A Riveting Saga of Unthinkable Trauma, Survival, Coping, and Healing

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Hidden Valley Road by Robert Kolker, is a riveting, engrossing account of one extraordinary family’s struggle with schizophrenia, and how they’ve lived with it for more than half a century. It’s about attitudes toward schizophrenia, evolving over decades in the medical and psychological sciences. It’s a story about superheroes in science labs seeking a schizophrenic Rosetta Stone, tirelessly investigating genetic clues from tissue and blood samples, building vast data repositories for future generations of scientists to tap. It’s about unthinkable trauma, survival, coping, and healing.


Imagine you are the mother of a college student, a handsome gifted athlete, a golden boy, and you wake up one day to learn he’s hallucinating, and may be a danger to himself and others. You discover, after his diagnosis as a schizophrenic, that you are the cause of his illness. According to psychiatric professionals, you are a “schizophrenogenic mother.” While processing the fear, horror, and shame of your child’s condition in a culture where mental illness lacks a social lexicon, you face terror for their future, and a flush of guilt when fingers of multiple degreed professionals point to you as the pariah who caused it all. You now see your child’s promising life savagely hijacked by a ticking biological time bomb lurking deep inside his body two decades before exploding.


Now imagine that after the excruciating experience of your first child’s affliction and subsequent nightmare years of living in the trenches with him, you are raising 11 additional children, and over an extended period of time, like a bad dream of giant dominoes falling against each other in slow motion, five more of your children fall prey to the same disorder.


Once you start this book, it’s hard to stop. Superbly researched, it unfolds like a medical mystery pulling you into the drama, the heartbreak, and the courage to persevere,
proving truth is stranger than fiction, and no less readable.

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