#376: Most “Mentally Insane” Family In America- Six Schizophrenic Brothers
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7-year-old Lindsay had plans to kill her older brother. I mean, she doesn't even hate him. If anything, she hates that he's so kind to her. She hates that she's so embarrassed by him. The way that he roams around town with this

glazed, empty look in his eyes and the way that everybody in town knows that something is wrong with him, but nobody wants to talk about it. Not even her parents. I mean, of course she hates it. She's seven. She's embarrassed. And yet he's so nice. And it's just the whole thing is unbearable. The way that he treats her like she's this sacred being. None of it matters anymore because the two of them, Lindsay and her older brother, Donald, are walking up the hill.

And that is where Donald is going to die today. He'll say yes to whatever Lindsay says. So it's very easy to convince him to come on this little adventure with her. Let's go build a swing on that tree branch up at the top of the hill. But we have to bring some rope. Donald grabs the rope and starts walking up behind her. When they get to the top of the hill, Lindsay looks around. She can almost smell the crisp pine trees there in Colorado. But that's not the point right now. Her brother is going to die today.

"That one. That tree." She points. "I want to tie you to that tree."

It's a little strange. I mean, why do you need to tie someone to a tree in order to build a tree swing? It doesn't even make sense. But he doesn't even hesitate. He just stands right next to the tree, hands her the rope. She takes one end and she starts running around the tree, tying Donald up. She's literally running, pulling the rope tighter and tighter, tying him up like a witch at the stake. The plan is she's going to light him on fire. That's how 20-year-old Donald is going to die.

If he catches on to her little plan, again, he doesn't say anything. It's like he trusts her with absolutely everything. When she's done tying him up, she starts getting all these little twigs and branches, piling them up at his feet. Again, it looks more like a bonfire than a tree swing, but he doesn't even show his confusion. Because if that's what Lindsay wants, that's what Lindsay gets. Donald, the older brother, will do anything for Lindsay. He absolutely adores her.

And that makes Lindsay want to cry. This is for all the times though, that he has screamed in the middle of the night for everyone in the house to get out because there's someone bad in the house trying to kill them all. I mean, of course, Lindsay was traumatized. She got her things and ran out of the house. Why would he lie about something like that? Why does anybody lie about something like that? They're all terrified.

This is for all the times he would chant the Lord's prayer for hours every single night, waking up the whole house. I mean, it's creepy. It's terrifying. She would tell him to stop, beg him to stop. Sometimes she would be crying, telling him, can you please stop? You're scaring me. And he wouldn't stop. This is just payback.

But Lindsay can't actually go through with this. I mean, this is crazy. She didn't even bring matches or a lighter or anything to start a fire. She just thought it doesn't really matter what she thought because she can't kill her brother. She starts running down the hill by herself without him. She leaves him tied up on the tree with no way to get down. And Donald knew from the get-go what Lindsay was planning. But he didn't mind. If that's what she wanted, he would have died for her. Because to him...

Lindsay is not just a little sister. Lindsay's full name is Mary Christine Galvin, which would make her the sacred mother Mary, Virgin Mary, the mother of Christ. He would do anything, absolutely anything that she says, which by the way, her being Virgin Mary makes complete sense because they're not actually even real siblings. Donald's mom is not the same mom. They don't have the same mom. Donald was swapped at birth at the hospital. His real mother is actually an octopus.

What? This is the story of, according to one psychiatrist, the most mentally disturbed family in America. Twelve full-blooded siblings living in one house. Six of the siblings, half of the siblings, will go on to get diagnosed with schizophrenia. This is the story of the Galvins.

We would like to thank today's sponsors who have made it possible for Rotten Mango to support the Galvin Family Trust. They have freely shared their stories, their trauma, and essentially were lifelong subjects for scientific research all in the effort to help others. I mean, that is the sole reason that they consistently share the most vulnerable, painful parts of their lives.

And any donation to the trust will be used to support the last two Galvin brothers affected by schizophrenia and anosognosia, which is a symptom of schizophrenia that prevents the person from recognizing that they have schizophrenia. Any and all donations will support the treatment and enrichment of their last golden years. This episode's partnerships have also made it possible to support Rotten Mango's growing team. And we'd also like to thank you guys for your continued support as we work on our mission to be worthy advocates.

As always, full show notes are available at rottenmangopodcast.com. A few things before we get started. So for this episode, I read the family's biography, Hidden Valley Road, by Robert Kolker. We chose not to source from the HBO Max documentary titled Six Schizophrenic Brothers. I mean, a lot of the family members had problems with this documentary when it finally came out, even though they did take part in it.

the two youngest siblings, they actually sought out Dr. Kolker to the author of the book to share their stories. The author had the blessing of the whole family including the mother but a few of the siblings chose not to even participate in the HBO Max documentary and even after the documentary came out, a few that did participate, they did not like it.

Wait, so they wanted the book, but they don't want the documentary. Well, they did. They thought that the producers were here to share their story in a way that sheds light on what was going on. And of course, they're expecting the good, the bad, the ugly all to be shared. But just the way it was done, it almost felt like they were being tricked. It just turned it into like a horror show.

And just even subtle things that a lot of netizens were pointing out. Some of the siblings without schizophrenia that were interviewed for the documentary, all of them were interviewed in these cozy looking living rooms of regular homes. Meanwhile, the siblings with schizophrenia were interviewed in what looked like empty basement garages with cracked cement floors and pipes along the ceiling. I mean, it's just such a subtle, strange thing to do.

One of the family members even said about the series. So she participated in the series, trusted the producers, and then when she saw the final product, she said, I am embarrassed by the series. If someone suffers from schizophrenia, it doesn't mean they're violent. The percentage of people with it who are violent is far lower than the general public. It's just the way that the media depicts it. Movies like Joker, Shutter Island. That's what they did with our series. They made it another horror story around mental illness and violence.

You know, my poor parents. They're portrayed as monsters. They were the kindest, most highly educated parents in the world.

So we focused most of our research on the book. And today's case does involve a lot of discussion around the diagnosis of schizophrenia. And I want to be clear again, most people with schizophrenia are not more dangerous or violent than people in the general population and may in fact be more vulnerable to being victims of crimes. A few other disclaimers. There are mentions of self-exit, grooming, and incestuous sexual abuse. So please watch at your own discretion. And with that being said, let's get into it.

The therapist is staring at Lindsay Galvin. She's in college now. This is the seven-year-old that tried to kill her brother. Well, not really, but you get it. She's in college. And the therapist asks, so tell me about your family.

Lindsay, for once, she starts talking and she just doesn't stop. It's like how you open up the floodgates. The words are just spilling out of her mouth. Every day living in that house with her siblings, her 11 siblings, it felt like a fever dream. I mean, just the strangest things would happen. There would be days where Lindsay would come home from school and believe, oh my God, everybody moved out without me. Everybody packed up their bags. The family moved. Maybe they forgot to do a head count because I'm just left behind.

All the furniture in the house is gone. It's out. She rushes into the living room and there she sees her brother naked, chanting in the middle of the living room. Our father who are in heaven, hallowed be thy name. Thy kingdom come. Thy will be done on earth as it is in heaven. Give us this day our daily bread. What the hell is going on?

Through the window, she can see that he has pulled out every last piece of furniture and stacked it up in the backyard. When the family gets home, they just bring the furniture back in and they don't even address it. They don't talk about it. Like that never even happened. Which brother? Is it the same one? Donald. Other times he would just be pouring a container of salt into an aquarium, poisoning and killing all of the fish.

One time she came home from school and he was going around saying the CIA is looking for us. When everybody was gathered in the kitchen, he starts screaming, get out! They're shooting us! Everybody drops to the floor and it's just silent. When they finally get back up, nobody is shooting at them. He's obsessed thinking that the CIA is after them and then another brother is peeing in the living room floor because he thinks that the devil is living underneath him and this is the only way to get the devil out.

Lindsay starts telling the therapist of everything that she went through as a kid and when she finally takes a moment to breathe, she looks up at the therapist whose expression has changed. You know, I'm sure she went from being very empathetic and understanding to suddenly she can see an expression on the therapist that indicates she does not believe Lindsay. In fact, it looks like she thinks Lindsay is making all of this up. And then Lindsay sees her face change to a face that she's seen many times before.

The therapist thinks, maybe Lindsay has schizophrenia. Maybe she's the crazy one. Maybe this is all in her head.

Inside the Hidden Valley Roadhouse, that's the road name, there is a ticking time bomb. There's 12 ticking time bombs all waiting to go off at any second. You don't know which and when and if they're even going to go off. It's almost like everyone in the house is eyeing each other up and down, waiting for the moment that another one of them loses their minds. And it's this never-ending question of who's going to be next? What are they going to do?

If the stress of this environment, of everyone analyzing every little emotion and move you make, and God forbid you have a mental breakdown because this is so stressful, everybody's staring at you. Uh-oh, you're next. Is this the start?

Some would argue that maybe there's something in the walls of the house. There's just no other explanation that makes sense. The Galvin family, they're a nice middle-class family. The parents, they're good-to-do parents. I mean, maybe there's some sort of toxic mold and you spend too long in that house and you just start losing your mind. That makes sense, doesn't it? I mean, everyone in town knew the Galvin siblings. They remember how one of the brothers had come to the high school hockey game.

He was sitting in the bleachers watching his younger brothers play hockey and he was eating dinner. So he had this mouthful of steak. Is it the same one or different? Same one. Well, it starts with the same one. He gets up and he gets down on one knee in the middle of the crowd like he's about to propose mid-chew. Hello, everyone. Guys. Hello. I'm eating my father's heart right now.

Another brother was put on heavy antipsychotic medications, and he didn't believe he needed them. So he slipped them into the family coffee pot so that his family members could take it instead. Whoa.

Everyone knew that something was going on with the Galvans. They just didn't know what. It just felt like being a member of the Galvan family meant that either you yourself are going insane or you're watching everybody around you go insane. The author describes it as growing up in a climate of perpetual mental illness. That environment alone makes you want to lose your mind.

Mimi Galvin is the mother of 12 kids. By her fifth kid, her friends are joking with her. Mimi, you should wear a ring of garlic around your thighs, you know, to keep away the vampires. But in this case, you know, perhaps your husband? Because you, that's a lot of kids. It's a joke, but it's not really a joke. Everybody's worried for Mimi. I mean, there's no way that having that many kids birthing that many children is good for you. Even Mimi's doctor agrees. Mimi, you have a severe...

severe prolapse along with a blood clot in your left leg your days of having children bearing children are behind you a decade of continuous pregnancy labor delivery that's enough your body cannot handle it anymore seriously we're concerned about you you might die 10 boys two girls later mimi galvin is still very much alive because here's the thing you do not tell mimi galvin what to do

Mimi is the granddaughter of a Texas aristocrat. At their height, the prime, the family owned their own island near the Guadalupe River, where Mimi's grandpa dug his own lake on the island. So her grandfather was very wealthy. He has this island. They dig a lake in the island, a man-made lake. They ship in a bunch of bass, like the fish, so that they could fish on this man-made lake. They bought the fish, brought in the fish, released the fish so that they could fish the fish.

That is very convoluted rich people behavior, okay? But these are the stories that Mimi would never fail to bring up during the important dinner parties of then how she moved to New York City and she was just head over heels with the ballet and the city is just so full of culture. There's just something so stimulating about New York. It's just where she belonged until she met Don Galvin.

Maybe Mimi fell in love with his voice first. I mean, don't get me wrong. Don Galvin is very handsome. He was very good looking. He has this very all-American look to him, but he also rarely spoke. And when he did, his voice is butter smooth. It felt like he was humming. There's like a vibrato in his voice. It's like a deep rumble. Even Don's guy friend said, oh, that man with that voice, he's going to hold you in the palm of his hand.

That's the voice that gets Mimi pregnant 12 times. Yeah. They didn't even really have a lot in common. Don likes baseball. She likes the ballet. But just the way he has this confident, easygoing way just made him so irresistible. The author puts it like this. From the very start, it was as if Mimi belonged to him while he belonged to everyone. Daniel. They met in high school and even for college, it was always, where does Don want to go? And Mimi will either go to that college or find a college nearby to attend to be close.

There was one thing though that Mimi really wanted from Don, which is she wanted him to be an attorney. I mean, he's smart. They're both really smart. Both of them are very educated, but this is the way to continue the prestige of the family. If it's not by money, because at this point, Mimi was pretty removed from her grandfather's side. Her mom had a falling out with her grandfather. It was a whole thing. She no longer had access to that. She didn't have the resources or the connections, but maybe they can up their social standing by Don being an attorney.

Instead, Don goes and joins the Marines, which don't get me wrong, is a very respectable choice. But he joins when a world war is going on. So he's going to be gone for a while. But he tries to tell her this is the best choice. I fight for the military and the military will pay for my law school later. Just two weeks before America bombs Japan, Don receives a letter. Three words. It's a boy.

They're having their first child and they have zero plans of stopping anytime soon. For the next 15 years, Mimi will be perpetually pregnant, giving birth, recovering, getting pregnant again in a loop. I mean, Dom thinks it's kind of cute that they have enough kids for a football team. And they can afford to raise 12 kids. Yeah, but I mean, not well. They're not living lavishly. They're always penny pinching for sure. Or they say rubbing two nickels together.

So the fascinating part of the family dynamics is Don, the dad, he loves having more children. He encourages Mimi to have more children. And yes, of course, it takes two to conceive. But at the same time, Don loves things that are impossible with kids. He loves silence, solitude, tranquility, order. He wants to have his cake and eat it too. So he just leaves Mimi to raise the 12 kids practically by herself. And he just goes to work.

Where does he work? At the military. And then he later trains at the Air Force Academy. Now, Mimi, the mom, has a sewing needle in one hand. She's got a long piece of thread in the other. And it's a very tricky business. You have to be very gentle when you're sewing eyelids shut. Because if you poke through the very thin eyelids, then it's going to be very painful. There's going to be screaming. There's going to be yelping. And she looks down and she starts sewing the little bird's eyes shut.

It's a process called sealing that most people do not do anymore. But Mimi was someone who did. She and her husband Don are falconers.

They train falcons. They train hawks, eagles to help them hunt game. A working bird, if you will. But it's called falconry and it's very hard to get into. You need a state and federal license. Most states require a two-year apprenticeship under a licensed falconer before you can get licensed on your own. You have to pass a written exam. Many falconers have said, it is the hardest yet most rewarding thing that I've ever done in my life.

What is? Sewing the eyelids? No, to have this relationship with the falcon. To Mimi and Don, it's kind of like raising children. The falconer tries to exert control over their birds. The birds try to fight for their freedom, but eventually they submit, and they create this mutually beneficial relationship between the two, which is interesting. But it could be thanks to Don that the Air Force mascot is now the falcon.

No, really, this was a time when a lot of people were submitting their ideas on what they believe would be the best Air Force mascot. Don suggested the Falcon, which was chosen as the mascot of the Air Force, and it still is today.

Don would actually bring his birds into the Air Force Academy. He took over the falconry program. He threw himself into his work. He received a falcon from the king of Saudi Arabia as a gift. He received a few falcons from the Japanese government, which side note, these birds are not domesticated birds. They're not like pets. So one of the birds that he kept in the house, it pounced on a neighbor's husky and the husky survived, but it had a talon embedded in its fur.

So these are not, they're not like cute, cuddly pets. Wait, so he is getting falcons from everyone because he is a higher up in the military? Yeah, he runs the falcon program in the Air Force. What is the falcon program? I guess they teach falconry to the Air Force cadets. Yeah. Oh.

They have like a program and he teaches and he's getting all these gifts of Falcons from different government officials because, you know, he's part of the Air Force. Is he like doing well financially then? No. He's not doing well financially, but he is doing well socially. So he is very interesting. The Galvin family, they are a middle class family, but they're hanging out with multi, multimillionaire families. Oh.

Because their social standing is very prestigious. It's elite. They have a lot of, I don't want to say power. They have influence and power, but not like money. Yeah, no money. And that is kind of a sore spot for both of them, it seems. I don't think that either of them want to be very wealthy. They're very anti-capitalism, but they just, you know, I guess it's a comparison. Yeah.

And it's interesting because the way the author puts it, Mimi and Don almost have the same relationship that falcons and their handlers have. He writes, "Don identified with his birds. He would soar where he pleased, returning only when it suited him. And Mimi, quite against her will, found herself cast in the role of a falconer, domesticating Don, luring him home, laboring under the impressions that she had him completely tamed."

And even falconry itself, I mean, the couple started it as a way to bond, have a shared interest. But as time went on, Don would start spending more time with local falconers instead of his wife. He would lure birds with other falconers, which honestly feels like cheating at this point. Meanwhile, Mimi would have to drag the kids to go grocery shopping twice a week. She had to maintain the house, keep the pantry stocked, which is not easy when you have 14 people in the family. She would have the kids push one cart. She would push one. You can't feed 14 people with one cart, right?

The shopping list for three and a half days is 10 gallons of milk, five boxes of cereal, four loaves of bread. And that's just the basic staples. That's going to last three and a half days. Wow.

Every night Mimi would make dinner for the entire family. Salad with lettuce, cucumbers, carrots and tomatoes, steaks and mashed potatoes. Or other nights if it's, you know, very special, she would have her specialty on the table. Lamb curry seasoned with onion, apple and garlic served with rice, green beans and artichoke hearts. She was trying really hard to make the family perfect, which is nearly impossible when you have 12 kids.

By this point, Don, the dad, even took to calling the kids by numbers. Number six, come here. No way. Which I don't want to make it seem like Don is a bad dad. I think both the parents are doing what they can. Don is out working all the time. I'm sure maybe it's in part because he just wants to get away from the chaos, but also because they do need the money. I mean, it's not cheap to have that many family members. Why is he calling them by numbers? Just for a joke? Because they have 10 boys.

first and then two daughters. So perhaps he does get confused once in a while because even with just two daughters, my mom calls me my sister's name all the time.

Wow, that is crazy. Crazy, crazy. He would set up chess boards when he was home, like four or five chess boards at a time. And he would play five games at once against his sons. So again, the parents are very intelligent. Mimi as well. She's incredibly cultured. She's genuinely into the arts, all forms of the arts. She would do this thing where on the weekends, she would throw on a symphony on the record player.

And she would tell the kids the stories behind each symphony, explaining the music with such detail. It felt like she was a walking encyclopedia.

And when they got sick of that, Mimi would teach the kids how to identify the wild animals in the area. They knew all the actual names for the birds, the wildlife, the insects, like the species names. She focused on making sure the kids were getting good meals, going to school. She would read them bedtime stories. During the winter, they would go ice skating, skiing. I mean, summers were tennis. They all got involved with the birds. For the most part, I would say it sounds like their childhood was very nice.

It said that before the diagnoses, the Galvin family, they had more good memories than bad. They were all very genuinely happy. They tried to balance all of the good times with structure and order, and it was working until it wasn't. One day, Don Galvin comes home with a few boxing gloves. He puts them down on the table. New rule, no fighting without boxing gloves on. Got it?

One of the younger boys, the sixth son, grabs the boxing gloves. He slips them onto his hands and he said that he just felt fear. All the brothers are all state athletes. Top notch shape. Boxing gloves aren't going to stop any of them if they want to beat us up.

So when you have 10 sons, just statistically, and I'm sure anecdotally, you're going to have some incidents. It's not going to be an urgent, careless life for the parents. But I will say the Galvin boys, they do seem to take it a bit far. One brother slammed a door into another brother's face, cutting up his mouth. The brothers would wrestle in the living room. And if it got really bad, sometimes the dad, Don, he's usually very calm.

cool collected sometimes he would have to tackle one of the boys to get them to stop like full stop because you're about to hurt another brother clearly he thought his kids were capable of doing some serious harm to each other there was almost this energy in this house sure the guys are having fun they're rough housing with each other but at any moment things could easily escalate and turn into a massive tornado and it would just be so sudden no warning signs it would just start happening

Dawn and Mimi, they tried to give the boys books on how to better themselves, like The Power of Positive Thinking, which was a very popular self-help book back then. They would sit the boys down around the dining table and give them lectures on harmony, you know?

And it would maybe work for the length of the dinner, but then another fight would break out. Cousins of the Galvin siblings, they flew from the East Coast to Colorado to visit the Galvin brothers. They said it was interesting, kind of thrilling, honestly. The Christmas cards that the Galvin family were sending, they were all so saintly looking. Every sibling was in the perfect pajamas sitting around the tree. It looks like their version of fight was rock, paper, scissors. Like that's what the brothers look like.

But when they go to visit the brothers in real life, they realize the minute the parents leave the house, the same boys on the Christmas cards are climbing onto the roof of the house and shooting BB guns at windows and birds. Yeah. It's very exciting for the cousins to be there. But they kind of behave around the parents? Like they try to behave? Yes. Yeah, they had never seen anything like it. But to some of the siblings, especially the younger boys, it was like living in a war zone.

One of the younger brothers said, when I was a kid, I would wait at the top of the hill opposite of my home for my mother to come home. I would wait for her until the car pulled up. I was afraid of being beaten by my brothers. That was not something that's normal for a child to experience. They would make me hold encyclopedias in my arms and then hit me in the stomach and tell me not to drop them. Or even sometimes they would pour Tabasco sauce on my tongue or make me eat cat food. It's like the fear of that. It was always something that was going to happen every day.

The parents, Dawn and Mimi, they do try to stop the boys. But at this point, it seemed like they were basically on borrowed time. One of the very few people Mimi could lean on at this point was her mentor, her tutor, the Catholic priest, Father Robert Freudenstein.

Everyone just called him Father Freudy, which ironically sounds a lot like Freud. You know the Freud. Mimi loved when he was around. He wasn't a judgmental Catholic priest. He feels very approachable. He doesn't spend all his time sitting there lecturing everybody on religion and modesty and being saintly. Instead, he would make you a cocktail, show the boys some magic tricks, and even talk about cultural events that are going on. Father Freudy was a big part of the kids growing up, and he might actually be the starting point to where the family starts losing their minds.

It starts with Donald, the oldest son. He's in college when he walks into the health center with burns all over his body. Oh my god, what happened? My sweater caught on fire during the pep rally.

Later, the doctors would find out through other students. Did you guys hear about the all-star football player? That all-American popular Donald Galvin, the oldest of the 12 Galvin siblings. He just walked straight into the bonfire. I mean, he practically jumped into the bonfire. It was weird. He lit himself on fire.

Which doesn't make any sense. Why on earth would Donald Galvin do something like that? Donald is the firstborn son of the Galvin family. He is the family star. He's the protege. He is the one that's going to just be like dad, which everybody looks up to dad. He's named after dad.

Donald, right? He joins the Air Explorer Scouts as a kid. He's parachuting out of C-47s. And in his free time, he's practicing judo, playing hockey, studying classical guitar. He's a jock, but he also has this very cultured aspect to him because of his parents. He's tall, star football player in high school, wrestling, dating a cheerleader who happens to be his dad's boss's daughter. He's dating the daughter of the Air Force General of the Academy.

Wow, that's a big deal. Yeah. And he's handsome. The rest of the 11 siblings, they feel like they're constantly living in their dad's shadow. And now their older brother, Donald's shadow. I will say there were some other reasons for the siblings to not love Donald that much growing up. He was kind of a bully when their parents weren't around. He was the de facto leader, which is great.

But it seemed like he thrived on chaos. He likes extreme authority. And sometimes he did that by wrestling his little brothers to the point where they would be getting punched. Sometimes he would have two brothers hold down a third brother and he would just start swinging. He would put brothers against each other by forcing them to fight a sibling fight club, if you will. And if you don't do as he says, it's the feeling of, okay, well, you're going to be punched next.

If you tell mom about it, she's not even going to believe you. First of all, that doesn't sound like something Donald would do. And it sounds overly exaggerated. What kind of crazy nonsense? Who would do something like that?

One of the younger brothers would say,

So you just endure what you can and you avoid what you could. I'm not the only one in the family that suffered that way. The parents seemed to ignore, to a degree, the complaints of Donald abusing his little siblings. But there were small things that they couldn't ignore about Donald. One time, he was maybe 17, he's standing in front of the kitchen sink when out of nowhere they hear smash. Like a clattering noise.

What the hell is going on? Everyone runs into the kitchen and it's like another clattering noise and he just keeps going ten times. He smashes ten dishes to pieces over the kitchen sink for apparently no reason at all. There was no reason to prompt this. It's very alarming, but the parents thought, well, other kids are out there doing drugs. He's likely frustrated. He's tired from school and all of the sports and hobbies. Maybe that's why.

But now, Donald is sitting in front of the therapist and he's done things that nobody can ignore. Tell me about the visits to the health center. Donald had gone to the university health center a few times recently to be treated for suspicious injuries. The first one being from, "Oh, a cat bit me." Which they thought, "Okay, that's interesting. Cats typically don't bite first. They usually scratch, but maybe this cat is different?" "What happened? Why did the cat bite you?" Donald wouldn't respond.

A little while later, he shows up again in the waiting room. What's going on? How can we help you? Donald explains how his roommate caught an STD and now he's feeling very uncomfortable and potentially even paranoid, worried that he's going to get the STD too. The doctor looks up from his paper. Donald is trying to get into medicine. Surely he knows that's not how STDs work. I mean, you don't just get it from breathing the same air. You have to have sexual relations, which he's not having with his roommate. It just seemed a little paranoid, right?

Then he comes back a third time. He says he went back home to visit his family and one of his little brothers jumped on him from behind. He wouldn't give any names or more details. Then a fourth time, he comes in stating he has been bitten by a cat again, which, okay, once, maybe you're unlucky. Maybe the cat's having a bad day. But the second time, you start feeling like maybe you're doing something to the cats. What kind of injury did they say? Bites on the hand. Oh, actual bites. Actual bites.

But the most alarming visit, the reason that he was seeing a psychiatrist now, is the visit about his burns. Why would he walk through a bonfire? Was he trying to impress someone? Was he drunk? Was he on drugs? Donald wouldn't say. The psychiatrist was very worried for Donald. I mean, what do you mean? You can't just do that without knowing why.

Donald is pulled out of classes, sent to a psychiatric evaluation where a psychologist for the Air Force Academy Hospital sees Donald four times in the span of two months. This is the first mental health professional examination on any of the Galvin family members. And it is very clear something's not right.

It's Marilee. Donald had been dating a fellow university student named Marilee. And apparently they were getting serious. Within a few months of dating, they're already talking about marriage, what their dream wedding is going to look like. Is that the different person from the general's daughter? Yes. Oh, no, same one.

Yes. This is the general's daughter. Oh, okay, okay. Marilee. And Donald, you know, never really introduced Marilee to his family. Never, like, sat down and had dinner. But they all knew of her because, you know, they likely never knew it was that serious considering he never really brought her home too often. But apparently, the psychiatrist believes that the breakup with Marilee led to Donald jumping into the bonfire. He spent all of his money trying to win back Marilee to the point where he can't even afford rent anymore. He can't tell his parents because...

What is he going to do? He's going to disappoint his girlfriend and his parents. Well, his ex-girlfriend, but let's not talk about that. Donald gets evicted. He ends up living in one of these abandoned fruit cellars. Back then, there were a lot of these underground storage spaces that kind of look like wine cellars, but not that nice. It's just dirt walls. Most people put fruit, vegetables, other stuff down there. And this is before when things were too big for modern refrigeration.

It's usually pretty cool. They don't even use it anymore. It's that old. So around 40 degrees Fahrenheit, it's humid. It's a dirt floor. It's like a bunker. He finds one of those near campus and he starts living in there. Just him in his little mattress. He had literally dug himself into a hole that he had no idea how to climb out of.

I mean, you would think that a therapist gets trained to have no emotions, no expressions to shocking things that patients tell them. Because if you look shocked or maybe your facial expression can be misinterpreted as perhaps disgusted, then the patient is never going to open up again.

One might imagine, okay, fine then. Maybe it's best to make no expressions at all. But that's not the case either. Therapists have to express emotions on what you say to them. So if you bring up past trauma that you have normalized so much in your own mind and they have a bigger response to it, they look shocked or angry for you. It helps your brain realize, wait, what happened to me is not normal. And it can be incredibly validating to see that emotion on somebody else.

So that's part of being a therapist. Yeah. That is interesting. The way they present their facial emotions. That's very helpful too, though. That is a good point. So Donald's therapist likely is having a very difficult time on reacting to the things that Donald is saying because it just seems awkward.

Rapid fire. He starts opening up about everything that has been going on in his life. He ran through the bonfire. He put a cord around his neck, probably in an attempt to strangle himself, though it's not explicitly clear. He turned on the gas, again, likely to poison himself, and even went to a funeral home to price shop for caskets for himself. I murdered a professor.

Donald's therapist nods. I mean, at this point in the session, they likely knew that is not true, but they have to make sure. And if it's not true, they have to get to the bottom of why would Donald lie about something like that? I have this fantasy of killing another person at a football game. The therapist jots down in their notes. He continues to mention bizarre self-destructive things. Two self-exit attempts at the age of 12. Okay, tell me about the cat.

Donald is sitting across from the therapist and the therapist is making no such face to indicate disgust or disdain, but they write down, he has killed the cat slowly and painfully. The cat had been living with him for two days and apparently the cat brought in another cat, probably male. The male cat made the place smelly. The cat scratched him, so he killed the male cat. But he doesn't know why, nor does he know why he tortured the cat slowly. He gets emotionally upset when he discusses his behavior.

This is when he was 12, killing cats? No, this is when he was in university, living in the fruit cellar. Oh, wow. Okay. And this was not a situation of Donald sitting there like a serial killer, joyfully recounting all the vile things he did to the cat. The way he talks about it, it's almost as if he's scared of what he's saying. Like he's scared of what he did, or maybe he's scared of himself. In a sense, it almost seems like that's not what he wanted to do. Hmm.

The therapist writes, "This boy represents some risk to himself and possibly others. Possible schizophrenic reaction. It was time to pull Donald out of class and get his parents to come take him home." Mimi and Don, they rushed to campus to pick Donald up. I mean, they heard the gist of what's going on from the psychiatrist. I'm sure they're surprised. They didn't really see any of this in Donald. Again, they saw some things like the smashing of the plates, but a cat? I mean, there had to be reasonable explanations for that and running into the bonfire. This doesn't sound like their son.

They walk into the room hoping that Donald is just going to laugh and say, okay, yeah, it's a sick prank I'm playing. It's all a misunderstanding. I got dared. But instead, they find their firstborn son washing his hair with beer as if that was the most normal thing to do. He would even go to the grocery store and point at laundry detergent and say, this right here is the best body wash. Donald, it's time to go home.

Only they don't even know what to do with Donald when they get home. The options for Mimi and Don at this point, not looking great. They can get him hospitalized. Yeah, sure. But there have been recent conversations about what mental institutions do to their patients. They just induce comas. They basically torture them. On top of that, the inevitable social stigma. Sure, Mimi and Don care about their family image, okay? But even if they didn't, Donald being hospitalized is going to impact the rest of their 11 children.

It's also going to impact Donald, his chances of getting back into university, going to get a job, all slashed. So do they make the best decision in hindsight? I don't know. Probably not. But they thought, maybe he'll get better. He just had a really bad breakup. Maybe he just needs time to heal and move on. Eventually, Donald will go back to school. This is just the start of Donald and his siblings starting to lose their minds. This show is sponsored by BetterHelp.

I had a really bad habit of comparing myself to other people when I was younger. I feel like most people do it when they're a kid, but I was comparing myself to everything. I always envied the kids who seemed like they had their lives together, they had all A's, they had flawless skin, no puberty acne. Every positive of another person had turned into a massive critique on myself.

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After all, ADT is America's most trusted name in home security because when every second counts, count on ADT. Visit ADT.com today or call 1-800-ADT-ASAP. It's estimated that schizophrenia affects one in every 100,000 people. There are currently close to 3 million people in America with schizophrenia. Now, here's the very interesting thing. It is probably one of the hardest mental disorders to treat.

I feel like we hear a lot about schizophrenia, we might know people with schizophrenia, but it's crazy that technically, medically speaking, we actually don't know that much about schizophrenia. We just know that it's a collection of symptoms including delusions, hallucinations, disorganized speech, trouble with thinking, more subtle signs are troubled relationships, poor school performance, reduced motivation, and schizophrenia just presents itself later in life.

Men start showing symptoms of schizophrenia maybe in their late teens, early 20s. Women tend to show signs of the illness in their 20s and early 30s. What are the signs?

like i said hallucinations disorganized thinking and there is no cure and there's not even a set of genes that can indicate when somebody has schizophrenia so like with alzheimer's it's a very specific gene you look at someone's genes and you can tell oh it looks like they're predisposed to potentially have alzheimer's right with schizophrenia there seems to be a genetic component so people that have schizophrenia typically there are other people in their family probably

Wow. Wow.

So you have this very specific sequences of genes inside of you already. It's genetic. And then something in the environment triggers the schizophrenia. They think it could be drug usage, could be emotional, sexual trauma. It could be anything. Honestly, we don't know.

could be something in the environment. And it's very difficult to treat. One person with schizophrenia said, "The best way to describe the disorder is, you know, you have a very clear line in your head, which tells you, oh, that's a thought, and then that's reality." So for example, I think that this person hates me. In the back of my mind, I know, oh, I'm just thinking that I don't know if they hate me. Maybe they just were having a bad day and they snapped at me.

But with people with schizophrenia, they think, no, they actually hate me. Every thought is basically reality. So all those intrusive thoughts that you might have, they feel real. Right. And then that means they will act on it. Yes. They will try to protect themselves. And that's why a lot of people think there is a link to schizophrenia and the paranoid actions. Because a lot of our intrusive thoughts are a little bit more paranoid and anxious. Right.

There also seems to be a dopamine imbalance in people with schizophrenia. So one netizen states, so where one person with average dopamine might not notice accidental eye contact, for example, you're walking down the street, you make eye contact with a stranger. You're either going to notice it or you're not even going to notice it.

Someone with excess dopamine in certain parts of their brain might not even just notice the eye contact, but they're going to hold it to a greater standard. It's like a symbol all of a sudden. They're going to pay great attention to it. They're going to notice all the other small details and draw meaning from it. Like, is this person following me? Are they trying to communicate some sort of danger with me? Why did they look at me for so long? Researchers know that there is a clear dopamine imbalance that might cause that.

There's also brain chemistry differences that might cause the hallucinations that feel very real. A netizen with schizophrenia has commented online what it feels like a day in their life with schizophrenia. And they said, let me run you through a day. 7 a.m., I wake up in bed and I lay there for a while. I live alone, but I hear footsteps throughout the apartment and I keep wondering, did somebody break in last night?

So then I have to get up and I check the lock. The lock is fine, but I hear the footsteps in the kitchen now. So I have to go check the kitchen. Nobody's there. So then I have to check the entire apartment at least three more times to make sure I'm alone. 7.30 a.m., I'm running a bath, but I keep hearing these voices inside of my apartment talking about whether leather car seats are better or cloth car seats. So I have to keep putting my head underwater to block the noises out.

8 a.m., I feel something crawling on my leg. I look down to inspect, but there's nothing. This happens about every 30 minutes throughout the day. 9 a.m., I'm eating toast for breakfast, but it starts tasting like metal. 10 a.m., I start walking to campus, but the gravity is different today. The gravity is actually pulling slightly towards my right, so I feel like I'm walking on a hill sideways. I need to sit down and wait unless I want to fall over.

11:15 I sit on the toilet on campus and the tiles keep getting larger and smaller and it's making me very dizzy I want to throw up. 12:00 p.m. I'm talking to a friend who cancelled on me a few weeks ago. The voice in my head keeps telling me that they absolutely hate me and that's why they cancelled. 1:15 p.m. sitting in class the teachers words suddenly don't sound English at all. I can't even concentrate.

2 p.m. I can finally eat again, but I can't help but feel paranoid that the people behind the counter had slipped something that I'm allergic to in my food. I have to take apart the food, inspecting it bit by bit. By the end, my meal is just a big mount of slop and it's getting cold. 3 p.m. I see my friends, but I can't even concentrate on what they're saying to me because the voice in my head keeps telling me that they're just pretending to like me.

4:30 p.m. I'm home. I'm trying to do homework, but it just sounds like someone's tapping on my window to get my attention. But I live on the second floor. But still, I need to make sure. 6 p.m. My foot feels like it's on fire, so it distracts me. 7 p.m. I'm trying to read, but the words on the page, they start meshing together and they're floating off the page and melting. 8 p.m. I smell something burning in the kitchen. 9 p.m. I'm tired, but the voice in my head keeps telling me how useless I am and how the human race would be better without me.

The voice keeps telling me all the ways that I can die tonight. 10.30 p.m. I finally finished my homework and I'm laying in bed. But it feels like someone is standing next to my bed, standing over me, watching me browse on my phone. I keep turning to check that nobody's there. 12.45 a.m. My last thought before falling asleep is I need to be killed to truly be happy. Wow. And this is...

posted by someone and people tend to agree with yeah it was uploaded a lot and a lot of people with schizophrenia agreed it's just you have this you hear a lot of things that sound very real i mean how can you if you hear footsteps right now coming from your kitchen you're not gonna go check really even though you know you didn't hear anyone break in your security alarms didn't go off you're home alone you're not gonna go check

And this is in 2024. Back then, when the Galvans start getting diagnosed with schizophrenia, there were actually two groups in the medical profession that believed schizophrenia was caused by two different things. Well, maybe there were like three groups. One group believed that it was purely genetic. It gets passed down in your genes. One group believed that it was purely environmental, that something happens in your environment and you develop this disorder. A third, very small group felt that it was maybe a combination of both.

So way before Mimi and Don had their 12 kids, there was this man in Germany which would undoubtedly impact the Galvins family lives. Like it's crazy how things are intertwined. His name is Daniel Paul Schreiber. He's going to write this book that's going to impact almost everyone with schizophrenia eventually.

Daniel is the son of this child rearing expert in Germany. Daniel's dad has, I don't know how to explain it, but he has a one-sided fight with bad posture. He thinks it is the hallmark of a bad child. So much so that his whole career, he creates and sells these upright posture machines, which are chair attachments that force children to sit up straight, completely straight. There's straps. Imagine like a wooden backpack with straps and it's like tied to a chair. Yeah.

They cannot lean. They cannot slouch. Nothing. There's one that has a head holder with a chin clamp, and it's supposed to keep the child's head in a fixed, straight position. The chin clamp will not let you tilt the head down. It's all about looking straight ahead of you. God forbid someone throws a football at you from above. You would have to lay down to look up at it before it slams into your face.

He was just crazy about monitoring kids. Kids chewing methods? He didn't like the way kids chewed. It's not correct. So he created this chin ribbon, which is like a rubberous chin strap that you wear around your head and it restricts how much you can open your mouth and how much you can chew up and down. What do you mean? He doesn't want you to chew? He doesn't want you to chew too animated. He wants small little dainty chews.

No more chomping. Soft shoes only. Even in bed, you cannot escape the father of posture. He created bed restraints for parents who wanted their kids to sleep on their back. Straight on their back. These devices were obviously not just uncomfortable, but potentially harmful. Also, they're just cruel. I imagine if that's what he's doing with other people's children, he's doing that with his own child, Daniel. His whole messaging is, you gotta break children. They're like a good pair of leather shoes. You gotta break them in first. I'm glad my, um...

Grandma didn't find out about him because she would be the number one customer. Yeah. He also did this thing where if a child is acting up, he would freeze them. He called it freeze punishment. Essentially, he would throw them into an ice bath for prolonged periods of time.

For some reason, everybody thought he was a genius. Daniel was the first person example that his dad knew what he was doing. Daniel ends up becoming a lawyer, then later a judge. He gets married. He has this very perfect life that every parent dreams of for their children. And then at 51 years old, his mind breaks. He is diagnosed with hallucinations and insanity. A few years later, that condition would be renamed schizophrenia.

Wait, Daniel is the son or the son of the dad? Yes, he had this perfect, picture-perfect life until 51. Okay. And then he falls apart. Daniel writes a book titled My Nervous Illness, which would lead you to believe that maybe he has been treated and is writing about his experience and his journey, correct? The book opens with a letter to his doctor. He asks the doctor, Are you the one that has been secretly transmitting messages into my brain for the past nine years?

The first 200 pages of the book, he writes about seeing two suns in the sky. One of the suns would follow him around, stalk him everywhere he goes. He talks about how he has direct access to God. He communicates through the rays that reach down from the stars. And God is really just a vast network of nerve fibers that have been taken from humans and blessed to become God. The only way to save the world from soul murder, which is happening right now, and restore the lost state of blessedness was for him to transform into a woman.

But God doesn't want any of this. God wants to cut him out of his life. He's trying to drive him into a state of dementia. He is opening up his skull and God is slowly pouring corpse juices into his brain and making him lose his mind. He's trying to use his body, quote, like a whore.

In the book, Daniel details getting into arguments with the sun and talking to birds, which obviously are very unrealistic claims and clearly shows a man's detachment to reality. But the way he writes is very enlightening. He writes and even at points he acknowledges how unhinged some of these things sound. I mean, it's just crazy. It's nonsensical. If you told me this was going to happen to me, I wouldn't even believe you. But it is happening. It's very true.

Even the way he writes, it's not jumbled. It's not incoherent. The things he's writing about maybe don't make sense, but he writes in a very clear, rational manner. One thought after the next. They're all connected. He writes, I have come to understand that the tumultuous events had some meaning in relation to the difficulties that directly confronted me. Divine rays from prominent people now poured down directly onto my person. Everything is in reference to me.

This book is released during a time where not everyone believed in mental illnesses. Some people that read his book from a, they saw it from a medical or a psychological perspective. Others thought this man right here, he's 100% possessed. They truly thought that he was suffering from a sickness of the soul, a possession. He did not need a doctor. He needs an exorcism, okay? Or maybe prison because his soul is rotten. The connection is if your soul is sick, that means you did something so bad that God is punishing you.

For the people that believed it was a sole possession, I mean, there's no arguing with them. How can you show them it's not? But the other group that believed he was experiencing a medical condition, they're having their own fight. Half of them believe that it's passed down from his dad, something in the genes, okay? Half of them believe, no, it's the way he was raised. It's the environment. And they're going at it. They're having arguments.

And it's somewhat still ongoing. At this point, nobody can even agree where schizophrenia comes from. And if they don't know where it comes from, they don't know how to treat it. Which, side note, back then, the way they treated schizophrenia was giving patients cocaine.

Yeah, cocaine was a prescription drug back then and that's probably the worst thing that you can give someone with schizophrenia. It's only gonna make the hallucinations so much stronger because it's a stimulant. They're gonna become hyperactive in their minds and it's like a dopamine increase which they don't need more dopamine. Do you know how they treat them today?

A lot of antipsychotic medications, but what a lot of family members with people with schizophrenia state is that sometimes the cure is as dangerous as the disease. So a lot of the antipsychotics, you're going to have heart failure. A lot of people with schizophrenia, they die maybe 17 to 20 years sooner than they should than the normal life expectancy. Wow.

but back then it was cocaine. Eight years after this book is published, a very famous man, Sigmund Freud, opens up the book and this would end his very long-term friendship with another well-known theorist, Carl Jung. So the two were friends. This book would break up that friendship.

Carl Jung was Freud's protege. He told Freud, you have to read this book on schizophrenia. Freud did not want to. He believed people with schizophrenia were all narcissists. They're not even worth the trouble. He said they are way too narcissistic to even engage in a meaningful interaction with anybody. If they don't want to be helped, why should I help?

Maybe boredom or sheer spite, Freud opens up this book and he starts reading and he can't stop. His eyeballs are just glued to this page and he's having an epiphany after epiphany after epiphany. He reaches out to Carl Jung afterwards. This is a revelation. He just solved the puzzle of schizophrenia.

What? First of all, psychotic delusions are nothing more than dreams that people have while they are awake. Second of all, in the book, Daniel talks about how he needs to, quote, transform into a woman. Well, that points to his, yes, enter in very famous Freud theory, fear of castration.

To give you some context, the fear of castration theory, Freud argues, is a universal human experience that starts when a boy is around the age of three to perhaps five years old.

He believes boys realize at that age that some people do not have the same body parts, little girls. And it must be because they have been castrated. They've been chopped off, sliced off. So now they start fearing, oh my gosh, I could have my part sliced off. But why would anybody want to castrate them? Because of their sexual feelings that they harbor towards their mother.

Basically, Freud believes every boy will have sexual desires towards their own mother when they're young as part of their psychosexual development. And the reason that they do not act on this desire is because they believe that their private part is going to get chopped off if they do. So you're telling me when he was three, he had those thoughts? Yes, but he says that when you're so young that you don't even realize those are the thoughts you're having.

That's what he claims. I, most people think it's a very bizarre claim, but he believes Daniel feels that he must transform into a woman because all of that castration anxiety, it never went away from him. He's still holding onto it. And he states that his dad of all people was a doctor performing all of these bizarre experiments, which led to him having more fear of bizarre experiments. Oh, and

And he believed that Daniel had repressed, quote, homosexual desires towards his father and brother when he was an infant. These are all the things that he's gathering from the book. And when he tells Carl Jung this, but also in an essay that many in the medical field would read, Freud in that essay states he believes schizophrenia is caused by the unconscious. You create it in your unconscious state as a child, and it all stems from a very sexual background.

When he told that to Carl Jung, Carl Jung was pretty pissed. He actually lost it on Freud and told him, "Not everything is about sex! Sometimes people lose their minds and go insane for other reasons. It's not always about sex!" This would be the end of the friendship between the two well-known theorists. But this would also be the start of the very misguided belief that schizophrenia is caused by one person's actions and environment or unconscious state and has not much to do with genetics.

Until decades later, 1,721 miles away from Colorado in Washington, D.C., researchers are studying a set of quadruplets, four sisters born at the same time. They're all 23 years old when all four sisters are diagnosed with schizophrenia.

By the National Institute of Mental Health Calculations, a set of quadruplets all diagnosed with schizophrenia is likely to happen once every 1.5 billion births. This is the chance of a lifetime for researchers to study schizophrenia to try and get more answers. The sisters stayed at NIMH for three years. They were studied by a team of two dozen researchers. Even after leaving, they were studied and watched for five more years.

David Rosenthal is the lead researcher. He wrote a book and this would change the trajectory of schizophrenia as research. It was no longer about environment. It was no longer about the parents. The case study helped show that there's at least some genetic component to the disorder. He states, "'Schizophrenia simply cannot be imposed or inflicted on someone who is not genetically predisposed to develop the condition.'"

This starts shifting this research towards investigating the genetic factors of schizophrenia. The study actually revealed, yes, okay, maybe there is a slight environmental factor, but it's also genetic.

The sisters grew up in a very abusive household. This was one of the first big cases that would highlight the combination of genetic and environmental, but it wasn't perfect. Other researchers that believed, again, still that it's purely environmental said, no, this is like the worst group you could study because the family wasn't just abusive. They were really bad. The father was drunk. He essayed two of the girls. The mom discovered two of the girls engaged in mutual self-pleasure together.

She would sedate them at night, put them in restraints so that they wouldn't do things in the company of each other. And then she mutilated both of their private parts so that they can no longer experience pleasure. It almost felt like you can't really argue it's genetic just because they're quadruplets, because look at how extreme their environment is. So now the researchers are left looking for a family that does not have the complicated abuse element where maybe the parents, you know, of course, they're not perfect, but they're not that abusive. Right.

A family. Like the Galvins. Have you ever done the inkblot test? It's where you look at 10 symmetrical inkblot images and you describe what you see in each one. It's like a watercolor blob of images of color. I mean, some people believe that it does nothing. It's way too subjective. Others state that it provides very unique insight into someone's psyche.

You're talking about like those painting looking watermark images. They don't really look like images. They look like blotches of color, watercolor. What are you supposed to do? So you, the therapist will hold it up and you tell them what you see in it. What do you see? Donald stares at the picture. Temptation. A woman is ready to have sex with a man, but the man is suffering mentally. He is in anguish on whether or not he should or he shouldn't. What does he end up doing? He does not have sex to keep his values high.

And this one? Maybe a father and son. A son is in bed and the father has come to say goodnight. He is about to walk out but then he sees the son crying on the father's shoulder asking him for help. He did something wrong and the father is going to offer him guidance. And this one? Someone killed the father. The son is avenging his death. He feels right in what he did because the other person committed injustice to the family.

And this one, I see a hole, a cliff, there's a hole inside and then you have to go deep inside the hole and you will find newborn birds so that you need to take home and make them your own. Interesting, a cave with a hole, it's almost like a birth canal, a passageway where you start a new bird family. And what do you see in this one? I'm climbing up a cliff and birds are diving at me.

Interesting. The therapist is intrigued at how much connection Donald is drawing from his real life and what he sees in the pictures. Because at this point, Donald is married.

Okay, we're gonna get there. After Donald's initial breakdown, Donald had started dating a woman named Jean. They were together for maybe a few months before Donald announced to the family that he's gonna marry Jean. Mimi and Don, the parents, I mean, they're confused how to feel. A part of them feels good because at least he's trying to move on, right? But another part feels very hesitant. Beyond the fact that Donald is going through a lot mentally, there's just... This couple doesn't make sense.

For one, Jean has made it very clear that she does not want kids. She wants to study genetics and help cure diseases and graduate. She wants like a very busy life ahead of her. And Donald thinks, eh, she'll come around to it. He honestly just could not believe that Jean was telling him the truth. The two get married and Donald's therapist starts hearing a lot about this cave-like birth canal where you go to pick up birds and start a new family. And he starts hearing a lot about Donald's married life. They

They eat separately. Him and Jean sleep in separate beds. They barely have intimate relations. Donald is very detached from the relationship and Jean is over it. She doesn't want a wooden board as a husband. But Donald doesn't even know how to be himself anymore. He tells the therapist, for years it just feels like I've been a mirror of what other people want me to be. He said that he's so busy reading other people's expressions, gestures, and words to get hints on how he should behave that

The doctor noted that Donald seems like he's trying to maintain a very tight leash on his self-control to the point where it's clear what he's doing. His whole personality is flat. It seems like he's trying to keep the lid on something. The therapist writes in the notes about Donald, he watches your every move.

Even though Donald is detached from Jean, he still doesn't want her to leave. He's watching her every move too. One time she was so done with him and his marriage, she walked out of the apartment. He starts chasing after her. She finds the nearest little area she can hide in, a ditch. She's ducking for cover when Donald finds her and he tells her, I want to drown you. What? He starts going into detail about how he wants to drown her and kill her and how he's going to do it.

Gene manages to talk him out of it. But Dr. Patterson, Donald's therapist, didn't know about that conversation. He didn't know about that when he walked into the hospital. He's at the hospital because his patient Donald failed to show up to a scheduled therapy session. And instead he was arrested. He was arrested and put into the mental hospital. Dr. Patterson is trying to figure out what the hell is going on. The police in the hospital, they fill him in.

Donald had taken two cyanide tablets from the lab at the university. He put them into a jar with hydrochloric acid, which if you mix the two, it creates a fatal poisonous gas. It's said that he took his wife, Jean, and shoved her face into the jar and he was going to kill her. But she looked over and his face was rammed into the jar too. He was going to kill both of them. The plan was that they were going to die together. He doesn't want her to leave. He would rather they die.

Jean managed to wiggle out of his grip and she ran out and called the police. Dr. Patterson walks into Donald's room at the hospital. It feels like a completely different Donald sitting in front of him. It's like he's in heaven. He's almost euphoric about what he did. In fact, he feels like a caricature of a comic book villain. He's telling Dr. Patterson in almost a bragging way about the way that he tortured and killed cats a while back. And recently he dismembered a dog in the bathtub just to upset Jean.

Dr. Patterson is confused because nothing in his observations about Donald would indicate that he's capable of any of this. So what's going on? Did he just snap or was he tricking Dr. Patterson? He couldn't see. So you're saying at this point, like his condition just getting so much worse. This would be the part where he can no longer go to university or integrate into society at all.

He's trying to kill the wife. He will be institutionalized in and out. And he will try to convince doctors that he does not have hallucinations. But they write in their notes that he keeps looking to the side as if he's listening to someone talking to him or perhaps even guiding him during the therapy sessions. And this is the start of schizophrenia in the family. There will be five more that are diagnosed back to back.

Dr. DeLisi and Dr. Friedman are the first researchers to study the Galvin family in depth as a whole. They had to pull each sibling's blood samples, study their genetics to see if there's something consistent in them. Because if it's true that there's a genetic component to the disorder, then all the siblings will have some sort of marker that indicates that it's present even if they don't have schizophrenia.

She flew all the way to Colorado to meet with the family. And when she walked in that front door, all she could think, all she could remember thinking was this might be the most mentally ill family in all of America.

Really? They start drawing blood. They start reading brainwaves, administering questionnaires and tests and trying to understand the timeline and what's going on in the environment at the time that each family member is diagnosed. And all of this research is going to be made even more difficult by the fact that the six siblings that have schizophrenia, five of them have something called anosognosia.

Schizophrenia itself is already rare. It affects less than 1% of the population in the US, but anosognosia affects even less. It's the condition that coexists with schizophrenia and it results in someone not being aware of their mental condition. Only a percentage of people with schizophrenia have anosognosia and they truly believe that they are not sick, that the world is out to get them. They don't need medication. Like some sinister being or reason is trying to administer this medication that they do not need.

One of the family members would say, "People with anosognosia are non-compliant because they don't think anything is wrong with them. When we see people on the streets and wonder, 'Why don't they get help? Why don't they get care?' They don't think anything is wrong with them. That's the biggest message."

But the researchers, they still have to try and figure out what's going on with the Galvins. I mean, it's almost too good to be true of a test study for understanding schizophrenia, as bizarre as that sounds. Meaning the Galvin family, if they are willing participants, they could change the course of how schizophrenia is viewed in the medical world. They could change a lot of people's lives.

But first, they have to understand the family dynamics. The family consists of mom, Mimi, who is obviously a lot more involved with the kids, Don, the dad, and then 12 kids, 10 sons, two girls. The house runs on two sets of laws, America's laws and God's laws. You've got a military dad in combination with a Catholic mom. There's going to be a lot of rules. Now, at first, Mimi received a lot of blame for how the children turned out. A lot of people thought it was her fault because she's the mom.

It does seem that she was a bit of a perfectionist. She also wasn't the type of mom to praise their kid a lot. If you created a piece of artwork, she would tell you all the ways it could be better or all the things that you did wrong that you need to fix for next time instead of praising you for how good it looks now. What part of timeline was this now? Like the researchers showing up? After they're diagnosed. Like future, future now? Wow.

But there doesn't seem to be anything thus far that indicates something alarming. So they start running down the list of siblings. Donald, the oldest, is the one that runs the house when the parents are gone. He's the one that we've been talking about this episode so far. He's the first one diagnosed with schizophrenia.

and he's going through a lot right now. He tried to kill his wife, Jean. They get a divorce. He's in and out of mental institutions, and it's rough. Donald clearly does not like being in a hospital. At one point, even the idea of being sent to a hospital has Donald pull a knife on his mom.

The other brothers have to stop him. And it's just a very difficult situation. One time he's being sent to a solitary confinement in the psychiatric ward. And right when they get to the door, Donald pushes the attendant into the room, steals his keys and traps him, the attendant, inside the seclusion room. But it's not like he's trying to run away. He just sits in front of the door, telling the attendant through the window, this is to teach you a lesson. He would tell his doctor that he stopped taking his medications. Why would you do something like that?

Because my watch stopped. So I had to stop. He calls his mom his father's wife because he's certain that Mimi is not his mother. In fact, he was birthed by an octopus. Once Donald thought one of his brothers was going to take his room. So he was so upset by the sheer thought of this that he goes to the market, purchases a raw octopus and lets it rot in his room so that his brother would not want his room anymore because of the smell.

The whole family, when it was just Donald diagnosed, they were really struggling to understand what's going on. The only person that seemed to enjoy Donald's downfall is Jim. Jim is the second oldest brother and he has always hated Donald. Hated. Jim has this thing where he always wants to be the oldest, always wants to be the one in charge, the one that the parents love the most. Their sibling rivalry was so bad. Sometimes they would get into full physical altercations like a tornado in the living room.

If Donald is the all-American guy, Jim is the bad boy. Leather jacket, driving a black Chevy, the brother that's gonna sneak you a little rum into your Coke even though you don't want it and you're underage, that's Jim. He tries to do everything Donald does but better. Football? Jim is good.

Donald is better. Falconry, Jim is good. Donald is better. And that drives Jim mad. Every single thing, Donald comes out on top. I mean, you would think that the other siblings would like Jim more because Donald had his little fight club days, right? But weirdly enough, they don't like Jim much either. Jim had his own issues. He did this thing where he would encourage all his little brothers. Yeah, bring your girlfriends around. Like, I'm so cool. I'll buy you guys drinks and stuff.

But the second the girlfriends would walk in through the door, he would start hitting on them. He just liked being as provocative as possible. One of the brothers would say, when Jim was 16, we just knew something was wrong with him. But we thought it was okay. He's just being a boy out drinking, skipping school. Eventually, he ends up getting kicked out of the Air Academy, which is honestly putting it lightly. He almost killed another boy in the Academy.

They had snuck out onto the jets one night that were parked outside. Jim was inside the cockpit. His friend is outside keeping watch. Jim presses a button and the plane starts moving and almost rams into his friend. And it does indeed smash into the tail of another jet. The friend could have died. I mean, one or two inches in one direction, he would have been dead. Jim would be transferred to a Catholic school where he meets a girl named Kathy, gets her pregnant and marries her.

Kath Lee immediately knew that Jim had a lot of resentment towards his parents. Within their first few dates, he starts going on rants about how his parents kept having babies and don't even deal with the younger ones. And of course, even with everything going on with Donald, Jim had so much hatred for him. She said he would go on rants about how Donald had been this big hero during high school and Jim could never measure up. He did not seem to have any sympathy.

During Thanksgiving one year, this is after his diagnosis, everyone gathered back at the house on Hidden Valley Road to celebrate. Jim and Donald start fighting physically. They start in the living room like a tornado. They make it to the dining room where they're running circles around the beautifully arranged and set table. Jim tries to reach across the table. Donald lifts it up, throws it onto Jim and everything, all the plates, glasses, silverware, food crashing down, destroyed. Thanksgiving is over.

If there ever was a moment in the house that it's dead silent, it would be now. And then you hear Mimi, the mom, slowly walking back into the kitchen and smashing the gingerbread house that she made for her kids because they don't deserve it.

Jim clearly still hates Donald. Even his wife knows it. Which, side note, a lot of people in the family loved Kathy. She had this very spunky personality. Mimi, the intense mother-in-law, would come over. "'You haven't dusted!' Kathy would just respond. "'Yeah, well, I don't have the time. Here's my dust rag if you want.'"

One time, Kathy saw Jim's motorcycle outside of the bar, which he wasn't supposed to be at. He's supposed to be at work. So she's thinking, what the hell? She walks in, sees Jim sitting there with another woman on a date. Kathy walks over, pours a pitcher of beer on both of them. And when she gets home, Jim slaps her across the face. And from there, the violence would only get worse.

Kathy tried to leave, she tried, but Jim punched her so hard in the face that she needed stitches. She was scared to ever try again and every time she thought about it, she told herself, "No, he's gonna get better and our son needs a dad." A few times Kathy did manage to leave for maybe a few hours a night. The baby, Jimmy, would tug on her shirt and keep asking, "Where's daddy? Where's daddy? Let's go home to daddy." I mean, what could she say?

Their relationship was just really bad. They constantly had police being called on them. Neighbors would call. Kathy called once. She declined to press charges. But ultimately, they didn't separate for a very long time. Kathy almost felt obligated. I mean, not only was it for her son, but also for Jim's little sisters. The two youngest siblings? They're like barely seven. Okay, one of them's like four? Yeah.

They would take Margaret and Lindsay in on the weekends, and it just seemed like the girls needed some normalness in their lives with Donald losing his mind. Margaret and Lindsay are the two youngest, and Lindsay is like five at this point. Jim would try to give his little sisters these little sleepovers on the weekends.

He would take them ice skating, swimming to the movies. Or sometimes if something was happening at the house with Donald, Mimi would call the couple to tell them to get the girls while she handles Donald. And Lindsay, the youngest daughter of the Galvin family, would state that Jim, her older brother, and his wife Kathy almost became like a second mother and father figure.

And their child, because there's 12 kids, there's a huge age gap between Jim, the second oldest, and Lindsay, the youngest. Jim's child, son, is close in age to Lindsay, his little sister. Yeah. So they became quick friends. And she said, I think my sister-in-law, Kathy, because...

because she had this small child and I was a small child. You know, I think my mother was relying on her to babysit. And I loved Kathy. She was really a mother figure to me. She had beautiful blonde hair that she would let me brush. Lindsay did not know at the time that her brother Jim had schizophrenia as well. Kathy noticed early in their relationship that Jim seemed tormented by something that she didn't know. Something that she couldn't see. It was just strange. One time Kathy woke up in the

Jim? She went to the restroom. No, no Jim. To the living room. No Jim. She finds him standing in the kitchen, standing over the stove, turning it on, turning it off, turning it on, turning it off. It almost seemed like he stopped sleeping at some points. One day they were walking down the street in downtown Colorado. He just stopped next to a building and slammed his head into a brick wall out of nowhere. Another time he walked up to a lake, fully clothed, looked like he was just enjoying the view, but then he dove in.

He kept telling her he heard voices. They're talking to me again. Who? He described people spying on him, following him. Everyone at work is conspiring against him. And Kathy tried to tell Jim's parents what's going on. She expected some tears, maybe them even blaming her for making him have a psychotic break. But instead, she was confused. She saw two parents trying very hard to pretend like this conversation was not happening.

It almost seemed like they were in complete denial, like they can only have one sick son at a time. Like whatever was happening was maybe a marital issue between Kathy and Jim and like, oof, maybe not my business. It seems like it's between you guys. That type of reaction. Kathy had Jim admitted to a hospital for two months and things did not get much better once he got out.

Lindsay, the youngest sibling, would say, I don't know how much the others remember of those times, but Jim was extremely abusive to Kathy. He would come home drunk at night and he would cause some ruckus with her. There'd be yelling and screaming. We would just be hearing it. We'd be in the other room. And then sometimes Jim would leave. He'd go out in a rage and Kathy would say, OK, come on, kids, come, come on, kids. Let's get in the car. Let's go. Let's go.

We need to get out of here. It felt like we were fearing for our lives, but it was either be there with that or be home with Donald, which for some reason it was scarier because it involved things that weren't real. Whereas I think Jim's condition was more concrete. It was like domestic violence, maybe more socially acceptable perhaps than schizophrenia. And so I don't know which one was worse. So the girls would actually prefer to go to Jim's at one point until the worst happened. Jim started touching his little sisters.

It would later be said that because Jim was so kind to the girls that when he started essaying them, it almost seemed normal. Lindsay, the youngest daughter, would say her first memory of essay was maybe when she was three, four. She said it was my brother, Jim, coming in the middle of the night, putting his hands on me and me crawling up into a ball tighter and tighter, trying to get away, not really understanding what's going on. I mean, I'm a little child and I'm trying to stop whatever he's doing only because I think

I probably knew somehow that it was wrong and I didn't like it but I was also so terrified to try and stop it. I didn't know what to say. You just pretend that it's not happening. You think maybe it's love, maybe this is love and him having his hands all over me is love.

I think he was very good at making sure it was only one child in that room when it was happening. Whether it was Margaret, my older sister, or me, or just, yeah. She said,

But it was either that, be there with Jim, or be at home with Donald, which was terrifying too. Because Donald had his outburst. He was not without us having to call the police about him and having to go to the hospital, whether it was attempted self-exit or whether he was getting into a fight with my father. It was like choosing the lesser of two evils. It was like you could be at home with Donald or you could be at Jim and Kathy's and endure his essay and also keep it a secret.

Because one, no one's gonna believe me. If I were to go to my mother, she was emotionally probably very unavailable at this time. So I'm not sure I felt safe going to her. And you want to go to the zoo and you want to go ice skating and you want to do these things. So this is the one place you're gonna feel normal. Getting to be around what felt more like a normal environment and it's almost like you had to pay the price for it. I don't know which was worse. I probably would have been better off at home.

then that one for sure. At least I wouldn't have had to endure the sexual abuse at the hands of Jim. You say it lasted 10 years? Yeah, until she was... Both daughter? Yes.

Wow. For Margaret, Lindsay's older sister, it started when she was also five. She was way too young to understand what was happening, same as Lindsay. She was confused that maybe it was love. I mean, she hated it. She didn't like it, but she thought maybe she just doesn't like love and it's just strange to her. Why else would Jim be so kind? She remembers he had even bought her this...

She went out to the store and they saw this tiger's eye stone. She thought it was beautiful. He bought it for her and for years she treasured that stone until she realized how wrong it was and he was grooming her and this is S.A.,

Lindsay would say he was a full grown man. He would force me, my body to open up. He was a big guy. He pulled the tampon out of me and then penetrated. I yelled for him to stop. I yelled, please stop, please. The biggest reason I yelled was my fear of getting pregnant. I was terrified of being impregnated by my brother. I laid there. He went off and went to bed or whatever. And I just laid there in a ball, just sick. I remember the next morning wanting to get out of there. I wanted to go home. I said, take me home.

For Margaret, the older sister, moving on from this type of trauma, the best thing she could do was to remove herself from the family. She had to pick the lesser of two evils. The chance presented itself when this very wealthy family friend of Mimi's had asked if they could help in any way. They said, we could take Margaret. That would make your life easier, right? One less kid in the house.

Margaret would be sent to live with the very well-off Gary family in Colorado. I don't know their exact net worth or wealth at the time, but they owned a Picasso, a real Picasso, and they hung it in their hallway. Wait, why would they want to take over a kid? They're very charitable. They like to take in kids. So they had a few other kids from families that were going through rough patches. But they were friends. They're very close friends with Mimi and Donald.

So they took in Margaret and they have a Picasso in their hallway. They have private planes that they use to bounce between their multiple homes. They have a gardener who clips their hedges into beautiful shapes. A lady who does all the laundry, a personal chef that cooks all the fresh meals for the family. It feels like a completely different world to Margaret. When did Margaret go there? She was in middle school. Hmm.

The reason that they didn't take Lindsay as well was because she wasn't young enough to go to the same private school that the Gary kids and Margaret would now be going to. So Margaret was the same age as the Gary kids. So they all would go to the same private school. I see. Yeah, but Lindsay was not old enough. And Margaret, she had a very complicated time with the Garys. She always knew in the back of her mind that

This isn't my world. I'm just a guest. And she couldn't help but feel like maybe her family didn't want her. That's why she was sent here.

Margaret writes in her diary, That was a lot for her, in addition to dealing with the trauma of being essayed by Jim.

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Lindsay, the youngest, she was actually one of the tougher ones in the house. She has to watch all of her siblings one by one either go insane, go to college, start their own lives, or be hospitalized. Or in Margaret's case, just leave to live with a wealthy family. They all leave her in some way, shape, or form. Did they have any fears of, is that going to... Yes. So many of them were paranoid of going insane. Lindsay would actually say that

Even just the idea of crying in front of her parents, she felt like they were analyzing her and thinking, oh no, she's next. So she had to show no emotion. While she's witnessing all of this, she can't show any emotion. And then her parents don't want to talk to her about it because this is at a time where they barely know what's going on with their children.

They barely understand. So how can they explain it to a little girl? So Lindsay developed this habit where she would just spend hours in her room organizing and reorganizing everything just to have some semblance of control.

Yeah, she would feel very jealous that Margaret left. She said, oh, my gosh, you live in this gorgeous home in Denver with all these fancy people. And I didn't understand why Margaret got to be there. And I I didn't understand why I didn't. I didn't understand that. Why was I left to live with schizophrenics? I mean, I was angry. I was furious, but I couldn't show it because being angry meant that maybe you were becoming mentally ill. Raising your voice, yelling or screaming or crying was what people with mental illness do.

So we have Donald, the oldest, that's diagnosed with schizophrenia. Then Jim, who also clearly has schizophrenia, but the whole family doesn't know it until a little bit later. Brother number three, John, he's kind of the opposite of his two oldest brothers. He is fully devoted to classical music.

He's very quiet. He just keeps in his own world, which at the time, Don the dad did not like. He would tell him, John, you need to get out more. Music is a selfish profession. You spend so much time in the practice room. Why don't you socialize more? What good are you doing?

It hurt John, but this was kind of his escape. He would eventually start working as a music teacher. And interestingly, later at John's wedding, Don the dad would pull John's new mother-in-law aside and tell her, your daughter got the best of my litter, like the best of the 12th. Why so? Why did he say that? Does he really like John? Yeah, but he never showed it.

John had no idea what to do with that, but he just knew that he wanted some distance between himself and the family. Which sounds selfish, but I mean, it was just really hard. Especially with the parents. I mean, it was hard for them too. Mimi and Don were not perfect. I don't think anybody is. Sometimes they would say very hurtful things to the kids. If somebody starts acting up in ways that Mimi didn't like, because she has all this pressure, all this stress, she would snap at them and tell them, you're just like Donald. Right?

which at that point was considered the worst thing you could say to someone in the galvin family don the dad was always busy outside the house he was allegedly had like six different affairs threw himself into his work and it was it was a lot yeah it was a lot but how does john how is john doing mentally he does not have schizophrenia maybe that's why the dad said it you think maybe but i think john is just a very calm person

So the other brothers who also don't have schizophrenia, they still have more of like rebellious streaks that they went through. John was just a very calm, collected person.

And, you know, I will say that Mimi did try to do everything she could in her power. She would read up on all these things that you can do. She found this one doctor who believes all mental disorders are a cause of a lack of blood nutrition balance. So she starts buying all of his supplements, forcing each of her kids to take them every morning. But nothing is working and nothing is going to be as shocking to the family as what happens next.

So we have Donald, the oldest, who is diagnosed with schizophrenia. Jim is diagnosed with schizophrenia. John is not diagnosed with schizophrenia. Brian is the fourth oldest. He was always considered the most handsome in the family, even more so than Donald. But he's very, very shy. He would spend most of his time kind of like John, deep into classical music, jazz, rock and roll, anything to do with music. Brian naturally becomes the favored child after Donald and Jim kind of fall apart.

The parents, they invest the little money that they have to spend on non-essentials to get in private piano lessons, musical instruments. Brian ends up packing up, moving to California to be part of a band. And he meets this beautiful girl named Lorelei Smith. She is the daughter of a doctor. I mean, the family does very well for themselves. And Brian has this thing where he talks a lot about very dark subjects. Like he would very, he would talk openly about death.

But people thought he's so musical. He's in this band. It's almost romanticized when he does it. Lorelai thought it was nice until it wasn't nice. She ends up breaking up with him and they would both be found dead in her apartment. Brian would shoot his ex-girlfriend Lorelai Smith in the head with a rifle and then turn the rifle on himself. He would be dead.

And we don't know if he had... We know that he was prescribed antipsychotic medication prior to that. I see. How old was he? Do we know? 20, early 20s. So Michael, the next eldest, he briefly had a visit to a psychiatric hospital soon after. And everyone in the family was convinced that he's next. He's losing his grip on reality. He's going to end up just like Donald, just like Jim, just like Brian, right?

But Michael was certain the minute that he stepped into that hospital, wait, I don't think I belong here. This was like his tipping point. He said he started getting into meditation, mindfulness, and he was not diagnosed with schizophrenia.

I do want to preface. I don't think that it was a choice that he made. I think perhaps it was kind of a wake up call for him to get on the right track because he was acting out, which is why he was sent to a psychiatric hospital. But I don't think schizophrenia is a thing where you can make the choice of like, you know what, I'm going to get it together. You know, I think it just happened that he was acting out probably because of everything going on, but he does not have schizophrenia. Yeah.

Richard is another brother that does not get diagnosed with schizophrenia and it was very hard for these brothers. A lot of people say schizophrenia is like Alzheimer's in the sense that it breaks the whole family apart. It doesn't just impact the person with it. It impacts the whole family unit. Richard said he was terrified watching his brothers. It felt like he was going to go crazy any second. He said, "It scared the shit out of me. For 20 years, I just tried to soothe myself, sedate myself with alcohol and other things hoping that it wouldn't happen and I had to block my whole family out."

Out of the oldest six siblings, we have Donald, Jim, and Brian who have schizophrenia. John, Richard, and Michael do not. There are four more sons and two girls left. The last four brothers, they were actually known as the Hockey Brothers.

They're the youngest four, and they almost have like a subunit inside the family. They were inseparable. They played every single sport together. They actually got along for the most part. Their main sport of choice was hockey. It's actually quite cute. At hockey games in high school, the announcer would narrate, you know, they narrate who the ball is passed to. And a lot of the games, the announcer is just screaming, Galvin to Galvin to Galvin to Galvin, the hockey brothers. And so the oldest is Joe. Very mild-mannered, introspective. He likes to just...

stay on the outskirts of the family analyzing. Then we have Mark, the chess protege, and quite sensitive. Not in a bad way, but sensitive. Matthew, he had a little bit of a mischievous spark in him, but when he's not goofing around, he was obsessed with pottery. Peter, the youngest, he was probably the most rebellious of the sibling bunch, even before everyone is diagnosed with schizophrenia.

Matthew was Lindsay's main protector in the house. Wait, hold on. Slow down. Matthew is the second of the four. No, wait, who's Matthew? Matthew is the third oldest of the four.

Okay, so out of the four, Matthew is number three. Yes, and he is like Lindsay's main protector for whatever reason. He's the one that's obsessed with pottery. Okay. He does have like a mischievous little spark in him, but I don't know, something about him, he just wanted to protect Lindsay when it was just the younger ones in the house. He was always making sure that she's okay, checking up on her. He just had this very calm, artistic air about him when he wasn't goofing around.

And then one day, Joe backflipped him onto the patio as a joke.

He landed on his head. He had to be rushed to the hospital. Blood was rushing out of his skull. He suffered from a concussion. Lindsay would say about the incident. One day somebody had gone to soccer practice and I think Joe was supposed to take Matthew. There was some basic disagreement about Joe having to take him or Joe was in a hurry or something. Very, very simple. And half joking, half in anger. He took Matt and threw him down, cracked his skull open, and he needed brain surgery.

He had a hemorrhage in his brain. He was bleeding. He was in the hospital for a very long time, but he survived. It was a very big scare for the family, but he was discharged and everybody thought it was going to be okay until one day very soon after, Matthew goes over to visit Margaret. So Margaret is the one staying at the rich family's house.

Okay, so his younger sister. Yes, Matthew, his brain injury has healed. He goes to visit his little sister at the rich family's house, and he's the one obsessed with pottery. So he brings this new beautiful vase that he made. And Margaret was upstairs in the beautiful home. How old are they at this point? He's like early, like late teens, I think, early 20s. Oh, okay. Yeah, and Margaret is upstairs. She's on her way down to come see Matthew, and she hears this huge commotion.

She's like, what is going on? She runs downstairs. Matthew is completely naked in the family friend's living room. And he had smashed his face to bits. It was shattered everywhere. He was diagnosed with schizophrenia. Wait, wait, wait. So he was just like naked, throwing things on the ground. Yes.

And then they've taken him to the hospital. He was diagnosed. And it just seemed like out of nowhere. I mean, since that day, he is convinced that he is Paul McCartney, a famous musician. He believes that his moods control the weather. And he states that when he wants, he can also control all the stop signs in Colorado Springs, like the stoplights where they turn green and red. He was interviewed in the HBO doc. And they were asked, hi, who are you? What is your name? Paul McCartney.

the famous musician from the band the Beatles do you have schizophrenia they say that I have schizophrenia I'm not schizophrenic but I have something called schizophrenia which is a synopsis of the brain functioning in a proper way because of brain damage I may have been a little schizophrenic because I was with a lot of people that were schizophrenic but that doesn't make me a schizophrenic how old or is he at this point 50s how did you feel schizophrenia was affecting your life

Well, schizophrenia was used by the doctors as an excuse to abuse me. They would actually drug me with the needle for 20 years. So the needle is...

When someone has anosognosia, they don't take their medications. So a lot of times doctors will resort to giving them shots. They put me on clazarel for 36 years. Over the years, I'm just getting tired. I got tired of the whole scene. The whole scene was just a nightmare because it didn't really do anything for me. It just makes me think that psychiatric medication is not needed in my life. I just want to express myself. But what do you do when your friend John Lennon gets shot by Mark Chapman? I mean, I'm no Mark Chapman.

Side note, Paul McCartney and John Lennon were bandmates for the Beatles. John Lennon was killed by a man named Mark Chapman. Can you remember when you were younger, you lived on Hidden Valley Road with your brothers and sisters? Yeah, I remember all that. But it's like, I don't want to go back to it because it's just a nightmare to remember everything that happened there. It was so violent because, you know, Donald Kenyon Galvin would smash my teeth in, knock my teeth in. I had my jaw broken. My jaw bones were slammed back behind my ears. I'm half dead now.

death in both ears because of this. He made my life a living nightmare, you know, being beaten as a child, carrying a cross into a graveyard, being crucified and resurrected. And I got scars to prove it. From a nail, there's holes right in my wrist here and a hole right in the wrist of, you know, both sides of my body. Do you think that you will ever get cured of schizophrenia? That whole schizophrenia thing was my mother's idea and notion that I'm mentally ill. I meant to be a little schizophrenic because I was with a lot of people that had schizophrenia, but it doesn't make me a schizophrenic.

Matthew believes essentially the world is conspiring against him and the family is letting it happen. He states in his medical treatment, it is not necessary to be treated. And the more that the doctors keep drugging him, the more people will end up dead. He says, you ever watch the news lately? Like 480 people died in four different plane wrecks. 8,000 people died in an earthquake in the Himalayas. 150 men in Nigeria were shot down. 22 people killed in a church. 22 people in a plane wreck. Quit drugging me or these things will keep happening. I am the prophet you have heard so much about.

Wow. Then it was Joe, the one that slammed Matthew down. The oldest of the hockey boys. Joe was working for United Airlines. So he was doing okay. He was a baggage handler. Things were going really well. He fell in love with a doctor's daughter. It seemed like they were going to get married. But everything starts falling apart with a knee injury.

He gets this knee injury working for United, but he didn't want to file a claim for it. He just wanted to keep working to show United Airlines, hey, look, I'm such a valuable employee. But United Airlines did not see that. Or maybe they just didn't care. Because when a promotion opens up, Joe thinks, I mean, that's got to be me, right? Nobody dedicates as much of their lives to the job as I do.

He gets passed for the promotion and Joe starts losing his mind. He starts sending threatening letters to the boss, to United, the whole company, to the CEO. Unsurprisingly, they fire him and he starts sending those same threatening letters to the White House. He starts going off the rails. His fiance leaves him. He starts seeing things. He starts running down the middle of the street, screaming at the top of his lungs, the wolves are chasing me. The wolves are chasing me.

He would go on these rants about how he used to live in China in a previous life. He would sit his sisters down and talk in depth about Chinese history. And he says that he knows all of this because there's a Chinese emperor in the clouds that is talking to him. Yeah. But Zhou is actually the one sibling without anosognosia. So he knows he has schizophrenia. Oh, this one. His sisters would say it's very hard to watch Zhou.

Because the other brothers, you know, they genuinely don't believe anything is wrong with them. It almost feels like they're living in their own reality. But Joe would have these moments where he looks up at the skies and he would say, oh my gosh, look, the clouds are pink. And then he would say, I'm hallucinating, aren't I? And then he would say, I just want this to stop. So it's like he would be able to break himself out of his hallucinations and recognize this isn't real. And I think I do agree that is much harder to see, I believe.

And it's just like the Galvin family could not catch a break because after Joe, soon after, the dad suffers from a stroke. Just right there in the middle of the living room floor, he collapses. Peter, the youngest of the Hockey brothers, is standing right next to him. He witnesses the whole things. He had witnessed his brothers lose their minds. He had witnessed one of the most important people in his life, his father, have a stroke and almost die. I mean, after the stroke, the dad was never the same.

The stroke hospitalized the dad for six months. He'd be paralyzed on the right side of his body. He seemed to be without any short-term memory. He didn't really remember much else after World War II. It was really bad. He went from reading three books a day to just sitting there watching TV. He never liked the TV. He never even wanted a TV to be in the house. And it's soon after that, Peter, the son that was right next to him when he had his stroke, starts losing his mind.

It started with him speaking gibberish in math class. Nobody could understand what he was saying. It seemed like a different language. He was just talking in ways that didn't make sense. He would sit on the edge of the teacher's table talking and talking and it was just weird. When the teachers try to pull him out of class, he gets violent. He starts attacking them.

But the parents thought, "Okay, maybe it's gonna be okay." He's just a little bit stressed out. A few weeks later, he goes to a hockey camp as scheduled. That's where he fully breaks down. He starts wetting the bed, spitting on the floor, hitting other campers. He'd be hospitalized.

The Galvin parents would not be able to visit him for multiple weeks. And when they finally get to his entire room smells of urine and he is strapped to the bed with no bed sheets. He is not doing well. He's just very violent. He's convinced that George W. Bush, the president, was bombing the hotels in Colorado Springs, but

Yeah, he would be forced to undergo shock therapy, the electric shock therapy, which he hated. He said, I'm not having that shit. I'm going to call the Air Force Academy and have them bomb this place. That shit messes with my bones. He had to receive shock therapy once a week, to which he told a medical worker, you're a bitch. You'll be fired if you mess with me and my attorney. I'm suing you for 50 billion trillion million dollars. You are the whores of Babylon. My arm broke last night, but I healed it.

That same month, he kicked a hospital worker breaking her rib. And after continuous treatment, remember Peter used to be the most rebellious of the siblings? Now he just repeats the mantra, I cooperate fully, I cooperate fully, which is what they had them say before the shock treatments.

It's just devastating. Mark is the only hockey brother, if you will, that does not get diagnosed with schizophrenia. He was a chess protege growing up and he was just the one constantly trying to break up fights. He was the closest with the three brothers, the hockey brothers, and a part of him feels like he has to grieve them. He feels like his brothers are alive, but it feels like they fell off the face of the earth.

Like they almost died in a sense. Yeah, because I'm sure like the bond, the connection is no longer there. And he just felt very alone. Now it is uncovered that many of the Galvan brothers had been allegedly assayed by the priest, Father Freudy. No. The one that kickstarted all of it. Some researchers believe that perhaps it was a genetic component as well as

Now, I will say schizophrenia is not caused directly by sexual abuse, but it is caused by environmental triggers. And some researchers believe this could have been the environmental trigger for a few of the brothers. Is that confirmed about the priest? It's pretty much confirmed. So Donald had started talking about it. And I will say a lot of people did not believe Donald because he's schizophrenic. Which one is Donald? The oldest. But he would say this when he was very lucid. He's very aware, right? And even when he was going through his...

periods of psychosis his story never wavered even when therapists asked him about it his story with father freudy was always the same and then in addition to that there is another boy in town that father freudy was close to his family he stated that he was abused but none of the other brothers a few of the other ones jim likely was essayed as well they also shared the same story yes yeah

So it seemed that father Freud was abusing at least one or two of the brothers and two of the other brothers. So at least two were abused by father Freud and two other brothers stated that they were abused by one of the brothers. They did not name the brother, but we can kind of assume that it was likely Jim.

Mimi was devastated and pissed the mom. I mean, she knew now that Father Freudy had likely targeted her family. She said he knew it was a big family of boys. So it's likely that he cozied up to Mimi and said whatever Mimi wanted to get close to these boys.

A lot of the siblings who did not get diagnosed with schizophrenia, they state that they live with a lot of guilt because there's still no definitive reason because you can't say it's this essay because the girls were also essayed. An essay is not a cause of schizophrenia. Yeah. There might be some correlation. It might be considered an environmental trigger, but it's not the direct cause. I do want to say also the HBO documentary makes it seem like the essay of the

to the younger siblings was taking place in the house. I don't know about the brothers. They did not expand, but the sisters stated it always happened at Jim's house. And the HBO documentary makes it seem like the parents were okay with it. They were just letting it happen. But that's not true. When Lindsay, the youngest, eventually told the parents, they cut Jim out of their lives. Well, the dad did. The mom, she never wanted Jim around the other kids, but she tried to get him psychiatric help when he needed it.

So there's just no definitive reason on why Six did not get schizophrenia. And Margaret once wrote in her diary, my brothers were going crazy and I was swimming at the country club. My brothers are still going crazy and I'm still swimming at the country club. Oh, she's the one that's living with the wealthy family? Yeah.

She just feels a lot of guilt because there's no reason, there's no answer. And she finds it very hard to be around her brothers. She wants to help, but she said, it's like pouring a glass of water with no bottom in it. You can't ever fill it up. It's just so futile to try and help them. It's not like they don't want to get better, but they just never get better.

As far as Lindsay, she has chosen to be the new caretaker for most of her brothers. They're all much older now, 40s and 50s. She's even started taking care of Mimi in her last days before the mom. Wait, Lindsay, the youngest, is the caretaker of all the brothers? Yes.

Yeah. So Margaret, the other sister, does not really partake in family matters. She said that she needs that to heal. And the author writes that they just process the grief very differently. Margaret takes that grief and she internalizes it so much that she can't be around her family and heal at the same time. Where it seems like Lindsay takes that grief and she's got a bit more of like that fighter spirit.

She feels a lot of guilt and obligation and she does it by helping her family now. She took care of Don, the dad, before he passed. She took care of Mimi, the mom, before she passed. And she now has children of her own, which one of them is actually studying under a researcher who studied the family, Dr. Friedman, to learn more about schizophrenia. So Lindsay's daughter is now working with the researcher that had studied the family.

So she's also very intelligent. And Lindsay has stopped blaming her mother. She said, I really believe that my parents didn't get us as much help as we should have had, but they didn't know what that looked like. What would that help even look like? You know, this was at the point where psychiatrists didn't even know how to help people with schizophrenia.

Jim, the second oldest, the essay abuser, and Joe, the one that does not have anosognosia, the one that knew that he was hallucinating, and Peter, the one that had the electric shock therapies, they have passed from complications of the medications given to them with schizophrenia. Brian has passed away a while back, remember, because he murdered his girlfriend and then killed himself. So four of the six brothers are passed that have schizophrenia.

All the ones without schizophrenia are alive. Four of the ones with schizophrenia have passed. So there's only two brothers left with schizophrenia. Which is the oldest? Donald, yeah, and Matthew. What are they doing? They're just trying to live. And they like being around birds. And they still try to get the family together every now and then. They have the Galvin Family Trust, which we are supporting thanks to the partners of today's episodes. But it's just to help them have their best golden years.

Yeah. And so one of Lindsay's earliest memories of her oldest brother, Donald, is when she's maybe five years old. She remembers being in her bed late at night. Donald had just gotten back from the hospital and she could hear him in the hallway. And he just kept crying. I'm so scared. I don't know what's happening. I'm so scared. I don't know what's happening.

Lindsay states about her brothers with schizophrenia and those that suffer from it. She says, "Just because they have schizophrenia doesn't mean they don't have their own minds. Their mind's a little broken, but when they're lucid, they're lucid, and they want so badly to be normalized. They don't want their condition to be scarier. To me, schizophrenia is really tragic, and it's not their fault." In one personality test given by a psychiatrist, Donald, the oldest son, he was told to fill in the blanks.

So it would say, I feel, and then he fills in the blanks. It says, I feel tense. I wish too much. I secretly want to be happy when I'm alone. And that is the story of the Galvin siblings. It's just such a shame that the HBO documentary is making them seem like just really violent, evil people. I do think that obviously Jim is a bad person, but...

It's just the other brothers with schizophrenia. There are little bouts of violence that happened, but I think this is also at a time where schizophrenia treatment was nowhere near where it is today. And even today, it's not good. So it's just, I don't know. What are your thoughts on this case? Have you seen the doc? Have you read the book? What do you think? Let me know in the comments and please stay safe and I will see you in the next one.