Original subtitles

Mother and Father came to me specifically and said, "Please, please."

There was no one else that could've handled it.

I mean, they said, please do not do not desert them.

And what I have seen is that everyone else in my family,

has deserted them.

Maybe that was too big of a chore.

No, it's absolutely not.

I never thought I would be

doing this by myself without you guys.

I never in a million years thought

that my siblings would not be by my side.

Where schizophrenia is diagnosed

between age 17 and 24...

It's a tragic story,

to be part of the Galvin family

is to be part of a tragedy.

This mutation was present in every person in that family

who had schizophrenia.

They might hear voices, they can command them to do things.

Throwing a cat into a bonfire,

dismembered a dog in the bathtub.

This family gave us hope that there might be a chance to cure schizophrenia.

He shot her first, and then he shot himself.

Well, it started to fall apart.

My brothers were falling ill.

They were losing their minds.

What happened in our family is very rare.

Six siblings out of 12 to have schizophrenia...

Half the family.

That's rare.

You don't see that.

I mean, if you look at the chronology, it's unbelievable.

Donald, you know, I was two when Donald became ill.

Then Jim went to the hospital.

And then Peter went to the hospital.

And then Matthew went to the hospital.

And then Joseph.

In the middle of all that,

Brian committed suicide

and murdered his girlfriend.

And it's only been over the course of a lifetime that you can

look back on it and go...

Oh, my...

Holy crap!

How did this happen?

Peter Eugene Galvin.

Son of Dr. D.W. Galvin.

We were all healed.

Gave something the doctors had to heal us with.

They tell us what to do with medications.

We take them and shut up.

I don't.

I don't need to be looked after.

I can look after myself.

Peter was so noncompliant.

He just would not abide

by what the doctors were asking him to do.

He just would not do it.

He was in and out of the hospital.

I have no idea how many times.

Hundreds, I would guess.

Get stabilized, go home.

My parents would try to get him

established in an apartment and he would blow it

within a few months.

And this was just this repetitive revolving door

with Peter, in and out, and in and out, and in and out.

Stopping taking the medications

because of the way they make you feel.

And then we would get a call from the police.

No, I haven't.

Police reports indicate

that he was charged with two counts of assault

in the second degree against a police officer.

No.

On 5/18/91, a theft of cigarettes had occurred from a 7-Eleven store.

Someone chased Mr. Galvin down and got the cigarettes back.

Mr. Galvin then sat in front of the store and refused to leave.

When the police approached him, he began swinging his fists

and fighting, injuring both officers.

He punched both in the face.

During his trip to corrections, he was yelling and incoherent.

Nope.

I stay clean

and I'm an E.M.T

and I save lives.

I had to go get Peter's court records and say, look,

he has a severe mental illness.

I really had to convince the courts that he did.

It wasn't like they were just willing to take the piles

of hospitalizations.

I mean, we had to go to great efforts

within the Boulder County judicial system

to convince them that he had severe mental illness.

Peter is a very interesting person

and he's fun to talk to.

He was so chronically cheerful,

but he could be a very difficult patient.

He can be violent.

He can be agitated.

He can be very manic.

He can be grandiose.

I'm Saint Peter.

The holy Saint who was crucified on the cross.

Irish setters right in my hands,

I died on the cross

with Jesus.

And I saved his life, too.

It's upsetting because you love Peter

and then when he turns on you,

it feels like a betrayal.

But we eventually, and particularly with the support of his family,

we were able to get Peter in a good place and get him stabilized.

My mom said, "Oh, Mary, don't take this on. Do not take this on."

And I said, I have to try or I won't know.

Mary took Peter in and tried to do

whatever was right for him.

She could help him

get clothes and find jobs and whatever.

I saw real progress.

I mean, really.

Peter held down a job in Boulder.

He lived in his own apartment,

and I don't know how many years that went on.

Found but he was pretty high functioning.

But he was taking medication and going to therapy.

Combined.

His doctors talked to me.

At one point, and said that he's extremely brittle,

unresponsive to the medications.

And that they would eventually stop working.

And that they felt that it was time

for Peter to go back to Pueblo,

where somebody with his severity

of a brain disorder would get better treatment.

So basically the doctors were telling me to give up

on my attempt to save him.

Yeah.

I didn't like it.

I was the main patient at the hospital.

And I did what they said to.

Pete was, he was very unstable.

He was in and out of the hospital.

We would get him out.

He would destabilize.

He would come back in, and I don't know

how many admissions we had, where he came back in.

And then it was like, well, "Okay, let's do the shock therapy now."

The state of Colorado requires Peter to have ECT.

Because when he doesn't have it,

he is a danger to himself and perhaps others.

There's always been something to electroshock therapy.

And it's been scary and it has a bad reputation.

The way we do it now is much more judicious.

We use anesthesia.

I think if you can come up with a treatment,

and it is electroshock therapy,

and that's what works,

then that's what you stick with.

I get...

shock treatments right in the temples.

They get-- They knocked me out.

With their beds

on the shock-treatment tables.

I feel much better.

Like a brand-new man that takes care of his doctors.

I sing them songs,

and I do everything that I can think of for them

because they're fine doctors.

In Peter's case, it really helped significantly

with his, um, manic, manic type of symptoms that he had.

The biggest issues that I have dealt with

with electroshock therapy is memory.

And when you talk to Peter...

Uh, I always describe Peter's talking in a loop.

He will-- He'll have a story.

He'll have a loop that he'll talk to you about.

Maybe someday we'll understand better

exactly how electroshock therapy actually works,

and we can use something that's much less of invasive

and doesn't require the same drawbacks.

There-- There needs to be some progress

in the way they treat the mentally ill.

I keep hearing from Peter.

And one of the most painful things

is the fact that they do these shock treatments on him.

I'm just thinking about what he's been through

and the pain he's been through.

I can't even imagine.

So much tragedy in some ways

has been brought to the family because of this disease.

And to me, losing my brothers

closest to me in age to this disease

has had a big impact on my life.

It's-- It's painful.

What my family has gone through, it's horrific.

But there is hope.

Okay.

Hi. How are you doing?

Okay.

And when we did our our first main study,

uh, I had about 350 families, something like that.

And the Galvin's was the largest.

At that first visit, there were at least

four of them that were there.

And what I remember is them marching around

through the kitchen saying things that didn't make sense.

They were essentially a gold mine

because the larger the family

and the more the number of affected people in the family,

the more likely we can find something

that's significantly related to the illness.

Bob Freedman was a colleague of mine.

He was doing genetic research that was related.

So I introduced him to the Galvin family.

There were a lot of Galvins.

Mimi, from the start, was a very impressive woman.

Don Jr. and all his brothers were sitting on a bench

for myself and my research team to begin to interview,

to draw blood for genetic sampling.

Better research on mental illness was Mimi's hope.

The family had clearly been devastated by schizophrenia.

They wanted to do some genetic testing on the family.

I was ready to help.

I never thought of the overall big picture

until the testing came along.

I remember giving the blood sample.

Advances are being made in genetic treatments all the time.

Maybe someday they'll find a cure

for these mental health issues.

And maybe that could help my brothers as well.

That whole schizophrenia thing

was my mother's idea of notion

that I'm mentally ill.

I might have been a little schizophrenic

because I was with a lot of people who were schizophrenic,

but it doesn't make me a schizophrenic.

Every human being has a genetic blueprint called DNA.

Researchers hope to map the genes found on the chromosomes.

It could be a fundamental advance towards a cure

for genetically-linked illnesses

such as schizophrenia, cancer and heart disease.

In the early 1990s,

scientists all over the world

hit on the idea that you could make a map

of the entire genome in human beings.

There was a great sense of competitiveness.

Each of us wanted to be the first to find the gene that causes schizophrenia.

Once we knew what "the gene" was,

we would be able to target a medication towards that gene.

The magic bullet.

So we went gene hunting and identified a gene.

And the name of the gene was CHRNA7.

So we sequenced the whole genome in the Galvin family.

They had one mutation that really stood out,

that was present in all affected siblings.

It was a gene that was expressed in the brain

in what's called the SHANK2 gene,

and was important for brain development

so that we knew we were on the right track.

SHANK2 is a very important gene.

It's not a complete determinant of schizophrenia.

But multiple discoveries like that

changed our view of what we were looking at

in schizophrenia in general.

For example, having an abusive childhood,

where you've had a lot of trauma,

that trauma is doing something

to the genetic material in the brain,

and maybe causing genes to be expressed in a different way.

Church officials have reportedly sent the names of 49 additional priests

accused of child sexual abuse to prosecutors,

bringing the total number of priests

named by the archdiocese so far to 87.

NBC's Monica Novotny has the story.

When the story about the Catholic Church

and the priests abusing young boys broke across the world,

my mother was watching television with Donald.

Priests during the 1980s or even before were knowingly assigned to active ministry

after there had been credible allegations of child abuse.

And he told my mother

that he had been sexually abused by Father Freudenstein.

Hm?

My mother, of course, believed him

because he was lucid and on his medicine.

And just because they have schizophrenia

doesn't mean they just make stuff like that up.

That would not be something, um,

Don would hallucinate or make up.

The priests? Well, there are a lot of them.

A lot of priests over the years.

Most of them like smoking cigars, as I recall,

that stunk up the house.

Um, but they would come over a lot.

There was one... One priest.

His name was Freudenstein.

They called him Father Freudenstein.

I was not particularly fond of him.

Something about his personality,

the way he carried himself. Maybe it was his demeanor.

And I kind of distanced myself from him.

Don, Jim, and Brian, all would go on these excursions.

I remember, Father Freudenstein was picking him up in a station wagon,

saying goodbye to him,

and then, they'd come home three days later.

We didn't think any of these priests

would be doing anything illicit or wrong.

What I heard from my mother and my brothers

is that he became sexually abusive towards my oldest brother, Don.

And then, suddenly, it was like...

"Well, that must have happened to Jim, too."

Because what else would have caused him

to sexually abuse me?

So,

we came to that conclusion without firsthand knowledge.

But it just fits.

It just fits, you know.

It makes everything make sense.

There are those in psychiatry who say that a traumatic experience

can trigger mental illness, schizophrenia.

While, maybe it's genetic,

perhaps it's a traumatic event that triggers it.

One of the things we know about schizophrenia

is that just having the genes by themselves is not enough.

There have to be other factors.

How much is nature? How much is nurture?

How much is the way you were treated in your life

versus how much did you come into life with

as a biological background?

Of course, most human diseases,

including cancer, are nature and nurture.

Donald played football, and wrestled and was very athletic.

So, the chances of him having head injury were pretty big.

He was sexually abused.

And so, there was trauma there.

And then, Jim,

he played sports, too.

I think he was probably sexually abused as well.

For Brian,

maybe psychedelic drugs.

Yeah, maybe LSD,

and flashbacks might have been a trigger for him.

For Joe, he was in Chicago at the time that it happened. So...

Maybe just working long hours at the airlines,

just being exhausted, physically and emotionally, and alone...

Maybe loneliness could be a trigger.

Matt, perhaps his crash into the hockey goal...

Been a lot of hospitalization from trauma happening to my physical body.

I was lucky to live through it after being in

a hematoma, blood clot hemorrhage brain operation.

For Peter, witnessing my father's first stroke

could have been that kind of traumatic event

that might have triggered the schizophrenia.

He once stated to me, "You know, I had a pretty good life

until this mental illness came along and ruined it."

Christ, Christ...

Christ...

I was trying so hard to normalize mental illness around my children,

and didn't...

understand the consequences of exposing them to so much mental illness.

Our intention was, um...

to try to expose the kids to the ill boys

so that they would get to know them.

I think it's really important to normalize mental illness. Um...

But I also think there is a lot...

that I wish I hadn't known until I was a little bit older.

If you're not mentally equipped to handle this information,

you're not normalizing it, you're inflicting more trauma,

whether you mean to or not.

I mean, no one's family is normal,

but not many people have six schizophrenic uncles.

Well, it has been a minute.

The day I wake up, on my 26th birthday

will be a very happy day for me.

Because that's, like, when scientists think

the male brain finishes developing.

I will feel like I've... gotten past it,

and then, I have no percent chance now.

Zero percent chance of developing schizophrenia.

I mean, none.

I think the fear started to set in once I was 12, 13, 14,

um, because, you know, that the...

I was not doing things that other kids did, like I didn't play football.

I didn't play hockey because, you know, fear of head injury

eventually turning into schizophrenia.

When I hear a sound in the house,

I immediately look to see and figure out what it is.

I have that moment of, like, anxiety,

of like, "Did I just hear that?"

Like, "Was that me or was that actually happening around me?"

And you know, for someone who fears that way,

you run a very fine line.

Because I think you can convince yourself

that you're hearing things that you're not,

that you can tell yourself that you're hearing stuff,

and eventually, you will.

I think my brother was really affected

by the idea of possibly becoming schizophrenic.

He started to smoke weed for the first time.

And he...

would tell me what was going on,

um, for the most part,

and be like, "Oh, I'm here,"

or "This happened."

I started to get worried and telling my parents,

you know, what was going on.

And then, he stopped telling me things.

And that was when I was...

got really nervous about what was happening.

We were struggling that summer.

We can't find him,

He's MIA. Won't answer his phone, won't answer his texts.

Um...

- Yeah. That was a tough summer. - Mm-hmm.

Yeah, we were struggling with what to do.

I was self-destructive,

to the point where it was going to affect my life in a serious way.

I started abusing drugs with my prescribed ADHD medication.

I was abusing that.

My mind was that, if he keeps going down this path,

he is going to potentially develop major mental illness

- by his drug use. - Yeah, that's true.

His behaviors reminded me of things

that I suspected Peter had been up to when he was young.

- The two of them just reminded me of each other. - Oh, yeah.

We had been researching, uh, programs,

what we might do, where we might take him,

who might be able to help us,

But Jack just...

wouldn't fully engage in the process.

My parents really did not want to send him away.

Once that was decided, um...

my parents, like, made a plan.

They were gonna take him and his friend to the skate park,

and then, they were gonna ask him to stay in the car

so they could talk to him for a minute.

And instead of that, they were just gonna drive away.

And before they left, I put the child locks on the doors

so that, once they started driving away,

he couldn't get out of the car.

He tried to, like, kick out the windows and open the doors on the highway.

And I feel bad now because, like, how traumatic was that for him, you know?

I can't imagine just, like, being sent away like that.

At the start,

this was perhaps the worst experience of my life,

having to take him down there and leave him there,

turn him over to someone else.

It was horrible.

It was horribly traumatic and awful.

Absolutely, I think.

But, then, by the time we got to graduation, it was the exact opposite.

What we met In Jack when he was done,

was... It was unbelievable.

I did think, at the time,

maybe there's a preventative component to an early intervention.

But I thought that, "Boy, what if Peter had had this opportunity?"

Would he have ended up as bad as he is now?

♪ Our father who art in heaven,♪

♪ Hallowed be Thy name...♪

Growing up in this type of situation,

it felt like things were always happening.

You know, it was... This is going on with this brother.

And, you know, my mom being the person that takes care of them,

it's not like we were just hearing about it.

You know, we were there.

Madness has defined my life.

I've lived too many days worried about it.

♪ But they'll never ask for me ♪

I've done all the therapy.

But I'm still afraid of schizophrenia.

Since she passed,

the family's kind of broken apart in more ways than one.

You know, John's so far away.

He's been kind of separate from the family for a long time.

You know, Michael and I just never shared a common bond of any sort

to spend time together.

And for me, you know,

I've got my own three children and my three grandchildren.

And that's my life now.

My mother was... She was the center.

And when she passed away,

the family has kind of fragmented...

more.

We're not together so much,

especially my sister, Margaret.

She's still hurting...

from everything that's gone on in the family,

and she wants to...

just get away from it.

And...

that's her way of dealing with it.

I ran away from it in my own way.

I'm just not a professional mental health caregiver.

I don't think it's my calling.

My parents were very clear in expressing to all of us.

Not just me, but to my other siblings as well.

"Please don't desert them."

That was very clearly my parents' message,

to all of us, not just me.

"Please don't desert them."

I can't find anything positive and being mentally ill the way they are.

And it's such a loss of what could have been.

I'm sure that they have different perspectives on that.

Try the 14th corner.

Peter and Matthew seem like they have some joy in their lives.

I used to love to play the pool, and I'll win it again.

They're not-- They're not totally... I can still communicate with them.

I don't call Donald...

just because I don't think there's a communication between us.

I don't think that he would have anything to say

that I could understand.

Mary seems to think that we should try

to have a relationship with my brothers,

you know, and try to be there for them, and...

I haven't been able to do that.

Hi, Mary.

God, you look great.

Hi, Pete. Oh, you... I just don't enjoy seeing them.

I mean... There's not much point to it.

I'm just trying to look and see what you need. Yeah, there's more garbage.

Oh, they think I'm being my mother. I'm a martyr.

I mean, we always called my mother a martyr.

- You're doing what your mom did, though. - Mm-hmm.

I mean, in terms of making sure that they're taken care of.

Yeah. Just let me follow you.

I personally believe that only through helping others

do you really find true joy in life.

Kind of wearing off. Have you seen Michael?

And I think you're missing out by not helping those closest to you when they need it,

and they need it.

Yeah.

I didn't envision our family

having become divided the way it has in the last five years.

I thought we all had enough love and care for each other

that everybody would step up and participate.

I obviously have a lot of anger around us.

Still, I'm trying...

I'm really trying to understand their perspective.

Mother and father came to me specifically, and said,

"Please, please..."

There was no one else that could have handled it.

I mean, they said, "Please do not... do not desert them,"

and what I've seen

is that everyone else in my family

has deserted them.

Maybe that was too big of a chore for 'em.

No, it's absolutely not.

I never thought I would be

doing this by myself without you guys.

I never, in a million years,

thought that my siblings

would not be by my side through this.

You cannot demean. You cannot put down.

You cannot admonish your brothers and sisters for that.

This is not your place. You're not the judge. I can be angry.

You can be angry, but don't be angry at your brothers and sisters.

I am angry at my brother and sisters.

Because you think everybody can do what you can. That's wrong.

We're not professionally equipped to handle it.

- She is the only one who... When I'm looking at her, - I don't see it.

She's the only one in this family...

Because I'm willing to be vulnerable.

Vulnerability is power. She has done it.

She has done it.

I mean, she's taking care of what's needed to be taken care of,

and she will continue to do that.

She looks after the kids.

She looks after Don. She looks after...

Matthew. - ...Matt, Peter.

I couldn't do that.

I wish I could have helped Mary more. But...

as far as me making arrangements for my brothers

and seeing to it that they have what they need,

what those boys need, she does it.

She does it.

Do you think Mary's taken on too much?

Uh, only she can answer that.

I hope that she knows she can always call me and lean on my shoulder.

From a distance, I can talk and visit.

Um, and support her the best I can.

The survivor guilt is unbelievable.

Like, why am I not just bringing them into my home?

You know, like my mother chose to. Um...

I don't know how she did it.

I think the pain, the emotional pain

that somebody suffers, from having schizophrenia,

is maybe worse than the disease itself.

Didn't I get into a lot of trouble in Boulder?

So, it's really debilitating,

not only to the person...

There's a picture. There it is. There's a picture.

...but to the family, too.

We can work on a puzzle. I like puzzles.

Hi, handsome.

- You're cold. - Yeah, I know.

- Yeah. - Cold hands. Warm heart.

Just because they are schizophrenic

doesn't mean they don't have their own mind.

I mean, 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.

You know, to me, schizophrenia is...

really tragic.

And it's not their fault.