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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.