Recently, a piece of news has been making a lot of noise in the international melon circle:
Despite the overwhelming opposition of more than 90 percent of the Japanese population, Princess Mako, the eldest daughter of Crown Prince Fumihito, was very determined to marry.
Subsequently, another piece of news shocked the whole country of Japan: Princess Mako also suffered from "complex post-traumatic stress disorder" because of a long-term Internet storm.
From empress Michiko, who suffered from "aphasia" due to mental stress, to the current empress Masako, who has been recuperating for 18 years because of "adjustment disorder"... Three generations of women in the Japanese imperial family have not escaped the intrusion of mental illness, and it has become a hot topic for a while.
However, when it comes to the world's most famous "psychotic family", we still have to look to the "Calvin family" in the United States.
Don't you think it's strange? But this family is well-known in the international "schizophrenia" research community, so to speak, they have contributed special strength to human understanding of schizophrenia with tens of times more suffering than you can imagine.
In ashin's new book, Hidden Valley Road: The Despair and Hope of a Schizophrenic Family, the story of the family's downfall is recreated in detail, telling the story of scientists and doctors who have studied schizophrenia for decades.
The book swept through almost all the list of the best books of the year in the famous European and American media last year, and even the author of "A Beautiful Mind: A Biography of Nash" praised it.
This book tries to tell us that those who are unfortunate enough to suffer from such a hidden disease should not be monsters isolated and abandoned by society, but people who are suffering great misfortunes in urgent need of salvation.
Before we begin today's story, let's take a look at some information about the Calvin family.
His father, Dorne, was an officer at the U.S. Air Force Academy and had a Ph.D. in political science.
Dorne at a young age
Born into an upper-class family in Texas, Her mother, Mimi, not only went to college, but had been in close contact with celebrities from a young age, and her mother was a classmate of Howard Hughes, the prototype of "Iron Man", and the family had sold a house to the Hughes family.
Mimi as a young man
Dorn and Mimi met at the age of 13, fell in love at first sight, and after the outbreak of World War II, Dorne enlisted and was about to be sent to the Pacific Theater on the eve of their marriage.
On July 21, 1945, the couple's first child, Donald, was born.
After the war, Dorne's career flourished, during which time he wrote intelligence summaries for the President of the United States and was later transferred to the North American Air Defense Command as an information staff officer.
The Calvin family has changed the most: in the twenty years since their marriage, Mimi has had a total of 12 children, all of whom are boys except for the youngest two daughters, Margaret and Mary.
The Calvin family in 1961
(Mary and Margaret were not yet born at this time.)
The 12 children are all cute and have different personalities and hobbies, and in the context of the booming postwar American economy, except for a little more people, this family looks perfect.
But in fact, before the birth of the youngest Mary, an incomprehensible force in the family was already surging and would crush one family member after another.
One night when I was 17 years old, standing in front of the kitchen sink, the elder Donald smashed 10 plates at once. Before that, he had often found it difficult to control himself, and it was becoming more and more frequent.
Two years later, on September 11, 1964, Donald, a sophomore, walked into the school health center for the first time: he suffered a minor injury to the thumb of his left hand and was bitten by a cat.
Donald as a child
Later investigations revealed that the truth behind it was that he had tried to kill the cat in a slow and cruel way.
For some time afterward, he opened up to doctors, saying that he was afraid of being infected with an STD by his roommates because of his daily contact; that he had poured salt into a fish tank and tried to poison all the fish; that he had killed a professor; and that he had jumped into a campfire without fear, causing himself to be burned.
The doctor's final diagnosis was that Donald was suffering from schizophrenia.
Although his condition seemed to improve for a time with the help of doctors, and he even married a girl, the situation soon deteriorated again: he claimed to be a descendant of octopuses; he felt that the CIA was pursuing him; he once put a knife around his mother's neck; and he tried to kill his wife with cyanide and commit suicide.
In the decades that followed, Donald was tormented by this devastating ailment. He was placed in a psychiatric hospital for "confinement treatment" and was treated with electroconvulsiveness, and to this day he still needs to take a variety of antipsychotic drugs.
But for the Calvin family, what happened to Donald was just a prelude.
In the short decade that followed, Mary's 6 older brothers suffered from severe schizophrenia, and the entire family was dragged into a bottomless abyss.
Self-harm, murder, and many more unspeakable tragedies and sufferings befell the family, and it was this family storm that once overwhelmed Mary and planned to burn Donald alive, and Mary even changed her name to Lindsay Calvin in an attempt to distance herself from the family once and for all.
Lindsay Calvin
A New York Times article used words like "a greek tragic experience" to describe what happened to the Calvin family.
Why do so many people in this family suffer from schizophrenia? Beyond the limitations of the family, what is the cause of schizophrenia?
Is the mother of a sick child. At least an entire generation of psychiatrists, psychiatric therapists, and many humanists in related fields think so, and they have even coined a term specifically to describe the mother of a schizophrenic mother.
They believe that harsh and authoritarian mothers have a dangerous effect on the growth of their children, and that people with schizophrenia get sick because they are severely snubbed at an early age and their temperament is distorted.
At the same time, socio-culture is spreading and reinforcing this perception.
In 1960, Hitchcock's film Horror was released, which blamed the delusional murderer Norman Bates for his crime on his deceased mother.
Poster for the movie "Horror Story"
In such a big era, Mimi Calvin, and the mothers of thousands of other schizophrenics, became scapegoats and were saddled with unwarranted guilt.
Also bearing the blame is the psychiatrist Lynn Delisey.
In an academic lecture, Yale psychiatrist Theodore Liz openly declared that children of working women like Delisey are more likely to develop schizophrenia because of a lack of parenting, and that they should stay home and devote all their energy to accompanying and caring for them.
This lecture completely changed Delisey's life.
In the face of Liz's remarks, Delise stood up: "Where is the evidence?" I want to look at the data. But Leeds couldn't give evidence, he was just quoting Freud.
In the absence of experimental evidence, only rumors and prejudices, such a convincing statement is unacceptable to Delisi.
Lynn Delisi
After that, Delisey began to study the literature on schizophrenia, hoping to study schizophrenia in the future, especially the relationship between the disease and the nervous system.
By chance, Delisey heard about the Calvin family from an alliance of the mentally ill.
She immediately realized that the family was an excellent sample for studying schizophrenia. On the one hand, multiple family members are helpful in figuring out whether the disease is hereditary or not; on the other hand, children who are not sick are the perfect "control" to help sift out a large number of unrelated factors.
With her consent, she gave detailed conversations and assessments to family members and took blood samples from each person, hoping to find traces of schizophrenia in the family's genes.
For nearly three decades, she took DNA samples from this family (and other families with schizophrenia) and conducted genetic studies, believing that schizophrenia has a genetic component.
The Calvin family
However, due to technical limitations such as DNA sequencing and some accidental factors, these studies have not made very significant progress for a long time.
This stagnation was not broken until the Completion of the Human Genome Project, a technique known as genome-wide association analysis, emerged.
In 2016, using the technique, Delisey and her colleagues discovered that all of calvin's brothers with schizophrenia carried the same genetic mutation, which is located on a gene called SHANK2, which plays a very important role in the "communication" of neurons in the brain.
By this time, a full 30 years had passed since Delisey had heard about calvin's family.
While Delisey was studying the Calvin family, Robert Friedman, a psychiatrist at the University of Colorado, was also studying schizophrenia, trying to solve the mystery of schizophrenia by studying human brain waves.
Robert Friedman
Delisi shared the family's situation with him.
As for the cause of schizophrenia, Friedman believes that there is a problem with the brain's ability to process instant information, and that neurons in schizophrenia patients are too sensitive to some information, so that patients show corresponding symptoms.
He devised a simple experiment to test his conjecture by recording human brain waves.
Through his study of the Calvin family, Friedman found that the Calvin brothers, who suffered from schizophrenia, did indeed have the same electrical activity as he suspected, and that neurons were always out of a state of "high alertness."
Following this line, Friedman and colleagues focused their research on the Calvin family and eight other families with multiple schizophrenias, and in 1997 identified the first gene highly associated with schizophrenia.
In the nervous system, the protein encoded by this gene called CHRNA7 plays a very important role, and it is found in various neural activities such as cognitive function, sensory information processing, and memory, even if the "central molecule" of neural activity is used to describe it.
It is not surprising that a genetic problem can trigger schizophrenia.
In fact, this gene is not only associated with schizophrenia, but also with a range of mental and neurological disorders and diseases such as autism, bipolar disorder, ADHD, and Alzheimer's disease.
Although Delisey and Friedman's research has delighted the academic community, unlike those diseases caused by single-gene mutations, schizophrenia is difficult to explain by abnormalities in the two genes SHANK2 and CHRNA7 alone.
In fact, in a 2014 paper published in the top scientific journal Nature, researchers conducted genome-wide correlation analysis of the DNA of 36,989 patients and found a total of 108 gene loci that may be associated with schizophrenia.
At present, a relatively common view in the scientific community is that the sites found in such studies may be related to the occurrence of schizophrenia, but the contribution of each site is very weak, and many factors, including acquired environmental factors, need to be combined to cause schizophrenia.
To this day, with the development of technologies such as DNA sequencing and whole genome association analysis, the Calvin family, a family that has suffered great misfortune, is still contributing their special strength to human understanding of schizophrenia, and many studies on schizophrenia use their share of DNA information.
But many members of the family may not be able to wait for the day when these findings translate into clinical drugs and therapies that will save countless schizophrenics and families.
Dorne and Mimi Calvin
Dorn and Mimi Calvin have died in 2003 and 2017, and three of the 12 children have passed away.
Donald Calvin now lives in a local facility called Songjianyuan Nursing Home, where he receives medication and lives under the care of medical staff.
Lindsay, the sister who once planned to burn him alive, planned to change her name and surname and cut off the family, finally could not let go of her family affection, chose to reconcile with the family, and would come to visit her white-haired, still somewhat crazy brother.