Hidden Valley Road: Inside the Mind of an American Family

by Robert Kolker

Schizophrenia is not about multiple personalities. It is about walling oneself off from consciousness, first slowly and then all at once, until you are no longer accessing anything that others accept as real.

the Finnish psychiatrist Martti Olavi Siirala wrote that people with schizophrenia were almost like prophets with special insight into our society’s neuroses—our collective unconscious’s shared mental illness.

Like a court jester, Fromm-Reichmann wrote, people with schizophrenia often tell uncomfortable truths that the rest of us would rather not hear.

In 1979, Wyatt’s team published research showing that people with schizophrenia had more cerebrospinal fluid in their brain ventricles—the network of gaps in the tissue of the brain’s limbic system, where the amygdala and hippocampus are located.

What if the problem with schizophrenia patients wasn’t that they lacked the ability to respond to so much stimuli, but that they lacked the ability not to? What if their brains weren’t overloaded, but lacked inhibition—forced to reckon with everything that was coming their way, every second of every day?

The hippocampi of the brains of people with schizophrenia were smaller than those without.

The hippocampus helps remind you of where you are at any given moment, and it is less developed in the twins that, diagnosed with schizophrenia, have less of a grip on reality.

In 1997, Freedman identified CHRNA7 as the first gene ever to be definitively associated with schizophrenia.