(typewriter keys clacking) (gentle piano music) - Hi, I'm Robert Kolker, and this is "Hidden Valley Road", which is the true story of an American family with 12 children, six of them diagnosed with schizophrenia, that became science's great hope in the quest to understand the disease.

I found writing it, and I hope readers find reading it, a hopeful story because it's really about what happens after perhaps some of the worst possible things happen to not just yourself, but to your whole family, and how do you make it through that?

(gentle orchestral music) - Can you talk a little bit about how you balanced the story with the science and brought it together?

- I prepared two different timelines, the science and history of schizophrenia and our thinking about it, and the history of this family.

Very quickly, it became clear to me that I wanted this to be a family story, that I didn't want this to be a case study or a science textbook that would have the family as evidence about the science of schizophrenia.

I wanted the science to be in the service of the family's story.

(gentle piano music) - [J.T.]

The family hobby is trying to tame wild things.

Can you talk a little bit about their falconry?

- It's a point of pride for the family.

They're excited about it.

It's not like it's continued through successive generations, but their family legacy is falconry.

Their father not only flew falcons for the Air Force Academy, but their parents, Don and Mimi, were the ones who first suggested that the Air Force make the falcon its mascot.

And so I couldn't not write about it.

That shows just how optimistic and how large and in charge they were as people, how they were ready to take on the world and confident that they could with enough hard work and faith.

That made me think of all sorts of family stories where the family starts off with hopes and optimism, and then something unexpected happens, and how do they deal with what's unexpected, and so I knew I had to write about it in that way.

- For more of my conversation with Robert Kolker, please visit awordonwords.org.

Thank you for watching "A Word on Words".

I'm J.T.

Ellison.

Keep reading.

(typewriter bell dings) - [Robert] The big takeaway, I think, is about early intervention.

We live in a time now where that's the big difference.

A teenager who's having some pretty severe difficulties can get a lot of care and attention now in a way that a teenager in 1965, it would be swept under the rug out of shame, stigma, and misunderstanding.