I had the sense that Louis Theroux would love to have been involved with this family and produce a series of programmes about them like he did with the Westboro Baptist Church. This is a fascinating and compelling account of a large family’s tendency towards schizophrenia. Alongside this detailed account the history of the attempts to investigate, find treatments and causes of schizophrenia offer the reader an immersive and challenging reading experience.
The whole nature/nurture argument is brought into play here. This forms possibly the backbone of the book. Six sons in the same family all suffering from the same mental illness. Were they genetically programmed to do so? Or was it their upbringing? Answers not on a postcard but in a 370+ page book.
It’s an uncomfortable and quite harrowing read. In some places it’s as if you’ve come across the pages of a horror story fiction that has in someway become interspersed with a scientific treatise on schizophrenia. At times there was an almost surreal sense to the book. A sense of disbelief. As if these people were rehearsing for their slots on the Jeremy Kyle show.
Don and Mimi Galvin, seem to have started out as perhaps the cliched image of the American dream. And it seems to go horribly wrong when their eldest son starts to display some erratic behaviour, to put it mildly. And what sets out as a book that seems to be dealing with a factual account of how this family deal with this dreadful condition and is almost clinical in its execution subtly shifts so that you find that emotion kicks in hard. I would have thought that dealing with 12 normal children is challenging enough but when half of them fall ill you might expect the parents to crumble. It certainly doesn’t appear they did outwardly although Don Galvin had some health issues. Mimi, like most mothers, loves her children, wants only the best for them and it’s almost as if she cannot face the dreadful truth.The whole family was affected especially the two youngest daughters. They alone seem to have had a stab at some kind of normality.
I am fortunate in that I’ve had no real direct dealings with schizophrenia. I would be really interested to listen to the opinion of this book from somebody who has been involved with the condition At times I found the scientific parts too long and wordy. I got lost. But I was interested in the family parts because personality, nature/nurture alway fascinates me. This book lays the family bare. I can’t think that they had any secrets left. It renders it very poignant. Something I found incredibly touching was that the youngest sister still makes sure that the oldest brother, in his 70s, is okay. After all she endured, witnessed and went through, including abuse, you might not have blamed her for turning her back on the lot of them and making a life for herself but she doesn’t. So there is almost a subtle, unspoken examination of family ties and bonds.
For me, it was an unusual book. I delve into non-fiction from time to time and I enjoy it. I think it’s good for me. To place myself in a reality that I don’t get from my diet of fiction. It opens up areas of life that I maybe haven’t considered fully before. This book will stay with me for a long time. It has actually made me want to find out more about schizophrenia.
My thanks to Ana McLaughlin at Quercus books for a copy. I actually won it in a social media draw! How cool is that?
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