Matthew Galvin walks on scene – a dark, empty area with stone pillars and cement floor – and takes a seat in a lone chair. An off-camera interviewer asks the paunchy gray-haired Galvin, sporting a long beard, green flight jacket and white baseball cap with aviator sunglasses perched on the bill, for his name.
“Paul McCartney,” he responds, his face deadpan, followed by an awkward silence. Pressed on his response, Galvin assures he’s serious, pulling a cassette tape from his pocket – The Beatles’ “Let It Be” – “to prove it.”
“Have you got schizophrenia?” the interviewer asks.
“They say that I have schizophrenia,” Galvin answers. “I’m not schizophrenic.”
As one of six brothers diagnosed with the mental disorder who gained the spotlight with the bestselling 2020 book “Hidden Valley Road,” Galvin’s answer is obviously wrong, as most viewers of the new Discovery docuseries “Six Schizophrenic Brothers” likely realized. But chances are they also viewed the answer, which was the same response the other two brothers interviewed for the series gave, as stubbornness or deception.
See related story: Galvin Family Matriarch Stands on the Side of Science
To her brothers, though, it’s the truth, said Lindsay Galvin Rauch.
Failure of the popular HBO docuseries to explain the condition preventing her brothers from recognizing their illness helps fuel misperceptions and adds to the stigma still surrounding mental illness today, said Rauch, the youngest of the prominent military family’s 12 children, who grew up in the picturesque outskirts of Colorado Springs.
Disorder steals insight needed to recognize illness
“Five of my six ill brothers have or had a condition called anosognosia, which is the inability to self-reflect,” said Rauch, who took over caring for her ill brothers per her mother’s dying wish in 2017. Only two of the six sons are still alive: Donald, the oldest born in 1945, in a nursing home in Pueblo; and Matthew, child No. 9, in a nursing home in Colorado Springs.
Peter Galvin (No. 10) died at 62, shortly after taking part in the filming of the docuseries.
“They don’t realize they are mentally ill, Robert Freedman, MD, of the Department of Psychiatry at the University of Colorado School of Medicine, one of the family’s longtime and most influential doctors, said of people with anosognosia. “And that’s not unusual for someone who has very a severe psychosis.”
Freedman’s work with the Galvin family and others resulted in the discovery of one of the first schizophrenia-related genes, including a groundbreaking finding that choline given in utero might protect a developing fetus’ brain from mental illness and other brain disorders. Choline is now recommended for all pregnant women.
Experts estimate that anosognosia, a common co-existing condition with major mental illnesses and other brain disorders, such as Alzheimer’s disease, affects at least half of schizophrenic patients.
The widespread fallout of anosognosia begins with failure to take their medications or see their doctors, Rauch said. “Why should they, if they ‘are not’ sick?” she said, recalling the constant battles between her mother and father, Mimi and Don Galvin, and her brothers to comply with treatment.
“I think not understanding anosognosia is tough for families in particular, because they just do not understand why their loved one will not get help,” said Rauch, whose mother and father often lost the medication battles with their grown sons, leading to a domino effect.
Symptoms common in young patients with untreated schizophrenia, generally diagnosed in their late teens or 20s, include confusion, delusions, bizarre behaviors, negative thoughts and audial and visual hallucinations, all things that often scare people – and provide good movie fodder.
Drive to entertain can fuel hurtful misconceptions
The Galvin family story grabbed national attention for its tragedy: a picture-perfect family led by successful parents who raised strong athletes, talented musicians and bright students plummeted into violence, murder and child sexual abuse as six boys fell, one by one, into a world of severe mental illness.
The docuseries, illustrated with powerful graphic effects – a shot of a child’s school photo slowly consumed by oozing blood; a picture-perfect family portrait exploding into flames – did not describe schizophrenia as accurately as Rauch would have liked.
“I think they missed the mark in sensationalizing it. There’s nothing sensational about major mental illness,” Rauch said. “It’s tragic.” And that need to entertain, along with the limited time factor of films, can often create hurtful misconceptions, Rauch said, pointing to violent blockbuster films, such as “Joker” and “Shutter Island.”
In both the book and “Six Schizophrenic Brothers,” Rauch’s sexual abuse by one of her ill brothers as a child and the sexual abuse of two of her oldest brothers by a priest were revealed to raise awareness of abuse and the issue of trauma’s role in triggering disease in a person with a genetic tendency.
Coming forward with her abuse was not to suggest that mental illness breeds such abuse, Rauch said.
“There is no correlation between major mental illness and sexual child abuse,” Rauch said. “The fact is, in the general U.S. population, one out of every four women and one of every 20 men report having been sexually abused as a child. So yes, it’s going to exist within families who have major mental illness, just as it’s going to exist in families that don’t.”
Shocking trauma creates effective headlines
“Families with this many severely ill people always look troubled,” Freedman said. But it’s important to remember that mental illness is a physiological disease that affects the body’s least-understood organ: the brain, he said.
“These boys have problems in their brains, and Mimi and Don were trying to do their best to make a family, and they had to cope with boys who are irrational and don’t know they are irrational,” Freedman said. “And it’s a struggle they put up with very bravely.”
Shocking moments make up the Galvin family story, including:
- Brian Galvin’s (No. 4) murder/suicide after moving to California and finding a girlfriend;
- Fights that erupted in the house with 10 boys ending in calls to police for help;
- And, in one of the first acts that launched the family’s journey with the disease, first-born Donald’s reporting to his mental health providers while away at college that he dismembered a dead cat in a bathtub.
Unfortunately, media, including the recent film documentary, often fail to explain how scared and distraught Donald was after the incident with the cat, begging his family to help him when he was sent home, and how lost the family was trying to deal with the traumas and a disease that was even less understood then than it is today.
“What we know,” Freedman said, “is that when people are severely psychotically ill, they can completely lose touch with reality, and they don’t understand the implications of their own reactions and actions. It’s part of the illness.”
“The film made it look like my family life was all violence, 24/7,” Rauch said. “That’s not true. There was a lot of joy. And categorizing people with major mental illness as being by nature violent is statistically incorrect.”
Rauch, who dedicated herself to mental health advocacy, providing speaking engagements and sitting on nonprofit boards, said she does it “so that other families will not live in shame; families should not be ashamed of having a member affected by major mental illness.”
While the documentary brings awareness to how hard the disease can be on families, Freedman said, it had some shortcomings. “I don’t think it brings awareness to the fact that in most cases it’s much more treatable,” he said, adding that the Galvin boys were at the most-severe end of the spectrum.
“And I wish it had called more attention to this particular family’s bravery with which they have made their sufferings public in order to help other people,” Freedman said.
‘We had great joy, tremendous joy’
The Galvin family grew up amid the beauty of Colorado and with parents with a true love of nature and the arts, going on family outings that included everything from skiing and hiking to ballet and opera.
“My parents were remarkable human beings who did everything they could to help my brothers and the siblings that were not affected. Every time one of my brothers became unwell, they went to the hospital. My parents did not tolerate my brothers being unwell in our home,” said Rauch, who has faced ruthless criticism of her parents on social media.
Rauch said she wishes there were fewer movies like “Joker” and more films like the award-winning “Rain Man,” where the writers took viewers through the entire spectrum of human emotion to get across an understanding of autism and savant syndrome and the ups and downs of mental illness.
“That piece is missing: showing people who suffer from major mental illnesses when they are well; when they are playing the guitar; when they’re funny. We had great joy; tremendous joy. Only through understanding true tragedy do you also have true joy.”
