Hidden Valley Road: Despair and Hope in a Schizophrenic Family
About This Novel
In the eyes of outsiders, the Calvin family in Colorado Springs, USA, is a perfect middle-class family: the enthusiastic husband Donne is an Air Force Academy officer, and the wife Mimi is a daughter-in-law from an upper-class family in Texas. They also have 12 lovely children. But beneath the surface, there was a power flowing that the couple couldn't understand. In just ten years, 6 of the 12 children suffered from severe schizophrenia, and the other 6 children were waiting in fear, waiting for themselves to be next, waiting for more pain and harm to come. Madness, humiliation and violence have never spared this family, and what hangs over this family is far more than self-mutilation and murder. Based on interviews with all living participants and a large amount of medical archives, author Robert Kolker tells the story of the whole process of schizophrenia devouring this family in a sympathetic and compassionate way. This special family also brings a glimmer of hope for exploring the causes and treatments of schizophrenia. Using the story of the Calvin family as a context, Kolker sorted out and interspersed the views and debates in the medical community over the past century on the causes of schizophrenia, the evolution of treatments for the disease, and society's prejudice and discrimination against schizophrenia patients and their families. From the disagreements and ruptures between Freud and Jung, to an entire generation of therapists blaming "schizophrenic mothers," from theorists abandoning the concept of illness and obsessed with subverting it, to medical researchers peeling back the cocoons to find the biological causes of the disease, this book covers it all.
What Readers Think
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Official(1)Scraped 7d ago
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Although it has been difficult to enter the flow state, I have finished reading it intermittently. A two-line narrative, the main line is the life history of the Calvin family, and the secondary line is the history of the development of psychiatry since the 18th century. The scenes of their onset of illness are written in a concise and plain style, as if countless audiences were calmly and silently watching them go crazy. During the reading process, I always felt that this book has a lot of humanistic care and reconstructs the same thing from everyone's perspective. Good books are like this. All are secretive and complex, but the revelations are so twisty and outrageous. While Mimi gave birth to 12 children, Don was cheating on her everywhere and neglecting the children all day long on the pretext of being busy with work. In the process of widowed parenting, Mimi established a simple and crude parenting logic. The children were crowded together, causing strife, violence, and sexual assault. These problems are mice hiding in the corner. Even if they jump in front of Mimi and Dawn, they will turn a blind eye, just like Mimi avoids solving the problem of Dawn's cheating. Twenty years later, when Lindsay and Margaret told Mimi about the past of being molested by their brother, Mimi showed empathy and told that she had also been hurt by her stepfather when she was young. After crying, she asked Lindsay and Margaret to understand her sick son. In the second half of the book, the author also explains this phenomenon. Due to the complexity and coverage of the logic of the onset of mental illness, it is often difficult to define the boundary between normal and onset. Many people have childhood trauma, and some people cannot be cured, and gradually develop into delusions, bipolar, autism, and other real mental illnesses. Some people have learned some ways to deal with it, avoid trauma, and turn a blind eye. This won't solve the problem, but at least you can pretend to live normally. Dorn's PTSD after his retirement erupted directly into depression in his later years. Avoiding cannot solve the problem, it can only delay it. It depends on which day it is delayed. The 12 children Mimi gave birth to each have their own unique personalities. When introducing each child in the book, the author always shows his personal characteristics in detail, but after the onset of the disease, their personality characteristics are so similar that many times it feels like there is no difference. For readers, this is the role of labels. The label of mental illness makes all the wild delusions and unprovoked acts of violence become memory points that are not worth mentioning. There is no need to analyze the motives, and they all blur into a common image. The author's writing power is also reflected in this point, and he really tries his best to distinguish each person's personal image. Mary and Margaret, two sisters with similar names, have completely different personalities and thoughts. Under the same suffering, they each completed their own redemption. Of course, there is no need to demonstrate the relationship between a people-pleasing personality and self-salvation. It is good that everyone's choices are self-consistent. The history of the development of psychiatry spans two hundred years, from the time when it was difficult for women to enter the workforce to the time when research results shocked everyone. There were too many twists and turns in the middle.
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Community(0)
Official(1)Scraped 7d ago
a free essay
Although it has been difficult to enter the flow state, I have finished reading it intermittently. A two-line narrative, the main line is the life history of the Calvin family, and the secondary line is the history of the development of psychiatry since the 18th century. The scenes of their onset of illness are written in a concise and plain style, as if countless audiences were calmly and silently watching them go crazy. During the reading process, I always felt that this book has a lot of humanistic care and reconstructs the same thing from everyone's perspective. Good books are like this. All are secretive and complex, but the revelations are so twisty and outrageous. While Mimi gave birth to 12 children, Don was cheating on her everywhere and neglecting the children all day long on the pretext of being busy with work. In the process of widowed parenting, Mimi established a simple and crude parenting logic. The children were crowded together, causing strife, violence, and sexual assault. These problems are mice hiding in the corner. Even if they jump in front of Mimi and Dawn, they will turn a blind eye, just like Mimi avoids solving the problem of Dawn's cheating. Twenty years later, when Lindsay and Margaret told Mimi about the past of being molested by their brother, Mimi showed empathy and told that she had also been hurt by her stepfather when she was young. After crying, she asked Lindsay and Margaret to understand her sick son. In the second half of the book, the author also explains this phenomenon. Due to the complexity and coverage of the logic of the onset of mental illness, it is often difficult to define the boundary between normal and onset. Many people have childhood trauma, and some people cannot be cured, and gradually develop into delusions, bipolar, autism, and other real mental illnesses. Some people have learned some ways to deal with it, avoid trauma, and turn a blind eye. This won't solve the problem, but at least you can pretend to live normally. Dorn's PTSD after his retirement erupted directly into depression in his later years. Avoiding cannot solve the problem, it can only delay it. It depends on which day it is delayed. The 12 children Mimi gave birth to each have their own unique personalities. When introducing each child in the book, the author always shows his personal characteristics in detail, but after the onset of the disease, their personality characteristics are so similar that many times it feels like there is no difference. For readers, this is the role of labels. The label of mental illness makes all the wild delusions and unprovoked acts of violence become memory points that are not worth mentioning. There is no need to analyze the motives, and they all blur into a common image. The author's writing power is also reflected in this point, and he really tries his best to distinguish each person's personal image. Mary and Margaret, two sisters with similar names, have completely different personalities and thoughts. Under the same suffering, they each completed their own redemption. Of course, there is no need to demonstrate the relationship between a people-pleasing personality and self-salvation. It is good that everyone's choices are self-consistent. The history of the development of psychiatry spans two hundred years, from the time when it was difficult for women to enter the workforce to the time when research results shocked everyone. There were too many twists and turns in the middle.
