Hidden Valleys of the Brain

I'm not even going to attempt to summarize Robert Kolker's meticulously reported and compassionately told story of the Galvin family, Hidden Valley Road: Inside the Mind of an American Family-- it's one of those books you have to read (like Andrew Solomon's Far From the Tree) plus, it's a family with twelve children, six of which are diagnosed with schizophrenia, so there's no short version of this disquieting saga-- but I did learn a few things:

1) in 1908, Eugen Bleuler coined the term schizophrenia because the root "schizo" implied a harsh splitting of mental functions but this turned out to be a poor choice-- popular culture has confused schizophrenia with the idea of split personality, but this is a mistake: schizophrenia is "a divide between perception and reality . . . it is about walling oneself off from consciousness . . . until you are no longer accessing anything others accept as real"

2) schizophrenia is a multiplex genetic disorder-- it's caused by a number of genes and they also need to be expressed, often by environmental factors or drug use-- and it might be even less tangible, it might be "a collection of neurodevelopment disorders" and not even one single disease . . . it might be like a fever, a symptom and not a disease at all-- schizophrenia might just be a reaction that happens to consciousness when a brain is broken for any number of reasons;

3) the children in the book were born from 1945 to 1965 . . . so they span a wide variety of treatments and a wide variety of failures in treating the disease, every theory more screwed up than the last: shock therapy, institutionalization, madness as a metaphor, madness caused by over-parenting, madness caused by under-parenting, tranquilizers, induced catatonia, medicines that did as much damage as help, the return of a kinder, gentler shock therapy, possible wonder drugs that couldn't get funded (because schizophrenics don't advocate very well for themselves) and finally the realization that there is no magic bullet yet for this disease-- because it is caused by so many genes and so many factors . . . and while wilderness-based youth therapy and therapeutic boarding schools have been found to curb the disease before it fully sets in, these treatments are extraordinarily expensive and only available to the very wealthy . . . as for the rest of us, we have to cross our fingers, avoid toxic environments, and hope for the best.