. . Original title: Hidden Valley Road: Inside the Mind of an American Family

. . ISBN:?9787521735147

. . Content introduction. .

In the eyes of outsiders, the Calvin family in Colorado Springs, USA, is a perfect middle-class family: the husband Don is an enthusiastic and confident Air Force Academy officer, and the wife Mi Mi is a lady from an upper-class family in Texas, and they have 12 lovely children.

But beneath the brilliance of the show, a power surged that the couple couldn't understand. In just ten years, 6 of the 12 children suffered from severe schizophrenia, and the other 6 children were waiting in fear, waiting for themselves to be next, waiting for more pain and harm to come. For more than half a century, madness, humiliation and violence have never spared this family, and what hangs over this family is far more than self-mutilation and murder. Based on interviews with all living participants and a large amount of medical archives, author Robert Kolker tells the story of the whole process of schizophrenia devouring this family in a sympathetic and compassionate way.

While enduring endless suffering, this special family also brought a glimmer of hope to the search for the cause and treatment of schizophrenia. Using the story of the Calvin family as a context, Kolker combs through and intersperses the views and debates in the medical community on the causes of schizophrenia over the past century, the evolution of treatments for this disease, society's attitude towards schizophrenia patients and their Prejudice and discrimination from family members. From the disagreements and ruptures between Freud and Jung, to a whole generation of therapists blaming "schizophrenic mothers" for the cause of the disease, from theorists abandoning the concept of illness and insisting on subverting it, to medical researchers peeling back the cocoons to find out The biological causes of this disease are all introduced one by one in this book. "Hidden Valley Road" ultimately focuses on several medical researchers, telling the story of their unremitting efforts to unravel the mystery of schizophrenia over the past few decades, using this special family as a sample, and their discoveries. Twists and breaks in schizophrenia susceptibility genes.

. . About the author?. .

Robert Kolker

Best-selling author and investigative journalist, his in-depth reporting works have appeared in "Bloomberg Business Week", "Wired", "The New York Times Magazine", etc. Famous media. His investigative reporting won the Harry Frank Foundation's 2011 Outstanding Criminal Justice Reporting Award, and his work was nominated for a National Magazine Award.

Due to his background as an investigative journalist, Kolker's work excels at building suspense and touching readers with humanistic narratives. In 2020, his long-form report "Bad School Superintendent" was adapted into the movie "Bad Education" by HBO, an American premium TV and movie channel, and won dozens of awards and nominations. His non-fiction work "The Missing Girl: An Unsolved American Mystery" received unanimous praise from all walks of life after its publication, and was selected into Time magazine's "Best True Crime Books of All Time" list and " The New York Times' "100 Books of the Year" list, and was adapted into a movie of the same name by the famous streaming media Netflix in 2020.

. . Short review. .

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The best book I have read in the past six months, with a very skillful balance between narrative and popular science. You can fully feel the care of the author, translator and editor from the references and detailed annotations.

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This line of narrating family history is written in pov, but there are some problems with the timeline of some details, which makes me quite confused when reading. Too much childbearing is the original sin. Parents cannot give each child enough care. Healthy children may develop psychological problems when they grow up in this kind of family environment. Not to mention children with congenital genetic defects who do not receive attention and timely intervention. Life can only be a tragedy.

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"People are so much more than our genes. In a way, we are the product of all the people around us, the people we had to grow up with, the people we have grown up with. Later, the people we choose to live with can destroy a person, change a person, and repair a person. Unknowingly, it also defines who we are as a person. The people around us make us who we are."

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So after all these years, all you can do is wander around in that decadent garden, with your bones loose, His head felt soft, and he suddenly shouted some strange words that came out of the blue. If you don't get it right, the drugs are just killing your will. You tremble, imprisoned for life. As for the seeds planted in genes, we can only wait anxiously to see if they will "bloom" evilly. The haze of these generations has trapped us in endless anxiety.

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The research progress on schizophrenia is really too slow...eh

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Lindsay finally understands better Innate factors and acquired factors work together. In the past, her mother had always defended herself, insisting that schizophrenia was congenital.

From one aspect, Mimi is right. Life is fatal to a certain extent. There is no need to deny this. But Lindsay also understands that there is more to a person than just genes. To some extent, we are all products of all those around us, those we had to grow up with, those we later chose to live with. The relationship between people can destroy a person, change a person, and repair an individual. It also defines a person in ignorance. We are who we are because of the people around us.

Quoted from Part 3

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When reflecting on life, Margaret always thinks of her mother and wonders why she had so many children. Why did she protect the sick children at the expense of healthy children? Why did she send her two daughters to live with him on weekends even though she knew Jim was mentally unstable? Slowly, she worked hard to understand her mother from another perspective. She began to realize that Mi was incapable of witnessing the sexual assault happening under her nose, and that she had never even admitted that she had been sexually assaulted. Could this be the reason why Mimi gave birth to children one after another without any sense of propriety or restraint? Her mother continued to expand the family, in fact, just to escape from the past, she tried to build an ideal home, a home without flaws. For the first time in a long time, Margaret experienced the pain of co-existing with her mother. Margaret's condition is improving little by little. Except for her sister, she needs to stay away from other family members to completely heal the trauma.

Quoted from Part 2

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