- Every family has its secrets.

Today's guest tells the story of an All-American family in the middle of the 20th century, grappling with the stigma and tragic consequences of mental illness.

He's Robert Kolker this week, on Story in the Public Square.

(upbeat music) Hello, and welcome to the Story in the Public Square, where storytelling meets public affairs.

I'm Jim Ludes from The Pell Center at Salve Regina University.

Joining me as he does every week of the cohost chairs by great friend and colleague G. Wayne Miller of the Providence Journal.

Each week, we talk about big issues with great guests.

Storytellers, journalists, novelists at war, to make sense of the big stories shaping public life in the United States today.

This week we're joined by bestselling author, Robert Kolker, whose new work is called "Hidden Valley Road" A towering accomplishment in narrative non-fiction.

Bob, thank you so much for being with us.

- Jim, thank you.

I'm really pleased to be talking with you guys.

- Your entire body of work is really remarkable and Hidden Valley Road is certainly just a really remarkable achievement as I mentioned.

But before we talk about the books and the articles, let's talk for a little bit about you.

How did you come to be a writer?

- Well, I've been a magazine journalist for about 25 years now, but growing up, I knew I wanted to write, but I really didn't come to journalism in the way that a lot of my friends at the time did.

I came up at a time, wherever you wanted to be a journalist, you wanted to be Woodward and Bernstein or a foreign correspondent or a like a pool reporter at the White House.

And that was never really the way I emotionally connected with it.

And it was after college where I was working at a little community newspaper that I really started to love reporting.

And what I found that it was that it was the reporting on everyday people that I really responded to, not just that they were everyday people, but because I was coming back week after week with this, updates about what they were doing, whether they were fighting a plan for a skyscraper or dealing with crime on their block or running for public office, if there was like a drama unfolding.

And so I discovered narrative nonfiction and really started to think big about ways to write long magazine stories and books.

And I feel in some ways I never really departed from community journalism because I tend to parachute into small towns and communities and families, and write about them as intimately and dramatically as possible, which is what I tried to do with Hidden Valley Road.

- How do you, achieve the sort of parachuted it is that without some parallel, how do you get people to trust you?

- I think my big thing is to say that if there's an opportunity to tell a deeper, less superficial story than what they might be accustomed to, when they think about the media, that I can spend time with them and really try and understand and let other people understand what they might get wrong about their situation.

And it's always a situation that's rather rather fraught.

And so my goal is to try to bring the temperature down a little bit not to pump more stress into the situation, but to sort of be a reliable grown-up.

I'm not an advocacy journalist.

I don't come in and say, I want to take your side against the bad guys and help out.

I said, don't cross that line.

But instead, what I say is that I'm non prosecutorial, that I'm not interested in finding good guys or bad guys or passing judgment.

I'm interested in helping the world understand them better.

- So let's get into Hidden Valley Road.

As viewers of the show may know, I have written about mental health for decades and it's been one of my passions for all that time, but I've never read anything like Hidden Valley Road from, from narrative point of view, from the way it flows from the information contained to the access to the people and the people themselves.

Talk about the people in this book themselves, starting with the parents who work.

Two people came out of the second world war.

They moved to Colorado and they started having children.

Eventually they had 12 children and it seemed at least at the beginning and from the outside that they were living the American dream, they're working hard, they have a house.

And but that's not really what was going on.

Tell us about this family, how they met the couple and then their children.

- Well, first of all, thank you Wayne, coming from you.

That's a really enormous compliment.

I have to say at first I thought it wouldn't be possible.

Anyone who writes about mental health issues or any health issues knows that in America, there are medical privacy laws and this is a large family.

And so I thought at least one or two members of the family wouldn't be interested in, in going there and speaking about things that had been so frowned upon or stigmatized or feared over time, but they all were ready.

And as you said, this was a mid century American family.

The parents had their first child in 1945 at the beginning of the baby boom.

And then their 12th child was born in 1965 at the very end of the baby boom.

And their troubles started in the late sixties and early seventies just as Americas started to bubble up on rest and insecurities as well.

And so it wasn't lost on me from the very beginning that this was kind of a unique American story to tell independent of acute mental illness and schizophrenia.

You have a very confident, adventurous, successful, admired American family, where behind the scenes, there are so many horrifying things happening that they are in complete denial about owning up to it because at the time to come forward with this sort of information would mean the end of the family.

And so they were sort of stuck.

- So what were some of the things that were going on behind closed doors of this, apparently bucolic American scene to the outside obviously.

What was happening?

As several of the sons were diagnosed with schizophrenia, there was a lot going on in addition to those diagnoses.

- I think the Trump might've really started early on with a lot of violence in the household, and I'm not talking about child abuse by the parents.

I'm talking about the boys and there were 10 boys and two girls.

All sort of turning on one another and rough housing.

And at the time in the fifties, it was easy to write it off as boys being boys and to perhaps for the parents to turn a blind eye to it.

But to hear the brothers talk about it now, it was a pretty fearful place to be with a lot of escalating violence.

And with some brothers who later developed acute mental illness, really not understanding limits and going hard.

And then from there, it gets, it increases as anyone knows about psychosis.

If you have some more psychotic breaks, things get worse and worse.

And by the time Donald, the oldest son was in college, he was torturing animals.

He ran into a bonfire one night.

He was acting out in ways that even he didn't understand, and he was frightened actually by his own behavior.

And it took some doing for the parents to sweep that one under the rug.

They went shopping for a doctor to give them a good opinion.

Because again, this was the late sixties where admitting your child had a problem like that meant perhaps he would have to have a lobotomy or be institutionalized, or at the very least, the whole family would be stigmatized.

So they were really chose to be optimistic.

And to think that the boys would just sort of grow out of their problems, but it wasn't just Donald.

It was Jim and it was Brian and it was Joe and Matthew and Peter one by one, six of the 12 children were diagnosed with schizophrenia.

And it only all came out by the mid seventies and late eighties.

They finally couldn't keep it under the rug anymore.

- So you talk about that era.

You mentioned Labatt.

That was one of the so-called interventions.

That was common, not just during that time, but in decades before there were other treatments such as insulin shock therapy, there was hydrotherapy these things that are so barbaric, certainly looking back, it was an era when psychiatric institutions were overcrowded, we're in humane.

How did, how did that all happen?

Did people who were in mental health at that time realized that a lot of this stuff was just horrible and wasn't helping even a little?

- There's sort of a second story bubbling under Hidden Valley Road being on the family saga.

And that's the story of an argument going on in psychiatry throughout the 20th century.

A conversation between nature and nurture.

The people who think that there must be something inherited and nature about schizophrenia and it needs to be medicalized and people who think that it's nurture and that something happens in a person's childhood to cause mental illness.

And this debate really has never ended.

It's kind of shifted now into the discussion of epigenetics, but at any rate, back in the fifties and sixties, there were people who were advocates of very drastic procedures, like shock therapy and lobotomy, and insulin therapy, chromotherapy, all sorts of things that in many ways we look back on now as barbaric, but they felt like they had the best interest of the patient at heart.

And then on the other side of the spectrum, where the therapists who thought that those methods were barbaric, but same time, they were convinced that it was mothers or bad parenting that caused schizophrenia and that too was wrong.

And so everybody thought they were on the side of the angels and they were arguing with the other side, but really there was no clarity about the condition.

- So Bob, you mentioned that the family had 12 children.

The first two were sons.

The last two were daughters.

As I understand that the daughters were instrumental in you getting the story in the first place.

Can you tell us about their role in your telling the story?

- I was introduced to them first and their names are Lindsey and Margaret.

And they were both in their fifties when I met them first over the phone in 2016.

And they're the youngest of the 10.

And so they had 10 brothers, six of them were schizophrenia.

And listening to them talk, I couldn't believe what they were saying.

And then they went on, they talked about how there was sexual abuse in the family and clergy abuse and a murder suicide so much tragedy.

My first question was how all this happened to just one family?

And then my second question was, how could they stay a family?

Like why would they stay together?

And that was the question I ended up asking the over and over again, over three years of reporting was you left town and we're come back.

You could've gone and changed your name.

Or you could have gone to law school and Los Angeles and sent a Christmas card every year and built a life there.

Why are you still a part of this family given that all the terrible things that happened?

And so I wanted to get to the bottom of that.

And that question really is another question, which is how do you move through traumatic experiences?

How do you come out the other side when the worst thing possible happens?

And how does a family stay a family in that situation?

And then of course there are the more, questions of mental illness about the nature of schizophrenia and what it is and what we still don't understand about it.

These were the things I was hoping to tackle and the sisters were of amazing help.

- So one of the amazing things about this is there and you mentioned this in your notes at the end, nothing is invented.

Dialogue is not made up.

You don't use pseudonyms.

These are all real people telling real.

How did you get all of those people to open up to you like that?

I'm trying to think of any comparison in certainly in mental health right now, I can't think of anything.

How did that happen?

How'd you do it?

- I'd have to tell you.

I didn't think it would be possible at first.

I thought that it would get difficult, that there'd be at least a few family members who just weren't into it.

And so I took it slow at the very beginning.

I said to the sisters, how about once a week?

I get on the phone with a different family member of your starting with your mother, Mimi, the matriarch of the family.

And I'd spend maybe an hour on the phone with each family member.

And then also some of the doctors who had treated the family over the years and in that hour, I would be very open-ended.

I would start by saying, so your sisters are interested in having an independent journalist come and write a book about your family.

What do you think about that?

And when you think about a book about your family, what do you think it would be like?

And then just listen and hear what they had to say.

And what I told the sisters was by the end of 10 weeks or so we all will know one way or another, whether this is doable or not, it'll be very, very clear.

And if it isn't, then I would just give my notes to the sisters and wish them well, and maybe they could write a memoir or something first person about it, but behold, everybody was ready.

And I think when it wasn't really realized was that there were two things really, the first was that so many decades had passed since the real horrible things happened in the family and the 1970s that people were ready.

And that Mimi in particular, the mother of the family, she was over 90 now.

And so there was sort of a now or never kind of feeling about telling the story.

That's when she went, a lot of memories would be gone too.

And then the second thing was that I think that many of the brothers were deferring to the two sisters because they were the youngest in the family.

And so many of the bad things and the tragedy sort of trickled down and affected them most of all.

So when they heard that the sisters wanted this to happen, they said, well, who are we to stop them?

And so they were respectful of that.

- So this family became the subject of a research study by the national Institute of mental health, which obviously it was one of the, I guess the, maybe the first of its kind, what came out of that research in terms of advancing, understanding and treatment of schizophrenia in particular.

- I'm glad you brought that up because that was another big reason why everybody was motivated to tell their family story.

They were convinced that the family was scientifically significant.

They knew that they had been studied, that their genes had been studied for decades, but they didn't have a lot of information on exactly what was learned from their family.

Because participation in studies like this is confidential and anonymous and not everybody kept tabs on the researchers years later.

And so there were two research teams, one from national Institute of mental health and one from the university of Colorado who really worked with the family's DNA over the years.

And they both ended up having breakthroughs at around the same time, around 2015 or 2016, which again, really motivated the family to, speak to a reporter like me and talk about it because they felt like their story could help people, but there was a lot, they still didn't know.

And I did a lot of work with the researchers, with the family's permission to really get to the bottom of it.

The short answer is that the scientists are learning that it's not just one genetic smoking gun, not one genetic mutation that causes schizophrenia.

It is a variety of genetic mutations that might be unique to each family, but that those mutations all happen in particular areas of the brain that are vital for brain function.

And so studying the Galvin's particular genetic abnormality sort of shines a light on the area of the brain that might be most responsible for schizophrenia.

So they helped get us one step further along in the journey.

And then the other research team in Colorado their work is all about prevention and about strengthening those parts of the brain, making them more resilient.

So you don't develop the disorder to begin with.

And that also is very promising.

- So where do things stand today in terms of treatment and understanding of schizophrenia, which I would argue is probably can be the most intractable of the mental illnesses that some people live with.

Where are we?

What's the state of the art now?

- I think there's bad news and good news.

The bad news is that the drugs that are being used to treat the symptoms of schizophrenia while very powerful and sometimes helpful to people are really the same drugs, essentially that have been used for 40 or 50 years.

They're Thorazine and its varieties and Clozapine the two different classes of drugs.

There's been no third game changing class for schizophrenia.

And that's astonishing given how many breakthroughs there been in terms of psychopharmacology for anxiety or depression or bipolar disorder.

And so it's a mystery really why pharma hasn't moved forward on that front?

It could be because schizophrenia has this stigma that so many people are in the shadows that there just isn't a groundswell of momentum to get them there.

So that's the bad news, but the good news is that there is less stigma now that there is more support for families.

When the Galvins finally came forward and sought help from doctors, half the doctors blamed the parents for the illness that wouldn't happen today.

Today, the families would get support as much as the patients would get support.

And early intervention is now a hallmark of treatment, which can be, really make a world of difference to a patient.

Donald Galvin, the oldest in the family, he first had troubles when he was 15, but he wasn't hospitalized till he was 25.

What if he had gotten really good medical attention when he was 15?

It could have perhaps prevented dozens of psychotic breaks.

- Hey, Bob, I, one of the things that I think really stands out in your writing is your own empathy.

You bring the readers through the lives that these people have lived with the challenges that they faced, but with a very sensitive touch.

And I'm curious where that comes from for you personally, but also the value of the usefulness of that.

Particularly in something like narative nonfiction.

- Well as an interviewer, I feel like I probably emulate my mother who was a very good listener.

She also was a psychiatric professional, but we didn't talk shop or anything like that.

She was a psychiatric assistant at our local hospital, but in terms of talking to people, she was always, she always was a quiet presence who always paid very close attention.

And so I try to do that in interviews, but with narrative nonfiction, I think intimacy is the key.

And I love that discuss potentially very, very complicated topics that perhaps the person might not even be interested in or intimidated by, wouldn't want to really get into the story itself is so compelling.

And the people you really feel like you're walking in their shoes that suddenly it all becomes very easy and it goes down smoothly.

And really, I think the subject could be anything I'm talking about books like "Moneyball," which, in one sense, it's a baseball story, but in the middle of it, suddenly you're learning some very complicated information about statistics that perhaps you never even signed on for.

You were like, I don't care about statistics, but it's interesting because you really wanna know about it.

And then there are, there are books closer to what I do about, tragedies and tragic situations like "Behind the beautiful Forever" by Katherine Boo, where you're suddenly you're in the slums of Mumbai.

And you're caring deeply about what happens to this family and all of their machinations and feuds and controversies.

And along the way, you're learning about the entire economy of India.

- So Hidden Valley Road was a New York Times bestseller.

It also was an Oprah's Book Club selection.

Now that's every author's dream, frankly.

No, I know a lot of authors and I'm one myself.

And how did you, how'd you react to that?

That must have been that's amazing.

Just give us your personal reaction to being named Oprah's Book Club selection.

- Well, I would say it's a dream come true, but I didn't even dare dream it because so many.

(laughs) So many of her books are fiction.

And so it didn't didn't occur to me that a non-fiction book would necessarily even be on her radar.

But in hindsight, I see mental health as a really big issue for Oprah.

And so it kinda makes sense in that regard, but to really answer your question it completely saved this book's life.

So many books have come out during this pandemic.

This book came out in April, just as everything was shutting down.

It wasn't even clear of Amazon was gonna be able to ship books because they'd be too busy, prioritizing toilet paper or whatever else people needed.

And to know that Oprah Winfrey was behind the book suddenly created a whole new readership for it that wouldn't have existed otherwise.

So she saved it.

She saved the book.

- So congratulations, you had a book in 2013 "Lost Girls" about the long Island serial killer.

Can you tell us briefly about that?

- This is another effort to delve into a potentially troubling subject, but also do it intimately and talk about the people involved and then get at a deeper issue, which is why victims in these cases often get blamed more than they should?

and why the police don't seem to care?

And why killers target women in sex work in particular, who are the victims in this case.

This isn't an astonishing case on long Island where, which is still unsolved.

And there could be as many as 16 victims and the police have no stated suspects, and they've never declared a person of interest.

There's been practically, no movement whatsoever.

And I reported on it from the beginning and focused on the family members of five women who were all caught up in the case and really looked at five different families and asked, what do they have in common?

They all seem to come from struggling parts of America that the media tends to overlook.

They all were women whose economic options had narrowed over the years until finally they saw how easy it can be to make money over the internet booking sex work they'd make more money than their friends were making a Dunkin donuts or at Walmart.

And you just see how the money solved their problems for a long time, until suddenly it created more problems for them.

And then they became the targets of a predator.

So it's a little bit of sociology and a lot of true crime and still unsolved.

So the case is sort of alive as you're reading about it.

- Yeah Bob, you grapple with a lot of difficult, heavy issues, serial killers, family dealing with profiled mental health issues, just to name a couple.

How do you balance that just personally?

Some of your research, some of your interviews have to just leave you emotionally spent as well.

How do you find balance?

- I'm smiling because I've a friend who wrote a sad book and his mother said to him, "Your next book should be a joke book."

(laughs) Yeah first one was tough because I was off worried cause it was anxious because it was my first book.

So I kinda white knuckled.

It wrote it alone and didn't share it with people and pretended everything was fine.

And I resolved not to do that this time around.

I resolved to open up the process and share parts of the book with people and develop a balanced life in my family.

We got a dog.

I was like the primary care for the dog that helped a lot.

But when I'm asked this question my answer is always, it's always very clear to me that I'm not the one really putting it out there that the people I'm writing about are, are ones who have really suffered and to share and be open about what they're going through with the public is a huge, huge role of the dice for them.

So I know that however, tough it is for me.

I just am filled with respect for those people.

And also gratitude that I have meaningful work that can help other people understand what it's like to be these people.

- It's a tremendous responsibility and you discharge it admirably.

Your magazine journalism covers a broad sweep of topics.

And I've read it, didn't read the story, but one of them is on your site quote, perhaps the most unbelievable survival story to come out of World War Two that got my interest and I will read the I haven't yet.

What was that about?

- [Ludes] But 20 seconds, - 20 seconds, what was it about?

- It's the amazing story of Yon Bowels Ruud who rescued and carried from house to house in Norway to escape from the Nazis.

And he spent weeks and weeks surviving in the frozen Tundra all by himself and amputated own toes.

It's really quite quite a grizzly story, but he made it through and lived a long life and lived to tell the tale.

- Well, Bob Kolker, we are so grateful to you for your storytelling.

The new book is Hidden Valley Road.

It's a remarkable read.

That's all the time we have this week.

For Story in the Public Square to wanna know more about the show.

You can find us on Facebook and Twitter or visit pellcenter.org.

We can always catch up on previous episodes for G. Wayne Miller.

I'm Jim.

Ludes asking you to join us again next time, for more Story in the Public Square.

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