Robert Kolker

One of the consequences of surviving schizophrenia for fifty years is that sooner or later, the cure becomes as damaging as the disease.

Schizophrenia is not about multiple personalities. It is about walling oneself off from consciousness, first slowly and then all at once, until you are no longer accessing anything that others accept as real.

Donald told the doctor that for years he had not been himself at all, but rather a mirror of what other people wanted him to be.

But that concession only raised a more puzzling question. “In the strictest sense, it is not schizophrenia that is inherited,” he said. “It is clear that not everybody who harbors the genes develops schizophrenia.” Schizophrenia was definitely genetic, but not always passed down. And so they all were still left wondering: How could this be?
“The genes that are implicated,” Rosenthal said, “produce an effect whose nature we have not yet been able to fathom.”

At the same time that he insisted on having a house filled with children, he also treasured a life of the mind, of solitude and order. And yet no matter how tranquil and orderly she made their home, he always found a reason to stay away.

Or as one of the ventricle study coauthors, a psychiatrist at St. Elizabeths named E. Fuller Torrey, put it: “If bad parenting caused any of these diseases, we’d all be in big, big trouble.”

As an undergraduate, Freedman had been drawn to the idea that the human mind could synthesize its own, entirely separate reality. “It just seemed to me if there was ever a disease that was uniquely human and philosophical, it was having schizophrenia,” he said.

What if the problem with schizophrenia patients wasn’t that they lacked the ability to respond to so much stimuli, but that they lacked the ability not to? What if their brains weren’t overloaded, but lacked inhibition—forced to reckon with everything that was coming their way, every second of every day?

If Michael was frustrated, Lindsay, back at boarding school, was surprised to find her resentment easing, her rage subsiding. Like Margaret, she had felt marginalized at her exclusive private school—but Lindsay stopped thinking that the solution ought to be to deny her family’s existence. Instead, she discovered a certain kinship with her sick brothers. They were ostracized by society. Sometimes she felt that way, too.

In 1984, just before meeting the Galvins, he had studied the gating abilities of schizophrenia patients and members of their immediate families, and he found that half of the immediate family members had the same gating deficits as the family members diagnosed with schizophrenia. Here was another sign that he was on the right track—evidence that sensory gating was hereditary.