That fall, Lindsay started seeing a boy named Tim, someone she’d known for years. The Galvin family, which eventually settled in Colorado Springs, Colo., began expanding in 1945, when U.S. Air Force officer Don Sr. and Mimi had their first child, Don Jr. She had a social life, boyfriends, parties—nothing was stifling her anxiety. Author. She was vague about it at first: “There was an incident with some boys.”. They saw that Eleanor was not home yet. ‘Hidden Valley Road’ Review: Young Men Touched by Madness The Galvins rejected the idea that their parenting was the problem, and helped researchers probing the genetic roots of … And it did so at a time when psychiatry’s nature vs. nurture battle raged on, with many experts still holding to the “schizophrenogenic mother” explanation. Lindsay is related to Thomas A Galvin and Patrice McGovern as well as 2 additional people. Tom Stoppard Doesn’t Trust Biographies. Now He’s the Subject of One. Shame and guilt are ways that children usually process those traumas when the grown-ups around them have failed them. McKay’s uncle was diagnosed with cancer at 26, her grandmother at 50, her mother at 58. Was she sending out some sort of sexual signal, as the victim of her brother’s abuse, equating sex with affection in some misplaced way? READ: ‘I am mine’: This is what Alzheimer’s is like at 41, For Indiana-born McKay, now a well-known Nova Scotia-based novelist (The Birth House, The Virgin Cure), learning whether she carried the genetic mutation that had shortened her ancestors’ lives for more than a century was not an easy call. The more brothers fell ill, the more plagues were visited upon them. The Galvin family, which eventually settled in Colorado Springs, Colo., began expanding in 1945, when U.S. Air Force officer Don Sr. and Mimi had their first child, Don Jr. Joe later told his mother that a family friend, a Catholic priest to whom Don Sr. and Mimi had often entrusted their boys, had molested them, while Mimi revealed to her adult daughters—after they had confronted her about sending them to James—that she too had been sexually abused as a child, by her stepfather. The plan had been for her mother to take her to a dentist appointment. The question was how well that mask was still working for her now: hypervigilant, uncomfortable with failure, terrified to present herself to others as anything less than perfect. The myth starts with a child unable to speak, and takes flight when the right therapist is sensitive and kind enough to coax the child into a breakthrough. All the kids got rides on Jim’s Yamaha 550 motorcycle. She told her mother she would never agree to be in the same room as her brother again. It seemed like a tidy enough explanation. And then the therapist’s expression darkened. © Copyright 2021 St. Joseph Communications. But she’d said it happened, and that was more than she’d ever said out loud on the subject up until that point. Lindsay Galvin started talking. Together, their family stories touch on most of the burning issues in contemporary medicine, including the role of genes and their complex interplay with environmental factors in our fates, and the related issues of privacy, family ties and agency—especially when it comes to the question of having children. Don Galvin and Mimi Blayney married in December 1944. Usually, he was drunk, after a shift at the bar. My father was an alcoholic and my mother was 20 years younger than him, needless to say our upbringing was very chaotic and there were no boundaries. She thought she was the crazy one. Barely a moment passed before Nancy cut away from Tim and marched down the lane to Lindsay. If McKay was clear, so were her boys. This was when she chose to talk about it. Some invitees came, those ready to acknowledge their genetic heritage, and some did not. His approaches were always the same. By joining Slate Plus you support our work and get exclusive content. These are familiar notes to McKay, who describes her “family reunions” in terms of everyday organizing: “I bring the potato salad, you bring the pecan pie, we talk about cancer.” As for those who fear advance knowledge of the future, McKay’s empathy can be interspersed with anger if children are involved. The mutation “predisposes” a person, early in life, to at least 13 kinds of cancer, from colon to ovarian to brain—it brings an 85 per cent chance of colon cancer with an average onset at the age of 49. The more I learned about the Galvin family, the more I couldn’t believe their story. Close to Jackson Park and walking distance to Peterborough Regional Health Centre. But the Russian author would have been just as mistaken as he was in the famous opening lines of Anna Karenina, where he divided happy families from unhappy ones. One brother sat on his teacher’s desk and spouted nonsense; another thought he was Paul McCartney; others fought one another, forcing the police to come and for Lindsay and her sister Margaret, the only girls, to lock themselves in the parents’ bedroom to stay safe. ~ WRITERS INTERVIEWING WRITERS |ALWAYS WITH A BOOK~ WEDNSDAYS WITH WRITERS OPRAH’S BOOK CLUB PICK #1 NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER ONE OF THE NEW YORK TIMES A rushed wedding across the Mexican border in Tijuana followed: a not uncommon wartime story. She thought about what it might mean if Jim tried to go all the way with her—if that meant she could have a baby. Didn’t she deserve what happened next? And then the therapist’s expression darkened. She had never picked the side of a healthy child against a sick one, and she wasn’t going to start now. There is a narrative, or a myth, that our society indulges in about trauma and therapy, particularly in the wake of unspeakable childhood, After all this time, she still was terrified of becoming mentally, To her, schizophrenia wasn’t an excuse for what Jim had done to, The Strange Beauty of Kazuo Ishiguro’s Human Inhumans, Living the Good Life in a Hole in the Ground, How Lawrence Ferlinghetti Changed American Culture Forever. Copyright © 2020 by Robert Kolker, published by Doubleday, an imprint of the Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group, a division of Penguin Random House LLC. That thesis, articulated by the influential German-American psychiatrist Frieda Fromm-Reichmann in 1948, tormented mid-century parents by blaming the disease on “severe early warp and rejection” in infancy and childhood, “as a rule, mainly from a schizophrenogenic mother.” It didn’t help that Mimi—a perfectionist averse to praising her children and secretly troubled by her own trauma—fit the (false) mother-as-bogeyman profile to a T. But if Mimi herself and the vast set of triggers that might have influenced her sons’ individual psychoses interested some psychiatrists, the basic Galvin arithmetic—six boys in one family—captured the attention of researchers seeking a physical cause. But of course she knew. He knew a little bit about her family already, even if he didn’t know some of the more difficult details. Her hope for Lindsay was that she end up in a place where she would be willing to trust new people, to let down her armor under the right circumstances. Her parents had assured her he would not be. At the University of Colorado in Boulder, Lindsay was getting straight As doing hardly any work, and yet at odd moments she was overcome with panic. But, after a series of personal losses, he too began being overwhelmed by hallucinations in 1982 at age 25. Lindsay paid for the sessions herself. When she got there, the big brother was there, along with two other guys, drinking Seven and Sevens. The guys invited both girls out to a well-known make-out spot in town to drink some more. Both Mimi and Don Galvin rejected the whole idea of therapy. Hidden Valley Road: Inside the Mind of an American Family. There came a time when they finally had the place to themselves—everyone else was either skiing or shopping—and they were on the verge of sleeping together. Of their 10 older brothers, six of them had been diagnosed with schizophrenia. This threw Tim, at first. It would always be very late at night. This excerpt is published with permission from the book Hidden Valley Road: Inside the Mind of an American Family by Robert Kolker. Because there were three boys in there with her. But if that were true—and to be sure, no studies have ever suggested that abuse does cause schizophrenia—that would mean that Lindsay was at risk. “Should’ve been on Halloween,” she joked to author Kolker. And when Lindsay got to the part about the college health services therapist not believing her, she remembered being outraged. View Lindsay Galvin Drakeley’s profile on LinkedIn, the world's largest professional community. The pottery classes she took as a child gave her a new way of looking at her world. She stopped short of revealing which of her brothers had abused her. One brother died, another almost killed his wife. The book is an account of the Galvin family of Colorado Springs, Colorado, a midcentury American family with twelve children (10 boys and 2 girls), six of whom were diagnosed with schizophrenia (notably all boys). Nearly 20 years older than the youngest children, Jim had often had all the younger boys and girls over to his house for sleepovers. The family became the subject of researchers investigating a genetic origin for schizophrenia. She was almost delirious with the thought of it. In the official version of Mimi’s enchanted New York City childhood—the story she’d raised her daughters on, and related to friends and neighbors proudly—Mimi’s stepfather, the painter Ben Skolnick, was her tutor in music and art. Too clouded by shame to place the blame on anyone but herself, Lindsay told no one what happened. What McKay went to find out was whether she had any of the five genetic mutations associated with Lynch syndrome, specifically the one on the MSH2 gene that had ravaged her most direct ancestors and closest relatives. She tried to ignore that feeling, but there was no mistaking it. There is a narrative, or a myth, that our society indulges in about trauma and therapy, particularly in the wake of unspeakable childhood abuse. “I know you’re not lying.”. All rights reserved. (Courtesy of Galvin Family). February 20, 2020, Ami McKay, with her son Ian (Photograph by Darren Calabrese). Leave me alone. She left out the part about the party. My family was very dysfunctional. In Lindsay’s case, the myth was barely half true. She never asked her parents to pay. Her father asked him to leave at once. By the time they came back, Lindsay’s friend and her sisters were all asleep. Join Facebook to connect with Lindsay Mary Galvin Rauch and others you may know. Mimi’s reaction was always the same. Lindsey Galvin Director. At heart this the story of the family of Mimi and Don Galvin and their 12 children (yes, 12! He taught Margaret how to fly a kite and ride a bike. Select this result to view Lindsay M Galvin's phone number, address, and more. Photo illustration. It was about reclaiming the past on one’s own terms. These would provide control samples for further research. Lindsay spent the rest of the evening in tears. Then he moves on to them building their life and family out in Colorado at the Air Force Academy. She opened the closet door and found her way to the living room. What if Mimi didn’t believe her? 5 talking about this. He holds a bachelor's from Prescott College and a master's degree from Norwich University. Why dig all that up again? Like a lot of boys, Tim had been in awe of Lindsay and her sister Margaret—both stunning, both effortlessly athletic. One afternoon in 1970, an eight-year-old American girl named Margaret Galvin came home from school in Colorado Springs to find her eldest brother, 25-year-old … Two years later, 15-year-old Peter, brother No. But she and Silvern talked a lot about the particular way Mimi had of silencing Lindsay. There came a time in her sessions when, almost as a dress rehearsal, Lindsay decided to talk about another childhood trauma, this one unrelated to her family—something that had happened to her five years earlier, at end of eighth grade, just a few months before she’d left home for good. If her mother had really done that, then Lindsay must not know her as well as she thought she did. They parked and walked slowly to the entrance. She’d been accepted into Hotchkiss and poised to move across the country, away from her brothers, away from Jim. Kolkore begins with Mimi and Don's courtship and marriage and early life in the military and Don's deployment. Where the myth breaks apart is with the idea of a breakthrough. But then, quite unexpectedly, part of her found Jim’s ability to disappear from her life to be utterly wrenching. All of that was true. At first it seemed like she didn’t believe her—that she thought she was making the whole thing up. And you'll never see this message again. For the two sisters, it was an easy choice. Lindsay has 8 jobs listed on their profile. It was 2016 before the right test offered a breakthrough. Over the course of decades, including times when medical orthodoxy was often intensely hostile to the idea of heritability in the diseases that devastated their families, the two American clans became significant factors in advancing genetic research into cancer and schizophrenia. Now she was back in Colorado, but still a safe distance from home. Even if, unlike six of her brothers, she happened not to descend into delusions or hallucinations or paranoia—if she didn’t come to believe that the house was under attack, or that the CIA was searching for her, or that the devil was under her bed—she felt as if she was carrying an unstable element inside herself. She knew that her body was changing. Her friend said no; she had to stay home to take care of her little sisters. When Jim approached, one night at the Manitou Incline, she lost control, saying things she hadn’t expected to say. After he had seemingly recovered, the youngest children were often sent to stay with him when Don Jr. made their lives too chaotic or frightening. How many of us really want to know our likely futures or, even more forebodingly, those of our offspring? The boys, seeking privacy, found a walk-in closet, opened the door, and directed Lindsay inside it. Her mother was a watercolor artist. You’re imagining things!”. View the profiles of people named Lindsay Mary Galvin Rauch. Silvern would put whatever she couldn’t pay on a tab. Margaret Galvin Johnson, Compartmentalizing The Grief, mixed media on canvas 24″ x 36″. Summary: Currently, Donald lives in Colorado Springs, CO. Other names that Donald uses includes Donald I Galvin. And he never spoke to her about it after that. They would much rather stay with Jim and Kathy if it meant avoiding their other brothers—especially Donald, who was home from the hospital now, after having had a psychotic break. It became the new book "Hidden Valley Road." Lindsay’s description of her family, and of the minute-to-minute experience of growing up in that house, was far and away the most traumatic story, certainly, that she had ever heard from a patient. If she was not, “I had to know for their sake as well as mine.”. But Lindsay said yes and got into a car with them. Tim left Lindsay and ran up to his aunt. Someone was giving what happened a name. Job one, Silvern had always thought, was to not shut a patient down. Ten boys and two girls.) She had plenty to worry about without them. Jim’s wife Kathy became almost like a mother to Lindsay, brushing and curling her hair while they all watched Sonny & Cher. Read Full Summary Pathway to discovery: Of the 10 boys born to Mimi and Don Galvin, six (highlighted in blue) were diagnosed with schizophrenia; the family’s remarkable misfortune prompted researchers to begin searching for a genetic mutation that might shed light on the illness. However, they are aware of the book's existence: "They're thrilled. My debut novel THE BREATHING SEA out Summer 2018 with Chicken House Books. But it was clear that he’d molested her, touching her inappropriately. As a first step, she did very little but listen to Lindsay carefully for several sessions, paying attention to which subjects were overwhelming, or “fragmenting,” to her, and which closed her down entirely. Finally, on a cool evening in the spring of 1979, Lindsay was more terrified of getting pregnant than she was of Jim’s fury at being refused. Instead, Mimi started talking about how Jim was mentally ill. Lindsay flushed. She’d done it: She’d fought him off, protected herself, made it so that he would never do it again. Joseph, Peter, John, Matthew and Mark Galvin. They approached journalist and author Robert Kolker about writing the story of their family. The therapist was wondering how much of this was all in her head. There had been too many out-of-control horrors for it to be otherwise. McKay, then 32, was slow to take up the offer because to know would be to have “this thing that sits in the back of your head and doesn’t go away—you could never go back to being the way you were.” Two factors finally sent her to the hospital lab in mid-September 2001, when she was acutely aware of headlines proclaiming America’s “new normal” in the aftermath of 9/11. Silvern would help Lindsay fantasize about what she could do with her anger toward Jim. All healthy families are alike, a DNA-conscious Leo Tolstoy might have written, and thereby entirely distinct from all those—each miserable “in its own way”—whose bodies or minds are threatened by their very bloodlines. She would acknowledge what her daughter was saying and then urge her to move on—to forgive—always reminding her that there was someone else out there who had it worse. Lindsay was not scandalized. Lindsay was so drunk she could barely stagger back inside. Lindsey Galvin Professional Corporation. They were in the car, Lindsay and her mother, going to Mimi’s friend Eleanor Griffith’s house. She sensed Jim escalating with her, working his way toward something. By late 1978, there were three Galvin boys in different wards of the same state mental hospital. The TV would be on, and his wife Kathy would be in bed, and he would come into the living room and lie beside Lindsay, just as he had with Margaret before she began fending him off, refusing him. She stumbled outside and waited on the curb, holding her stomach, trying to sort out what had happened. The details reinforced how unrealistic some of her self-blaming notions had been. Lindsay and Margaret Galvin grew up in Colorado Springs. It was with no small measure of satisfaction—a declaration of victory may have been more like it—that Jim, the second-oldest Galvin child, had stepped in to help out when things were too strained at home. “That’s not true! Some part of her had truly believed, as a child does, that this was love. Trying to find Lindsay Galvin? Mimi was deliberately light on details, and Lindsay did not press her for any. Courtesy Lindsay Mary Galvin Rauch Matthew Galvin is one of six brothers in a Colorado Springs family to develop schizophrenia. After World War II, Don’s work with the Air Force brought them to Colorado, where their twelve children perfectly spanned the baby boom. Jim wasn’t supposed to be there. He took Lindsay and her sister Margaret to the movies and ice-skating and swimming, and skiing on the Broadmoor slopes in Colorado Springs, not far from their home, and the Manitou Incline, a funicular tourist attraction, well known to everyone in the area, where he had a job. Thanks to the detailed family chart Pauline Gross provided to Warthin, the list of known Gross victims dates back to 1856. To get there, Lindsay would have to learn to recognize post-traumatic stress in real time, as it was happening to her—so that she would be able to recognize, for example, that a blistering argument she had with a friend one night was at least in part because of the rape scene in the movie they’d just seen. Silvern told Lindsay that when somebody copes by being more armored, it can wind up hindering them later. The session went nowhere. While her mother worked in the garment business in Manhattan, her stepfather helped her appreciate culture in a way no one ever had before. Silvern called resilience “that wonderful term for something we don’t understand.” Resilience is the subject of umpteen studies, of course, and if someone could figure it out, they would rush to bottle the solution. The syndrome is named after physician Henry Lynch, known as “the father of cancer genetics,” who picked up the barely flickering torch of cancer syndrome studies from a pioneering pathologist of the early 20th century, Aldred Warthin. He picked up a guitar that was lying around and broke it in half. Both of her parents were there. Lindsay bit her lip. Being a victim was being a victim. It was as if she had used up all of her compassion on the sick children, even Jim, leaving nothing for anyone else. “We are,” McKay writes, “the longest and most detailed cancer genealogy in the world.” For many years, that genealogy was possibly the greatest single factor in keeping alive the notion of heredity in cancer research. We found 18 people public records in all 50 states. She was invited to a high school party hosted by the older brother of a friend. And if I refuse to come home, can I deal with the upset that would create? “But I know who would.”, They got dressed and left the condo when Tim spotted Nancy Gary in the distance, walking toward them along the main drag. They have also lived in Amherst, NH and Brooklyn, NY. Certainly no mainstream researcher or psychiatrist would say that it was Jim’s psychotic delusions that made him a pedophile. It also was a perfect preparation for what had to come next. And then he saw his father, telling him to get out and that he never wanted to see him there again. There were, of course, several weeks of terror that she might become pregnant. The health records of the Galvins do not stretch as far back as the Grosses’, but their family genetics played an even more pivotal research role in an era when mental health professionals were leaning hard into an understanding of schizophrenia as a psychological and not physical disease. One reason to accept her own new normal was “my mom saying, ‘Look, you know we’ve gone down this path for generations—think about the benefits when doctors can no longer tell you that maybe you only have the flu or that you don’t really need a colonoscopy at such a young age.’ ” That, and the fact McKay already had two sons. Kate, one of the Galvin grandchildren, who is interested in neuroscience and schizophrenia, takes a much-coveted undergraduate internship in the University of Colorado laboratory of Robert Freedman. A shadow followed her. Was she asking for it? How can I go home, knowing he’ll drop in at any moment? Don and Mimi Galvin seemed to be living the American dream. Phone 403 456 6246; Fax 403 536 3540; lgalvin@wt.ca; vCard; Legal Administrative Assistant Erin Yung 403 456 6257 eyung@wt.ca; Profile. ... Colorado. There may have been no safer person to tell. They have a narrower road to travel going forward—a more fenced-in, claustrophobic life. Meanwhile, brother No. And Lindsay was getting tired of pretending. Laverne Galvin, Elin Walsh, Kassandra Bethune, Dominic Saiz and Curt Barr, and many others are family members and associates of Donald. Lindsay’s childhood in Colorado Springs had been a relentless deluge of danger and mystery. The mutation was known to never reappear once the genetic line of transmission was broken. The goal was to find a common genetic mutation, even if it was common only to a particular family, because that abnormality could indicate an overall biochemical pathway to schizophrenia. And Mimi said one thing that, in an instant, made Lindsay think of her mother entirely differently. “I’m sick.” Mimi might have gathered that her daughter had been drinking—this was her 12th teenager, after all—but she said nothing. At its worst, that pressure can be retraumatizing. But that day, Lindsay was ready. In November 2016, after researchers had told the Galvin daughters—their main points of contact with the family—about what they had been doing with the family blood for decades and the SHANK2 findings, Margaret Galvin organized what she called “a blood-drawing party” for non-afflicted family members. Now he and Lindsay were in college together in Colorado. Lindsay woke up a few hours later with no idea of where she was. This article appears in print in the March 2020 issue of Maclean’s magazine with the headline, “Betrayed by their genes.” Subscribe to the monthly print magazine here. Slate relies on advertising to support our journalism. Could trauma or abuse cause insanity? She wouldn’t say, “Shut up.” It was more like “You think you’ve got troubles?” She attacked Lindsay’s emotions by undermining them, dismissing them, or invalidating them. Once it became clear she wasn’t, Lindsay expected to feel relief. She went to a party when she shouldn’t have. Lindsay was working hard to make herself OK with that, showing up at events like her sister’s wedding as if everything was fine. Lindsay Galvin Rauch was four years old the night she first began to realize something was terribly wrong with her older Donald. In short, the Galvin household offered a horrifically rich mine of potential evidence for any theory of schizophrenia’s causes.
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