The Thorazine caused Donald to gain weight and sleep often, but it never eliminated his delusions of having superior powers or being controlled by God.
frequently away for work, it was up to Mimi to manage Donald along with the ten other children still living at home, most of whom became terrified of Donald. and Mimi tried to manage Donald’s illness while he lived at home because admitting him to a mental institution would be to admit defeat and publicly acknowledge what was happening. Because of the stigma attached to the illness, Donald Sr. Don and Mimi opted for a psychoanalytic treatment before eventually resorting to the use of Thorazine to reduce Donald’s aggressive outbursts. When he was forced to return home, he believed people were shooting at him and once removed all of the furniture from the house in a paranoid episode.
This behavior was at first attributed to a break up with a longtime girlfriend. He also killed a cat that had lived with him for a few days after it scratched him. By sophomore year in college, Donald was experiencing full-blown psychotic episodes, believing in one case that he had murdered a professor and in another fantasizing about murdering someone at a football game. Mimi and Donald were frequently traveling for work and left the boys to their own devices, which could be brutal as they formed camps against one another. By his teenage years, however, he was smashing dishes and ruthlessly beating up his younger brothers. played football, got decent grades, and wanted to follow in his father’s footsteps. He had experienced in his early military career “a case of the nerves” and was hospitalized at Walter Reed hospital, this event was not much discussed in the family, and his career and family developed quickly. was a professor at the Air Force Academy after having spent time in the Navy. In one other famous case of schizophrenia from the 1950s, the Genain quadruplets all developed schizophrenia by age 25 and were studied by the National Institute of Mental Health.ĭon Galvin Sr. Today, estimations are that one in one hundred individuals may experience schizophrenia at some point in their lives, but with an identical twin, chances increase to roughly 50%. Freud was the first but certainly not the last to place the blame of development of schizophrenia decidedly at least partially at the feet of the mother, a point not lost on Mimi as her son’s disappeared into the illness. Examining a family in which six of the boys developed the disease provides the opportunity to learn more about the underlying genetic components that may be associated with schizophrenia. The degree to which the physical components drive the illness is still one that is fascinating and much debated. Since Swiss Psychologist Eugen Bleuler initially coined the term schizophrenia, which comes from the Latin word -schizo- meaning a split in mental functioning, he had suspected that there was an underlying physical component to the disorder. The book addresses many facets related to mental illness, including the issues of genetic and environmental factors, the stigma around mental illness, and the difficulty in managing and finding good care for those experiencing different levels of schizophrenia. Eventually, six of the boys would develop schizophrenia. The non-fictional account follows the growing family from the time in which the young, recently married Donald and Mimi Galvin moved to Colorado Springs through the twelve children that eventually made up the Galvin family (10 boys and 2 girls). Hidden Valley Road, named after the street the family lived on, is the tragic story of the Galvin family.
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