Hidden Valley Road Quotes

“we are more than just our genes. We are, in some way, a product of the people who surround us—the people we’re forced to grow up with, and the people we choose to be with later.”
― Robert Kolker, Hidden Valley Road: Inside the Mind of an American Family

“You are the only variable in the situation you have control over,”
― Robert Kolker, Hidden Valley Road: Inside the Mind of an American Family

“Our relationships can destroy us, but they can change us, too, and restore us, and without us ever seeing it happen, they define us.”
― Robert Kolker, Hidden Valley Road: Inside the Mind of an American Family

“They taught me to embrace the cards you are dealt or it will eat you alive. If you go to the heart of your own matter, you will find only by loving and helping do you have peace from your own trauma.”
― Robert Kolker, Hidden Valley Road: Inside the Mind of an American Family

“Our relationships can destroy us, but they can change us, too, and restore us, and without us ever seeing it happen, they define us. We are human because the people around us make us human.”
― Robert Kolker, Hidden Valley Road: Inside the Mind of an American Family

“The National Institute of Mental Health spends only $4.3 million on fetal prevention research, all of it for studies in mice, from its yearly $1.4 billion budget,” Freedman noted recently. “Yet half of young school shooters have symptoms of developing schizophrenia.”
― Robert Kolker, Hidden Valley Road: Inside the Mind of an American Family

“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?”
― Robert Kolker, Hidden Valley Road: Inside the Mind of an American Family

“And that vulnerability, many thought, was really an issue with “sensory gating,” or the brain’s ability (or inability) to correctly process incoming information. A sensory gating disorder was the most common explanation for the schizophrenia experienced by John Nash—the Nobel Laureate mathematician depicted in A Beautiful Mind—who was able to detect patterns no one else could, and yet also was prone to delusions and visions of beings who were out to get him. Both of those aspects of Nash’s personality were said to be products of the same hypersensitivity”
― Robert Kolker, Hidden Valley Road: Inside the Mind of an American Family

“And so I was crushed,” Mimi said. “Because I thought I was such a good mother. I baked a cake and a pie every night. Or at least had Jell-O with whipped cream.”
― Robert Kolker, Hidden Valley Road: Inside the Mind of an American Family

“One of the consequenses of surviving schizophrenia for fifty years is that sooner or later, the cure becomes as damaging as the disease”
― Robert Kolker, Hidden Valley Road: Inside the Mind of an American Family

“it’s only a red flag when it starts to create conflict in your life, but otherwise it’s a truly healthy coping mechanism for you to organize your sock drawer.”
― Robert Kolker, Hidden Valley Road: Inside the Mind of an American Family

“Life is merely the permanent roots your family knots around you.”
― Robert Kolker, Hidden Valley Road: Inside the Mind of an American Family

“The normal brain learns from what it perceives. It doesn’t have to start from zero if it hears the same thing twice. People with schizophrenia, however, couldn’t manage that. In test after test, conducted at Freedman’s lab in Denver, their brains showed two waves of equal size for the two clicks. It was as if they had to react all over again to the second click—even though they had just heard the same click a fraction of a second earlier.”
― Robert Kolker, Hidden Valley Road: Inside the Mind of an American Family

“I’ll work myself to the bone and not ask for help,” Lindsay said, “and then I’ll be resentful.”
― Robert Kolker, Hidden Valley Road: Inside the Mind of an American Family

“R. D. Laing, influenced heavily by Sartre and other existentialists, made the case in The Divided Self that schizophrenia was an act of self-preservation by a wounded soul [..] He believed patients retreat inside their own mind as a way of playing possum, to preserve their autonomy”
― Robert Kolker, Hidden Valley Road: Inside the Mind of an American Family

“When you don't find a sense of love and belonging where you are, you go searching for it somewhere else.”
― Robert Kolker, Hidden Valley Road: Inside the Mind of an American Family

“Children, Silvern explained, rely on the adults around them to interpret what’s happening to them. They use their parents’ constructed systems: This is good and that is bad; this person is untrustworthy, and that person is somebody you can count on. Shame and guilt are ways that children usually process those traumas when the grown-ups around them have failed them.”
― Robert Kolker, Hidden Valley Road: Inside the Mind of an American Family

“In 2010, the psychiatrist Thomas Insel, then director of NIMH, called for the research community to redefine schizophrenia as “a collection of neurodevelopmental disorders,” not one single disease. The end of schizophrenia as a monolithic diagnosis could mean the beginning of the end of the stigma surrounding the condition. What if schizophrenia wasn’t a disease at all, but a symptom? “The metaphor I use is that years ago, clinicians used to look at ‘fever’ as one disease,” said John McGrath, an epidemiologist with Australia’s Queensland Centre for Mental Health Research and one of the world’s authorities on quantifying populations of mentally ill people. “Then they split it into different types of fevers. And then they realized it’s just a nonspecific reaction to various illnesses. Psychosis is just what the brain does when it’s not working very well.”
― Robert Kolker, Hidden Valley Road: Inside the Mind of an American Family

“The double-click test was not testing for schizophrenia itself. It was testing sensory gating, which was one potential aspect of schizophrenia. What made this result so exciting was that a sensory gating deficiency might well be genetic—and therefore could be traced through generations.”
― Robert Kolker, Hidden Valley Road: Inside the Mind of an American Family

“The military and the church supplied two sets of rules to follow: America's and God's.”
― Robert Kolker, Hidden Valley Road: Inside the Mind of an American Family

“Schizophrenia’s inaccessibility may be the most destructive thing about it—the thing that keeps so many people from connecting to the people with the illness.”
― Robert Kolker, Hidden Valley Road: Inside the Mind of an American Family

“If you’ve left town, like John, you can hold on to your truth. To come home is to run the risk of being contradicted. Even the people who leave, like John, can feel almost rejected.”
― Robert Kolker, Hidden Valley Road: Inside the Mind of an American Family

“That story is about children, now grown, investigating the mysteries of their own childhood—reconstituting the fragments of their parents’ dream, and shaping it into something new. It is about rediscovering the humanity in their own brothers, people who most of the world had decided were all but worthless. It is about, even after the worst has happened in virtually every imaginable way, finding a new way to understand what it means to be a family.”
― Robert Kolker, Hidden Valley Road: Inside the Mind of an American Family

“As she walked through the door of the house at Hidden Valley Road, she couldn’t help but recognize a perfect sample. This could be the most mentally ill family in America.”
― Robert Kolker, Hidden Valley Road: Inside the Mind of an American Family

“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.”
― Robert Kolker, Hidden Valley Road: Inside the Mind of an American Family

“The Galvin family’s DNA was part of that study. DeLisi seemed poised for a breakthrough. But within a few years, she, like Robert Freedman, learned the hard way about the vagaries of the marketplace. In 2000, Parke-Davis was bought by Pfizer. Almost right away, DeLisi learned that Pfizer was canceling DeLisi’s project. All work would stop immediately. And all the genetic material she had accumulated at Parke-Davis, including the Galvin family’s DNA, would remain the property of Pfizer—unavailable for DeLisi to use, unless”
― Robert Kolker, Hidden Valley Road: Inside the Mind of an American Family

“For a family, schizophrenia is, primarily, a felt experience, as if the foundation of the family is permanently tilted in the direction of the sick family member. Even if just one child has schizophrenia, everything about the internal logic of that family changes.”
― Robert Kolker, Hidden Valley Road: Inside the Mind of an American Family

“One of the consequences of surviving schizophrenia for fifty years is that sooner or later, the cure becomes as damaging as the disease.”
― Robert Kolker, Hidden Valley Road: Inside the Mind of an American Family

“At the end of the conversation, Lindsay posed a question to her sister: Were they willing to accept each other for who they were? Or were they going to continue down the path of thinking the other person was somehow damaged, and impossible to be close with? After”
― Robert Kolker, Hidden Valley Road: Inside the Mind of an American Family

“From an early age, Mimi had a way of glossing over the more painful disappointments in her life: the loss of her father; the forced exile from Houston; the husband who remained so distant from her. Even if she didn’t admit it, these losses hurt, and took their toll. Having so many children, however, offered Mimi a brand-new narrative—or at least distracted her, changed the subject, shored up the losses, helped her dwell less on what was missing. For a woman who so often felt abandoned, here was a way to create all the company she would ever need.”
― Robert Kolker, Hidden Valley Road: Inside the Mind of an American Family