The best quotes by the author we have brought to you
“And so I was crushed,” Mimi said. “Because I thought I was such a good mother. I baked a cake and a pie every night. Or at least had Jell-O with whipped cream.” (Hidden Valley Road Quotes)
Robert Kolker
Hidden Valley Road
“As she walked through the door of the house at Hidden Valley Road, she couldn’t help but recognize a perfect sample. This could be the most mentally ill family in America.”
Robert Kolker
Hidden Valley Road
“But Lindsay understood now how we are more than just our genes. We are, in some way, a product of the people who surround us—the people we’re forced to grow up with, and the people we choose to be with later.”
Robert Kolker
Hidden Valley Road
“Diagnosing schizophrenia was – and in many ways remains – more of an art than a science. None of the symptoms, taken by themselves, were specifically characteristic of the illness, and so doctors could only diagnose it by excluding other possibilities.”
Robert Kolker
Hidden Valley Road
“Each passing year brings more evidence that psychosis exists on a spectrum.”
Robert Kolker
Hidden Valley Road
“Embrace the cards you are dealt or it will eat you alive. If you go to the heart of your own matter, you will find only by loving and helping do you have peace from your own trauma.”
Robert Kolker
Hidden Valley Road
“For a family, schizophrenia is, primarily, a felt experience, as if the foundation of the family is permanently tilted in the direction of the sick family member. Even if just one child has schizophrenia, everything about the internal logic of that family changes.”
Robert Kolker
Hidden Valley Road
“For all of us, adolescence is a crucial period of housecleaning for brains that had been hard at work for more than a decade of extreme expansion and renovation. This demanding phase for the developing brain explains, for instance, why teenagers need more sleep, or why, after adolescence, it’s harder for most people to learn a language or recover from brain injuries.”
Robert Kolker
Hidden Valley Road
“If you live long enough, everything comes back to haunt you.”
Robert Kolker
Hidden Valley Road
“If you’ve left town, like John, you can hold on to your truth. To come home is to run the risk of being contradicted. Even the people who leave, like John, can feel almost rejected.” (Hidden Valley Road Quotes)
Robert Kolker
Hidden Valley Road
“It’s only a red flag when it starts to create conflict in your life, but otherwise it’s a truly healthy coping mechanism for you to organize your sock drawer.”
Robert Kolker
Hidden Valley Road
“It’s the way of scientific progress – if you aren’t among the rare few who are immortalized, you are merely part of the great procession of research, a player in a larger drama.”
Robert Kolker
Hidden Valley Road
“Life is merely the permanent roots your family knots around you.”
Robert Kolker
Hidden Valley Road
“One of the consequences of surviving schizophrenia for fifty years is that sooner or later, the cure becomes as damaging as the disease.”
Robert Kolker
Hidden Valley Road
“Our culture looks at diseases as problems to solve. We imagine every ailment to be like polio: hopelessly incurable, until a miracle drug comes along that can wipe it off the face of the earth. That model, of course, only works some of the time.”
Robert Kolker
Hidden Valley Road
“Our relationships can destroy us, but they can change us, too, and restore us, and without us ever seeing it happen, they define us. We are human because the people around us make us human.”
Robert Kolker
Hidden Valley Road
“Practically every drug prescribed for psychosis, from Donald’s time until now, has been a variation on Thorazine or clozapine. Thorazine and its successors became known as “typical” neuroleptic drugs, while clozapine and its heirs were “atypical,” the Pepsi to Thorazine’s Coke.”
Robert Kolker
Hidden Valley Road
“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.”
Robert Kolker
Hidden Valley Road
“Schizophrenia’s onset seemed a little like a bowling ball that veers ever so slightly to the left or right the second it leaves the bowler’s hand and strikes the wood on the lane. For a few feet, the ball seems to be doing well, heading straight. Only closer to the pins does it become clear that the ball has been gradually going off course – so far off-center that it hits just one pin on the side, or falls into the gutter.”
Robert Kolker
Hidden Valley Road
“The kids who don’t get the attention are the ones who often need it most.”
Robert Kolker
Hidden Valley Road
“The leadership of biological psychiatry seemed settled on the idea that mentally ill people weren’t people at all.”
Robert Kolker
Hidden Valley Road
“The National Institute of Mental Health spends only $4.3 million on fetal prevention research, all of it for studies in mice, from its yearly $1.4 billion budget,” Freedman noted recently. “Yet half of young school shooters have symptoms of developing schizophrenia.”
Robert Kolker
Hidden Valley Road
“The normal brain learns from what it perceives. It doesn’t have to start from zero if it hears the same thing twice. People with schizophrenia, however, couldn’t manage that. In test after test, conducted at Freedman’s lab in Denver, their brains showed two waves of equal size for the two clicks. It was as if they had to react all over again to the second click—even though they had just heard the same click a fraction of a second earlier.”
Robert Kolker
Hidden Valley Road
“Then he started seeing things. First Donald and Jim, then Brian and Peter, now Matt and Joe—six of the twelve of them, lost.” (Hidden Valley Road Quotes)
Robert Kolker
Hidden Valley Road
“There is no way of knowing how life might have been different for the Galvin brothers if the culture of mental illness had been less rigid, less inclined to cut people off from mainstream society, more proactive about intervening when warning signs first appeared. But there is, perhaps, reason to hope that for people like the Galvins born fifty years from now, things could be different, even transformed.”
Robert Kolker
Hidden Valley Road
“They have been warehoused where nobody can really deal with them,” he said. Here was the real reason, he thought, why big pharma could afford to be fickle about finding new drugs for schizophrenia—why decades come and go without anyone even finding new drug targets. These patients, he realized, can’t advocate for themselves.”
Robert Kolker
Hidden Valley Road
“They taught me to embrace the cards you are dealt or it will eat you alive. If you go to the heart of your own matter, you will find only by loving and helping do you have peace from your own trauma.” This, in her view, was the major difference between her and her sister.”
Robert Kolker
Hidden Valley Road
“To be a member of the Galvin family is to never stop tripping on land mines of family history, buried in odd places, stashed away out of shame.”
Robert Kolker
Hidden Valley Road
“We all have an amazing ability to shape our own reality, regardless of the facts. We can live our entire lives in a bubble and be quite comfortable. And there can be other realities that we refuse to acknowledge, but are every bit as real as our own.”
Robert Kolker
Hidden Valley Road
“We are human because the people around us make us human.”
Robert Kolker
Hidden Valley Road
“We are more than just our genes. We are, in some way, a product of the people who surround us—the people we’re forced to grow up with, and the people we choose to be with later.”
Robert Kolker
Hidden Valley Road
“We are, in some way, a product of the people who surround us – the people we’re forced to grow up with, and the people we choose to be with later. Our relationships can destroy us, but they can change us, too, and restore us, and without us ever seeing it happen, they define us.”
Robert Kolker
Hidden Valley Road
“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?”
Robert Kolker
Hidden Valley Road
“When asked about his marital status, he said, “I divorced the United States.”
Robert Kolker
Hidden Valley Road
“When you don’t find a sense of love and belonging where you are, you go searching for it somewhere else.”
Robert Kolker
Hidden Valley Road
“Without the inhibitory interneurons, we would end up processing the same information all over again—wasting time and effort, grinding our gears, becoming disoriented and, perhaps, anxious and paranoid and even delusional.”
Robert Kolker
Hidden Valley Road
“Yet half of young school shooters have symptoms of developing schizophrenia.”
Robert Kolker
Hidden Valley Road
“You are the only variable in the situation you have control over.”
Robert Kolker
Hidden Valley Road
