Bests & Worsts Reviews from Amazon

This is a riveting and intimate portrait of the Galvins, Don and Mimi, and their twelve children, all born between 1945 and 1965.. Six of those children were eventually diagnosed with schizophrenia. This was an incredible rarity and so, not surprisingly, the children’s genetic material and family histories became the focus of research. Thanks to the Galvins, researchers now have a wellspring of valuable information to help them discover ways of treating and predicting schizophrenia. The Galvins genetic makeup added a unique contribution to schizophrenia research. But this is far more than a look at one family’s contributions to the history, research, and treatment of the disease. It is also an intimate tale of the parents, each of their children and how the ill family members affected the entire family, including those siblings who never became schizophrenic ( but were far from unscarred) . All of the children’s compelling life stories are interspersed with the sections focusing on the way schizophrenia was perceived and treated from the 1960s through recent times. This makes for an often heart wrenching look at what family life was like for parents raising six mentally ill chilldren, trying hard to pretend everything was fine, everything was normal. And when that no longer worked, there are revelations about how those children were sometimes subject to treatment that would be seen as harsh and shocking today. But mostly, for me, this is a powerful work which both illuminates the history of schizophrenia treatments as well as reveals the impact of the disease on a specific family. After I finished this book, I felt I knew each of the Galvin family members as individuals. Robert Kolker’s writing struck me as incredibly compassionate as well as well-researched and that made it particularly compelling to me.