Hidden Valley Road: Inside the Mind of an American Family (37 page)

Lindsay’s daughter, Kate, grew up to look just like her mother—the same bright eyes, the same relaxed smile. Before having children, Lindsay and Rick, like Margaret and Wylie, had been assured by Dr. Freedman that the chances of passing along mental illness from parent to child—even in the extraordinary case of the Galvin family—were still very small. But parents always worry. And Lindsay had never been one to leave anything to chance.

When she was a little girl, Kate started to flinch and melt down in loud environments like playgrounds and classrooms. These were sensory processing issues. Kate needed occupational therapy, that much was clear. But when you have six mentally ill brothers and your child starts having temper tantrums that you can’t control, there is very little to keep you from wondering if this is the beginning of a story that will not end well.

Lindsay thought the worst. She hurled every possible solution she could think of at Kate. She sent her to therapy to learn self-soothing techniques. She bought a hammock for her room, to help her de-stress. She stocked up on essential oils to keep her calm. Was this hyper-vigilance—or just being a proactive, responsible mother? Lindsay didn’t know. But something about it worked, or at least it didn’t hurt.

Kate thrived. She took all advanced placement classes in her senior year of high school and got straight As in them all—including an art class in which she won an award for a series of works about mental health. Kate got into Berkeley but turned the offer down. Instead, in the fall of 2016, she enrolled at CU Boulder as a sophomore, where she continued to get straight As and spent her summers taking classes. She was, like her mother, a grind—not romantic in the least about childhood, eager to become a grown-up as soon as possible.

In fact, when Kate looked back on her childhood, what she recalled most vividly was how, as soon as she moved past her sensory issues and started doing well, her mother diverted her worry and attention away from her and toward her little brother, Jack.

Jack got therapy as a child, too—prophylactically, just to be on the safe side. He later told his parents that it was all the therapy and testing that made him the most tense. Jack felt put on the spot, like he was being watched all the time. He wasn’t wrong: Lindsay and Rick both knew that the Galvin disease affected neither of the girls and six of the boys. Jack was Don and Mimi Galvin’s grandson. How could his parents not be watching?

During his freshman year of high school, Jack started skipping class and hanging out in the skateboarding park with a new set of friends. He had been diagnosed with attention deficit disorder, and he’d supplemented his medication with pot. As a teenager, he was engaging in attention-seeking behavior, probably out of boredom; like their mother, Jack and Kate both were academically precocious and had trouble being challenged in a classroom.

For Lindsay and Rick, a pot-smoking male child of the Galvin family was the equivalent of a five-alarm fire. They went searching for people to advise them, and they found just two who understood both the challenges of childhood disorders and the particular issues of their family: Sam and Nancy Gary.

Just after Labor Day in 2015, Jack enrolled in Open Sky, a ninety-day, wilderness-based youth therapy program. One of the most expensive programs of its kind, Open Sky is designed to pull kids out of toxic or dysfunctional environments and reframe their perspective. Its approach is Buddhist, teaching meditation and other techniques to help young people with oppositional disorders and substance issues. The bill was paid by the Garys. “I would not let anything happen to Mary, or Margaret for that matter,” Nancy said. “I would help her do whatever she has to do.”

Short programs like Open Sky often serve as a prelude to longer-term treatments. When Jack completed his ninety days, he enrolled in a therapeutic boarding school called Montana Academy. Sam and Nancy paid for that, too—$8,300 a month for twenty-one months. Montana Academy attracts kids with a variety of substance and mental health issues: bulimia, anorexia, anxiety disorders. It was there that Lindsay and Rick learned that Jack’s issues had less to do with pot or ADD than with anxiety—the fear of becoming mentally ill.

Jack was angry. He had been saddled with a genetic legacy he’d never asked for, and made to feel like a freak. Lindsay blamed herself for this. “I made such a deliberate effort to expose my children to my mentally ill brothers, so they would not have a bias or feel shame around it. It sort of backfired a little bit.”

But it wasn’t just the brothers themselves who affected him. For both Jack and his sister, it was witnessing the strain that their mother shouldered, the burden she carried. “My kids have seen how much pain all of it has caused over all the years, and I think they’re protective of me,” Lindsay said. “Anytime I’m having to deal with something—my sister, or my mom, or one of my brothers—there’s angst and frustration around it.”

When Lindsay looked at Jack, some part of her had to recognize herself—the little girl she’d once been, walking rings around her brother Donald, tightening the rope, planning to burn him at the stake, bursting with fury and shame.

A FEW MONTHS
into the program, Lindsay and Rick traveled to Montana to see Jack and take part in some family therapy exercises together. Margaret came along, mostly to lend her sister moral support. They stayed with the Garys at Flathead Lake, just like the old days. It was a time warp for them both—the meadows in shades of green, yellow, and rust; the dusting of snow on the trees; the gorgeous home; the tennis courts, the orchard, and the horses. Even Trudy, the housekeeper, was still there, embracing both sisters warmly.

That weekend, Margaret’s own past replayed in the back of her mind—not just being back in Montana with Sam and Nancy, but watching Lindsay and Rick in the same position her parents must have been in so long ago, when they decided to send her away to the Garys. But she was there to help Lindsay, not to relive the past. Lindsay was going through huge emotional swings. On one hand, Lindsay understood the privileged position she was in. On the other hand, her son was going to be away from her for two whole years. What kind of mother does that? Of course, both she and Margaret knew the answer to that question.

For both sisters, being around the Garys gave them that feeling they had become accustomed to so long ago—the awareness that they were, simultaneously, some of the unluckiest and luckiest people on the face of the earth.

When he got home, Jack did well, attending school, staying sober, and earning good grades again. Jack had learned to manage his anxiety with rock climbing, meditation, even journaling, though he was quick to acknowledge that all these techniques were just deflections. “There’s no real way around the anxiety,” he said now. “You have to go through it.” Jack had become so therapized that he policed everyone else in the house. “He calls us out on our stuff all the time, and uses all the technical language,” Lindsay said, awash in relief.

Nancy gave Jack a fly rod as a graduation gift. “He’s a different kid,” she said. For college, Jack was looking to study early childhood education. After that, he wanted to pursue a career in outdoor wilderness therapy.

When Lindsay looks at Jack now, she thinks not of herself, but of Peter and Donald and Matt and all of her sick brothers. What sort of early interventions might have helped them before the medications took their toll, neutralizing them without curing them? And what about the thousands of people who couldn’t afford what her son had—who languish because of a lack of resources, or a stigma from a society that would prefer to pretend that people like them do not exist?

“The haves have these options and the have-nots do not,” Lindsay said. “To see this kid take this other track and have it be so successful—it could have easily gone the other direction. I genuinely believe if my brothers had had the opportunity to do something like this, they may not have become as ill as they became.”

In the summer of 2017, at his laboratory in Denver, Robert Freedman took the unusual step of allowing an undergraduate to work as an intern—a young pre-med major from CU Boulder with a special interest in neuroscience. She wanted to be a researcher, like Freedman, focusing on schizophrenia, her family illness.

On a sunny day in June, Kate walked into Freedman’s lab for the first time and met the lab techs and assistants, all graduate students, some five years older than she was. When they learned that she was just eighteen, they took notice. This was a highly sought-after position. One of them made a crack about how her family must have been huge donors to get her in there.

Kate smirked. “Well, are you talking money,” she asked, “or tissue?”

Lindsay’s daughter walked past the room where her mother and aunt and several of her uncles had come to test their auditory gating, listening to those double-clicks with electrodes affixed to their heads, years before she was born. She moved alongside the counters where genetic material from her family and others had been analyzed for evidence of the CHRNA7 irregularity. She stood near where the data from choline trials on little children were studied for signs of schizophrenia—tests that could change everything for a future generation, thanks to six of her uncles.

Her grandfather’s brain was probably lying around there someplace. She wondered how long it would take before she could have a look at it.

In early 2016, my great friend Jon Gluck first introduced me to Margaret Galvin Johnson and Lindsay Galvin Rauch. The sisters had been searching for a way to let the world know about their family. They knew that to do their story justice, every living Galvin family member would have to agree to participate—to speak frankly and unreservedly about what, until then, had been private and often very sensitive family issues—and the author would need the independence to follow the story in any direction. I’m extremely grateful that everyone agreed. My deepest thanks to Margaret and Wylie Johnson, Lindsay and Rick Rauch, Peter Galvin, Matthew Galvin, Mark Galvin, Richard and Renée Galvin, Michael Galvin, John and Nancy Galvin, and Donald Galvin—and, most poignantly, Mimi Galvin, who was so willing to open up about her life before her death in 2017. This book is a testament to the entire family’s generosity, candor, and faith that their story can be a help to others.

Lindsay and Margaret deserve special acknowledgment. As her mother’s executor and the legal authority for her mentally ill brothers, Lindsay worked tirelessly to locate medical records that no one knew still existed, filing reams of paperwork and connecting with a platoon of mental-health professionals and hospital administrators. Margaret, in turn, offered up decades of personal journals and diaries and biographical essays, supplying many priceless details about life on Hidden Valley Road. Both sisters have spent countless hours with me, in person and on the phone and over email, never once balking at the most picayune or intrusive questions or requests. My heartfelt thanks to them both.

I also owe a world of thanks to the psychiatrists and researchers who studied the family—Lynn DeLisi, Robert Freedman, and Stefan McDonough—each of whom spent many hours with me, explaining their research and, with the family’s blessing, connecting the dots between their work and the Galvins for the first time publicly. Several other experts in genetics, psychiatry, epidemiology, and the history of science helped me gain a broader understanding of the debates and theories of mental illness: Euan Ashley, Guoping Feng, Elliot Gershon, Steven Hyman, John McGrath, Benjamin Neale, Richard Noll, Edward Shorter, E. Fuller Torrey, and Daniel Weinberger. And I am eternally grateful to Kyla Dunn, whose expertise in genetics helped me ask the right questions in the beginning of this project and saved me from a number of embarrassing errors at the end. (Any errors that remain are, of course, my own.)

My thanks to many additional family members, many of whom are not quoted directly but whose perspectives contributed to the narrative: Eileen Galvin Blocker, Kevin Galvin, Levana Galvin, Melissa Galvin, Patrick Galvin, Betty Hewel, George Hewel, Ellie Johnson, Sally Johnson, Mary Kelley, Kathy Matisoff, Jack Rauch, and Kate Rauch. Thanks also to Nancy Gary (an honorary Galvin if ever there was one), and to the therapists Mary Hartnett and Louise Silvern for their insights into Margaret and Lindsay, and a host of mental-health professionals who have treated the Galvin brothers: Honie B. Crandall, Kriss Prado, Rachel Wilkenson, and, from the Colorado Mental Health Institute at Pueblo, Carmen DiBiaso, Kate Cotner, Sheila Fabrizio-Pantleo, Matthew Goodwin, Julie Meecker, and Al Singleton.

Still others offered insights into specific subjects. Bob Campbell, Jeff Cheney, and Ashley Crockett provided excellent insights into life in Colorado Springs. I’m indebted to many other close family friends and neighbors: Mike Bertsch, Marie Cheney, Ann Crockett, Beck Fisher, Janice Greenhouse, Merri Shoptaugh Hogan, Tim Howard, Ellie Crockett Jeffers, Suzanne King, Ed Ladoceur, Jenna Mahoney, Catherine Skarke McGrady, Roo McKenna, Lynn Murray, Joey Shoptaugh, Carolyn Skarke Solseth, Malham Wakin, and Mark Wegleitner. For sharing his expertise on falconry, my thanks to Mike Dupuy. For their memories of Don Galvin’s falconry heydey, thanks to Jerry Craig, Merrill Eastcott, Relva Lilly, George T. Nolde Jr., Vern Seifert, Hal Webster, and, from the United States Air Force Academy archives, Mary Elizabeth Ruwell. For memories of the Federation of Rocky Mountain States and the Aspen and Santa Fe social scenes, thanks to Nick Jannakos and Robin McKinney Martin. For their unparalleled historical knowledge of the Pueblo mental hospital, thanks to Nell and Bob Mitchell. For their perspectives on Father Robert Freudenstein, thanks to Kent Schnurbusch, Lee Kaspari, Craig Hart, and, from the Catholic chancellery of Denver, Colorado, Douglas Tumminello. For their memories of Brian Galvin, thanks to his former bandmates Scott Philpot, Robert Moorman, and Joel Palmer. And for their memories of Lorelei “Noni” Smith, thanks to Robert Gates, Brandon Gates, and Claudia Shurtz.

For ten years, I’ve been very lucky to have the support of two extraordinary agents, David Gernert and Chris Parris-Lamb, who believed in this book from the start and led me to the perfect publisher, Doubleday. Thanks to Bill Thomas and Suzanne Herz, and extra gratitude to my editor, the brilliant Kris Puopolo, who, over more than a few plates of taramasalata, helped me understand everything that this book could and should be. Thanks also to Dan Meyer for editorial assistance and photo wrangling, John Fontana for the jacket design, Maria Carella for book design, Rita Madrigal for production management, Fred Chase for copy editing, Dan Novack for his legal review, and Anne Collins of Random House Canada for her extremely helpful read-through of the manuscript. And long before this book was underway, I had racked up debts to many editors who guided me in the past, including Jerry Berkowitz, Robert Blau, Dan Ferrara, Barry Harbaugh, David Hirshey, Adam Moss, Raha Naddaf, Genevieve Smith, and Cyndi Stivers.

In addition to introducing me to the Galvins, Jon Gluck counseled me at every stage of this project. Jennifer Senior helped me reason my way out of countless dead ends and storytelling snarls. They and other friends, colleagues, and loved ones were kind enough to read part or all of this book in earlier stages: Kristin Becker, Kirsten Danis, Kassie Evashevski, Josh Goldfein, Pete Holmberg, Gilbert Honigfeld, Alex Kolker, Caroline Miller, Chris Parris-Lamb, William Reid, and Frank Tipton. Still others helped with enthusiasm, moral support, life-coaching, and guest-room-crashing: Franco Baseggio, Peter Becker, Yvonne Brown, Brewster Brownville, Gabriel Feldberg, Lee Feldshon, Kirsten Fermaglitch, Tony Freitas, David Gandler, Meryl Gordon, Amy Gross, Linda Hervieux, Michael Kelleher, Elaine Kleinbart, Mark Levine, Kevin McCormick, Doug McMullen, Benedict Morelli, Kenneth Mueller, Emily Nussbaum, Saul Raw, Nancy Rome, Phil Serafino, Abigail Snyder, Rebecca Sokolovsky, Clive Thompson, John Trombly, and Shari Zisman. Two researchers, Samia Bouzid and Joshua Ben Rosen, provided great help with selected subjects, and the wonderful Julie Tate performed essential fact-checking.

My mother, Judy Kolker, was my first real reader, the one who before anyone else told me that she could hear my voice when she read my writing. She also spent twenty-five years as a psychiatric counselor at our local hospital in Columbia, Maryland. While reporting this book, I had already started talking about it with her, and I had looked forward to sharing the manuscript with her (and parsing her very careful proofreading). On May 23, 2018—not quite a year after the Galvins lost their matriarch, Mimi—she died at the age of seventy-nine. Her loss has been a blow for our entire family. This book is dedicated to her and to my father, Jon, who, during such a difficult time, has been an incredible model of strength and sensitivity and generosity and grace. I could not have asked for better parents. Much love and gratitude also to my brother, Alex Kolker, and my sister, Fritzi Hallock, both also great role models, and to my entire family, including the Kolkers and Hallocks of Maryland and Iowa and the Danises of Massachusetts, Georgia, and North Carolina.

And finally, to Audrey, whose own writing already shines so brightly, and to Nate, whose advice on structuring the book (and living my life) has spared me a lot of time and heartache. And to my wife, Kirsten, who is so very precious to me—thank you for your love and beauty and inspiration. Everything I write is for you.