Robert Kolker (2020) Hidden Family Road: Inside the Mind of an American Family.
I once asked my cousin, Wullie, how they managed at tea time. He said they ate in shifts. Big ones and wee ones. Six and six. Another cousin, Paul, said when he was growing up (one of the youngest) he believed his mum, my Auntie Cathie, never slept. She was there when he got up and also there when he went to bed. Their dad died when they were young. Mum plugged the gap as typical Catholic working-class mothers did in the baby boom years after the Second World War.
Cheaper by the Dozen, a Twentieth Century Fox 1950 film offered a whimsical look at bringing up white, middle-class children in New Jersey. Based on the adaptation of a book published by the son and daughter of time-and-motion and therefore child-rearing experts, Frank Gilbreth and Lillian Gilbreth, it seemed the template for patriarch and matriarch Don and Mimi Galvin in their pursuit of upward mobility and the American Dream.
The front and back cover of Hidden Valley Road, which was their address, a home built to their specifications, near the Air Force in Colorado—show this graphically in a photograph. Don stands at the top of the staircase in his officer’s uniform. Mimi stands in front of him, dressed to the nines. On each step, all the way down, stands a son in shirt and tie are the ten Galvin boys. Donald, the oldest of the bunch, is holding the latest baby boy, Peter. This means it is 1960. Because Donald was born in 1945. Mima delivered a son every year afterwards. Don joked that he wouldn’t stop until he had a hockey team. And that did happen. In one hockey match, on the airport base, the commentator intoned Galvin to Galvin to Galvin to Galvin. Mimi went against medical advice and had two more children. Two more girls. Twelve children.
The dark side of Cheaper by the Dozen was Frank Gilbreth and Lillian Gilbreth were keen advocates of eugenics, as were the industrialists who employed them. Hitler didn’t invent the idea of the master race. Six of the ten Galvin boys that developed schizophrenia would be deemed in the taxonomy of white supremacy, a sub-category: ‘life unworthy of life’.
Kolker asks what the prognosis would be in the twenty-first century. Research and treatment has flat lined, but the ‘one-size fits all definition’ no longer sits comfortably with a changing awareness of mental health.
‘Each passing year brings more evidence that psychosis exists on a spectrum, with new genetic studies showing overlap between schizophrenia and bipolar disorder. The most recent research suggests that a surprising number of us may be a little bit mentally ill. One meta-analysis, published in 2013, found that 7.2 percent of the general population had experienced hallucinations or delusions, another study in 2015 put the figure at 5.8 percent.’
The Galvin family with the Genain sisters—quadruplets born in the Hungry Thirties that experienced psychotic breaks one after the other in the girls’ twenties—were ideal families, currency, for those debating what schizophrenia was and by implication how it would be cured?
Nature or Nurture? A single illness or a syndrome? DNA samples. Genome testing. Dementia praecox, which we now associate with older people, but in 1903 was renamed schizophrenia. Unlike senility, praecox had the Latin root, precious. Old people have nothing precious to say, but hints of insight and Richard Nash’s A Beautiful Mind spilled over from a different era and worldview.
Mary, the youngest girl in the family (who changed her name to Lindsay) didn’t care about these things. She just wanted to fit in and be normal like everyone else. King Saul ate grass like a cow. Like Joan of Arc, he heard voices, he couldn’t resist acting on. Jung, Freud and Alder clashed not over soul murder but whether formative childhood experiences—‘psychogenic experiences—moulded the brain. Jung argument that not everything was to do with sex and libido, which was a break from his older mentor.
But Mary/Linday’s sexual molestation and rape by her brother Jim, who also molested and raped her other sister and her brother Peter, would suggest that sex and libido do play a large part in brain plasticity. Neither her sister, or herself, however, became schizophrenic. Peter did. Evidence too shows plasticity.
Donald, the oldest brother at the top of the staircase, and the first to exhibit symptoms. He too was sexually abused by a Catholic priest and family friend. Mimi later berated herself for being so naïve as to let Freudy, Father Robert Freudenstein access to her boys, and the pick of the cookie jar. But she was a Jewish convert to her husband’s faith and he, with his louche ways, seemed a fitting audience for their ascent to the top of society.
She wanted everything and everyone to be perfect. Fitted snuggly as a glove into the Freudian theory of the psychogenic mum. Her ‘schizophrenogenic’ input poisoned family life. Later versions such as ‘refrigerator mom’ and ‘dragon mom’ still pop up today to explain autism or most other isms. ‘The double-bind theory’ (still with us) argued prim and proper wives were also taking on the husband’s role and easing them out of family life and leaving them redundant, with no place in society.
With brothers threatening to kill each other. Don, who tried to kill his wife, and never gave up trying to find and harass her, to own her. Brian, the fourth brother born and the best looking, was also a musical prodigy. He could have made it big in the sixties band scene. Instead, he was dead. After murdering his ex-girlfriend, he committed suicide. Freud had a lot to answer for but he didn’t put the trigger.
Mary, when she tied her older brother to a tree, wanted to set him on fire. But even as a girl that hadn’t yet reached puberty, she knew it was wrong. She knew she wouldn’t. She was unaware of the anti-psychiatric movement, including Thomas Szass and R.D. Laing’s book, The Divided Self. The counter-culture movement that those that were locked up in loony bins should be set free and those locking them up imprisoned instead, for their damage to the soul of the patients with their frontal lobotomies, insulin comas, shock treatment and mass medication using tranquillisers as documented in Ervin Goffman’s Asylums. Mary didn’t care about any of that. She just wanted a life away from the madness. But it was too much to ask.
Hidden Valley Road is a battleground over ideas and what it means to be normal. What it means to be insane. How we in society deal with it. Not very well, as the sane ones among us know. The insane one among us quickly finds our default setting of stigma and isolation. It allows me to use that old joke: I’ve a letter from my psychiatrist saying I was to give this to you if you think I’m insane.
odonnellgrunting 