Hidden Valley Road: Inside the Mind of an American Family

　　二戰過後，唐．高爾文因為服役於空軍，而和妻子咪咪．高爾文來到了科羅拉多，在1945年生下了第一個孩子、1965年生下了第十二個孩子，正好趕上了戰後嬰兒潮時期。

　　他們積極樂觀、努力工作且親切友善，就像人人口中會出現的模範家庭。然而，他們卻一連生下了6位患有精神分裂症的男孩。這個像是生活在美國夢中、人人稱羨的家庭，背後卻潛藏了接連不斷的精神崩潰、突如其來的暴力與看不見的各種折磨。

　　究竟唐與咪咪怎麼會一連生下這麼多位患有精神分裂症的孩子呢？這背後難解的謎，使他們成為美國國立精神衛生研究院首次研究的家庭個案，從而讓我們看到了精神分裂症史的不人道之處，不論其研究制度、醫治手術（腦白質切除術）、乃至精神分裂基因型母親相關論述，在在都違反了及訂本身的自然法則。

　　高爾文家族的DNA研究至今仍影響著精神分裂症研究，它帶領我們看見治療精神分裂症一線曙光，甚至進一步帶我們預見了根除精神分裂症的方法。(文/博客連編譯)

#1 NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER - OPRAH’S BOOK CLUB PICK - ONE OF GQ’s TOP 50 BOOKS OF LITERARY JOURNALISM IN THE 21st CENTURY - The heartrending story of a midcentury American family with twelve children, six of them diagnosed with schizophrenia, that became science’s great hope in the quest to understand the disease.

＂Reads like a medical detective journey and sheds light on a topic so many of us face: mental illness.＂ --Oprah Winfrey

Don and Mimi Galvin seemed to be living the American dream. After World War II, Don’s work with the Air Force brought them to Colorado, where their twelve children perfectly spanned the baby boom: the oldest born in 1945, the youngest in 1965. In those years, there was an established script for a family like the Galvins--aspiration, hard work, upward mobility, domestic harmony--and they worked hard to play their parts. But behind the scenes was a different story: psychological breakdown, sudden shocking violence, hidden abuse. By the mid-1970s, six of the ten Galvin boys, one after another, were diagnosed as schizophrenic. How could all this happen to one family?

What took place inside the house on Hidden Valley Road was so extraordinary that the Galvins became one of the first families to be studied by the National Institute of Mental Health. Their story offers a shadow history of the science of schizophrenia, from the era of institutionalization, lobotomy, and the schizophrenogenic mother to the search for genetic markers for the disease, always amid profound disagreements about the nature of the illness itself. And unbeknownst to the Galvins, samples of their DNA informed decades of genetic research that continues today, offering paths to treatment, prediction, and even eradication of the disease for future generations.

With clarity and compassion, bestselling and award-winning author Robert Kolker uncovers one family’s unforgettable legacy of suffering, love, and hope.

ROBERT KOLKER is the New York Times bestselling author of Lost Girls, named one of the New York Times’s 100 Notable Books and one of Publishers Weekly’s Top Ten Books of 2013. As a journalist, his work has appeared in New York magazine, Bloomberg Businessweek, The New York Times Magazine, Wired, GQ, O magazine, and Men’s Journal. He is a National Magazine Award finalist and a recipient of the 2011 Harry Frank Guggenheim Award for Excellence in Criminal Justice Reporting from the John Jay College of Criminal Justice in New York.