Hidden Valley Road: Inside the Mind of an American Family

This book follows the true story of the Galvin family, who had 12 children- six of which developed schizophrenia. Kolker dives into the struggle that this family had, starting in the 1940s, with not knowing what was happening with their children and how having so many kids with their own unique struggles with schizophrenia in a time in which the illness was not well understood and was heavily stigmatized.

Concurrently, the book goes through the history of mental illness as we understand it, with a focus on schizophrenia obviously.

I really enjoyed this, the blend of psychology history, family drama, and schizophrenia examination checked a lot of my boxes of interest. The Galvins were a big contributor to the study of genetics and schizophrenia; it is extremely rare to have so many documented cases in a family, and their willingness to contribute to research has advanced our understanding of schizophrenia, mental illness, and genetics quite a bit.

However, this book has one huge, glaring flaw. It spends the first 2/3s going through the history of schizophrenia and the history of the family, and the last third just meanders into tangentially related things. There is a LONG section on sexual abuse and the fallout from it. The problem with this section is that it is mostly disconnected from anything else going on- while it does examine the role trauma has on onset of schizophrenia, the section was still quite long and didn't contribute much. The author then spends the entire end of the book giving “closure” to the two youngest daughters and how they have survived their past- obviously the author's main sources, and his favoritism shows. These two things combined makes me think that the author wanted to showcase the struggles of the two daughters more than he wanted to highlight the contributions and suffering of the entire family.

Still though, this was a mostly great read. I highly recommend it if you like learning about mental illness, or if you're into family sagas.

8/10.