One day in 1972 in Woodmen Valley, a place full of forests and farmland between steep hills and plateaus in Colorado, USA, a couple leaves their house through the door that leads to the backyard.
Donald, 27, with deep eyes, a shaved head and the beginnings of a scruffy beard, walks with his beloved sister Mary, 7, blonde hair and a button nose.
The scene is idyllic: the yard smells of fresh, earthy sweet pine, birds fly over the rock garden while the family pet, a goshawk named Atholl, stands guard.
Although her brother is older, it is Mary who is taking him to the top of a hill, because she has a plan: to burn him at the stake like they do with the heretics in the movies her mother sees.
He had suggested that they make a swing on the branch of a tree, for which they needed a rope, but once they chose one of the tallest pines, he tells Donald that what he wants is to tie it to the tree; he agrees without problem, she brings firewood and drops it on her bare feet.
It was the same Mary, later called Lindsay, who, nearly half a century later, told journalist and author Robert Kolker what happened that day.
With her sister Margaret they had asked her to help them recount what happened to them and to find out what happened with all that happened.
They had opened the door to the world of a family that, for a time, was the perfect portrait of the postwar American dream, with a World War II veteran at the helm, no less, and a mother who baked cakes and made the clothes. for his 10 handsome sons and 2 beautiful girls.
But nothing was what it seemed, not even that story of Mary.
it wasn’t Mary
Donald was no ordinary brother.
Nothing in Mary’s life was.
Donald revered her because he was convinced that she was Mary, the holy Virgin and mother of Christ, and he, someone on whom Saint Ignatius had conferred a degree in “spiritual exercise and theology.”
He spent his time reciting aloud the Apostles’ Creed and the Our Father, and a litany he called the Holy Order of priests: “DOM, Benedictine, Jesuit, the Order of the Sacred Heart, the Immaculate Conception, Mary Immaculate, Order of Oblate priests…”, day and night, without ceasing.
On his best days, he would don a monk-style reddish-brown sheet, sometimes completing the outfit with a plastic bow and arrow, and go for hours on walks, sometimes stopping in places they pretended not to. meet him or ask him to leave.
Other days, he remained naked, sitting in the living room of the house, in silence.
Sometimes Mary would come home from school to find him busy with tasks that only he could understand, like moving all the furniture out of the house or pouring salt into the aquarium and poisoning all the fish.
His mother, meanwhile, behaved as if everything was normal, even if she had had to call the police for outbursts of violence.
While the other siblings found excuses to be away from Donald, Mary, the youngest, often had no choice but to be with him.
And, despite his young age, he knew that he could not cry or complain: his older brother was not the only one with strange behavior and his parents watched all their children, waiting for any worrying sign.
It was in the middle of this nightmare without waking up that the 7-year-old girl came up with the plan to get rid of her brother.
It was a gasp of despair.
He wasn’t really going to go through with the madness of burning Donald alive. She wasn’t like the others, and she would prove it to her parents and to herself.
She wasn’t the one suffering from the family problem, but she couldn’t escape its shadow.
1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6
That (and more) Kolker tells us only in the foreword to his acclaimed book “The Boys of Hidden Valley Road: Inside the Mind of an American Family”, the result of hours of conversations with members of the Galvin family and research on the studies they carried out.
Because the Galvins were a unique case of “mankind’s most baffling disease”: schizophrenia.
In addition to Donald (1945), the first and most conspicuous case, five other Galvin brothers suffered from this brain disorder that encompasses a wide variety of symptoms in completely different ways.
- James (1947-2001), the second son, who viciously fought with Donald and went on to victimize the most defenseless members of his family, especially the girls, Mary and Margaret.
- Matthew (1958), a talented potter who, when not convinced he was Paul McCartney, believed his moods controlled the weather.
- Joseph (1956-2009), the most peaceful of the sick brothers, heard voices from different times and places.
- Peter (1960), the rebellious boy, was manic and violent and for years refused all help.
- Y Brian (1951-1973), the rock star of the family, who kept his deepest fears secret, and in one inscrutable burst of violence changed all of their lives forever.
“Brian went to live in the San Francisco Bay Area, fell in love, the family met the girlfriend and everything seemed to be going well. But one day, that relationship ended and shortly after he killed her and committed suicide,” he told her. Kolker to BBC World.
“It was a huge turning point. It marked the moment when the family could no longer hide what was happening. They couldn’t sit in the shadows any longer. They had to ask for help.”
They had not done it before, explains the author, because “they knew that the moment they made public what was happening, the fate of the whole family would change, and the future of the children who were not sick would be affected, so They kept it a secret for as long as they could.
Dead end
Mimi, the mother, had learned to pretend that nothing that happened was strange.
“To do anything else would have been the same as admitting that he had no real control over the situation, that he couldn’t understand what was going on in his house, let alone how to control it.”
“Mimi made a lot of decisions that had brutal consequences, that hurt a lot of the kids. But on the other hand, she heroically stood up for her sick kids.
“In another family they could have ended up on the street and forgotten,” Kolker told BBC Mundo.
She also had to care for her husband, who suffered a stroke.
“You may wonder why he didn’t call a doctor, until you find out what doctors were doing at the time with people like the Galvins – that’s when you begin to realize how trapped, lost and confused the family was.”
For a long time, the options tended to be two, says the author.
“A group of doctors said it was a genetic problem, and they tried to cure schizophrenia with electric shock therapy, Thorazine, lobotomies… they treated them like test subjects, and put them in mental hospitals from which they never came out again.
“Another group of doctors said, ‘It’s the parents’ fault, so let’s get all the children out of the house and put the healthy ones in shelters and the sick ones in psychiatric hospitals so they’ll never be seen again.'”
That second option devastated Mimi.
“I was devastated,” she told Kolker. “She thought she was a good mother. She baked a cake and a pie every night. Or at least she had Jell-O with whipped cream.”
From silence to book
What then, all these years later, led the Galvin family to want to make public all the details of a story that had been kept quiet for so long?
“The two sisters had done a lot of therapy to recover from their childhood traumas, and they felt that their experience could be useful to other people.”
Also, Mimi was already in her 90s and the family thought: ‘now or never’.
However, their interest was not just in telling what happened, “they were also genuinely curious about what their family’s contribution to science was.”
“They knew that they had studied it, and that they were once treated as significant, but that didn’t mean anything had come of it, so they were hoping that someone like me would be able to find out.”
The precise genetic pattern of schizophrenia has defied detection, explains the author.
Researchers know that one of the biggest risk factors is heritability, but it doesn’t seem to be passed down directly from parents to children.
Psychiatrists, neurobiologists and geneticists thought there was a code for the condition, but they couldn’t find it.
By virtue of the large number of cases, the Galvins offered an opportunity that was difficult to repeat: six individuals with an identical genetic lineage.
Beginning in the 1980s, the entire family became the subject of study. Their genetic material has been analyzed by the University of Colorado Health Sciences Center, the National Institute of Mental Health, and more than one pharmaceutical company.
We now know that samples of its genetic material have formed the cornerstone of research that has helped unlock understanding of the disease.
By analyzing their DNA and comparing it to genetic samples from the general population, researchers are on the verge of making significant advances in the treatment, prediction and even prevention of schizophrenia, the author notes.
For a long time, the Galvins had no idea that they might be helping others, oblivious to how promising their contribution had been.
“That was what made them most happy,” Kolker told BBC Mundo.
“They thought it was a breakthrough that the disease was genetic, so a lot of the other theories, like it was the result of bad parenting, were nonsense.”
“They felt like that put them on solid ground, and the mother, it put her in a good mood. Suddenly, she was ready to talk about her family.”
unbreakable bond
For the author, for his part, what caught his attention the most was that “the six brothers who did not suffer from mental illness found their way and led a normal life.”
“None of them ended up homeless or drug addicts.”
“How do you get through such an extraordinary childhood and find your way in the world? And how do you reassess your relationship with that family?”
“The mere fact of wanting to remain a part of it after such traumatic experiences amazed me. Why did they leave at the first opportunity and never return? “
“Everyone found ways to stay connected to each other.”
“With Lindsay, for example, I could see her attitudes toward her family changing.”
“First she wanted to leave, then she was angry, then she wanted to rescue some of the siblings who still needed help, and finally she settled into a caretaker role very similar to the one her mother played for many years.”
“When she was a child she didn’t want her siblings to exist, and now she spends a good part of her life taking care of them.”
Lindsay has spent decades trying to make sense of her childhood, and that project continues.
He has learned that the key to understanding schizophrenia is that the key remains elusive.
There is a menu of symptoms, various ways the disease presents itself, and specific indicators.
Psychiatrists speak of loosening of associations and disorganized thinking.
Yet hardly anyone can explain to him why, nearly half a century after that day they climbed that hill, Donald is still reciting his religious litany or why, for nearly as long, he has consistently and unswervingly maintained that he is the son of an octopus. .
But as soon as he sees his younger sister arrive at the institution where he lives, he gets up, ready to leave. He knows that when Lindsay visits him, it’s to take him to see his family.
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BBC-NEWS-SRC: https://www.bbc.com/mundo/noticias-63244966, IMPORTING DATE: 2022-10-16 11:30:05