, belligerent, suicidal, hyperactive, over-talkative, and grandiose.'
He was put on large doses of antipsychotic drugs, which made his psychoses manageable enough to be released back into the family environment. Five of his brothers would similarly be caught in a revolving door between inpatient treatment, heavy doses of antipsychotics, and returning to the family home. Jim Galvin, the next eldest son, is said to have molested one of his younger brothers, as well as raping the two youngest girls, Mary and Margaret, when they went to stay with him after Don Jr's delusions frightened them. A Catholic priest who was invited into the family home when the boys were younger and abused at least two of them may have led Jim to his predatory behavior, according to the Spectator. In an interview with NPR, the book's author Robert Kolker said that each of the brother's conditions displayed themselves in different ways. Jim, he said, often self-harmed because he was paranoid and depressed. The two girls were already deadened by the time Jim abused them after being molested by the next eldest brother, Brian. In 1973, aged 22 and driven into further insanity by antipsychotic medication, Brian shot his young wife dead before turning the gun on himself, which the family tried to cover up as an accident. The next youngest, Peter began wetting himself when he was 14 years old because 'the Devil was under the house'.
According to NPR, his diagnosis was originally schizophrenia, which later became bipolar disorder, before being switched back again. Joseph saw visions in the sky of a Chinese emperor speaking to him and Matthew had the delusion that he was Paul McCartney of the Beatles. The narrative study of the medical interactions of the boys' charts Freudian attempts to blame over-bearing mothers and absent fathers for the disease while detailing the misdiagnoses such as those seen in Peter's case. Kolker also describes the treatments received, which included piles of medication (eight at one time for Peter), and intermittent electric shock therapies. 'It's like having somebody die over and over again,' Lindsay, who is now a corporate events planner living in Colorado, told People.
'Because they're not always ill. But when they are, it's like death over and over again. They (her six brothers) had dreams of having families of their own, of careers and of love, but all that was stolen from them.'
Scientists discover 10 genes that 'dramatically increase' schizophrenia risks and could open the door to better treatments
In October last year, a new study revealed that 10 genes play a key role in the development of schizophrenia. Researchers at Massachusetts General Hospital and Harvard Medical School found that risks were raised when these bits of DNA which code for proteins that help brain cells communicate effectively were disrupted. Schizophrenia is a complex and variable psychiatric condition, and scientists hope that identifying both the genetic and environmental risk factors involved will help them design better treatments. And the scientists say their discovery may be just the tip of the iceberg as they suspect their genome analysis will uncover more DNA that plays into schizophrenia. For those researchers and those who don't suffer the condition, schizophrenia is a subject of fascination. But for those with the poorly understood mental illness, schizophrenia can be debilitating, and though treatment with antipsychotic drugs can be quite effective, years of using them have also been linked to atrophy. So the development of new drugs to treat schizophrenia could bring major life improvements for the 3.2 million Americans living with the condition in the US. But, 'drug development for schizophrenia has had limited progress in the last 50 years, but in the last decade, we have started to make genetic discoveries that help us better understand the mechanisms underlying the disorder,' notes Tarjinder Singh, a Harvard postdoc who studies psychiatry.
'The main aim of our research is to understand the genetic causes of schizophrenia and motivate the development of new therapeutics.'
To that end, he and his team did one of the largest genetic analyses for schizophrenia ever conducted. They poured over the DNA data of over 125,000 people, about 25,000 of which they knew to have schizophrenia. And they found a pattern in the genomes of the 25,000 suffering symptoms of schizophrenia such as delusions, hallucinations and confused thought and speech. 'For the first time, we were able to identify 10 genes that when disrupted, dramatically increase the risk for schizophrenia.'
Crucially, two of those 10 genes contain instructions for the body's production of a special protein. These proteins, called glutamate receptors, are one of the most important components of the way that brain cells talk to one another. So when those genes are tampered with, so is the brain's own system of internal communication. Many antipsychotic drugs currently work by changing levels of dopamine, another neurotransmitter involved in schizophrenia. The interaction between glutamate receptors and dopamine ones had been studied for its importance to the prefrontal cortex's function. And the prefrontal cortex is the hub for executive functioning. It's a long way off, but this new understanding of how disruption to DNA designs for glutamate raises schizophrenia risks may give researchers a new target to aim for in developing therapies to treat the condition. 'Furthermore, our analyses showed us that there are many more such genes; our search is just beginning,' said Dr. Singh.
WHAT IS SCHIZOPHRENIA?
Schizophrenia is a chronic and severe mental disorder that affects how a person thinks, feels, and behaves. People with schizophrenia may seem like they have lost touch with reality. The cause of schizophrenia is not understood and it is believed to be a mix of genetics (hereditary), abnormalities in brain chemistry, and/or possible viral infections and immune disorders. Symptoms of schizophrenia usually begin between ages 16 and 30. In rare cases, children have schizophrenia too. The symptoms of schizophrenia fall into three categories: positive, negative, and cognitive. Positive symptoms are disturbances that are 'added' to the person's personality and include:
Hallucinations
Delusions
Thought disorders (unusual or dysfunctional ways of thinking)
Negative symptoms are capabilities that are 'lost' from the person's personality and include:
'Flat affect' (reduced expression of emotions via facial expression or voice tone)
Reduced feelings of pleasure in everyday life
Difficulty beginning and sustaining activities
Cognitive symptoms are changes in their memory or other aspects of thinking and include:
Trouble focusing or paying attention
Problems with 'working memory'
Poor ability to understand information and use it to make decisions
Figures suggest around one percent of the world population suffers from schizophrenia with around two million in the US.
Source: National Institute of Mental Health
