A noose, a gas switch, a funeral home. Donald was fixating on death, on ending his life. This disconnection he’d always felt wasn’t going away at college—it was getting worse, manifesting itself in new and frightening ways.
While under observation, Donald’s free fall continued. He told one doctor that he had a notion that he had murdered a professor. Days later, he shared another fantasy—this one about killing another person at a football game. He also talked more about his past, including a new admission that the doctors found especially troubling. The hospital notes were brief: 2 suicide attempts at age 12.
Exactly what those attempts amounted to, no one could say. There was no telling if Donald had ever told anyone else about them—or, assuming they did happen, that his parents had ever known. But the doctor treating Donald had heard enough. Especially after learning what had really happened with the cat.
“He killed a cat slowly and painfully,” the doctor wrote in his notes. “The cat had been living with him for two days, and apparently brought in another cat (probably male) that made the place smelly. The cat scratched him. Doesn’t know why he killed the cat nor why he tormented. Got emotionally upset as he discussed the behavior.”
Donald was more than baffled as he was relating this. He was frightened.
“This boy represents some risk to himself and possibly to others,” the doctor wrote. “Possible schizophrenic reaction.”
* * *
—
IN THE CAR, Donald muttered about God and Marilee and some people from the CIA who were looking for him. Back home, in the kitchen, Donald exploded in a panic—shrieking “Get down! They are shooting at us!” Everyone around him jerked around to see if what he was saying was true.
It was the end of 1966, just as Don had started his new job with the Federation of Rocky Mountain States—the new life for them all, about to begin. The doctor at Colorado State said it would be impossible for Donald to continue in college until he received more evaluation and treatment. Don and Mimi drove to Fort Collins at once to check on their son. When they found him, Donald was washing his hair with beer. They decided to take him home. But now that he was there, they did not have the slightest idea what to do with him.
Donald needed help. But what help was available to him? Assuming he’d be willing to go, a private facility like Chestnut Lodge in Maryland or the Menninger Clinic in Topeka—or, closer to home in Colorado Springs, a hospital called Cedar Springs—was too expensive an option for the Galvins. The public hospitals, meanwhile, were a terrifying prospect, places where the peace was kept using neuroleptic drugs and restraints—the stuff of Samuel Fuller’s nightmarish film Shock Corridor, released in 1963. In 1967, the state of Massachusetts made headlines by litigating to stop the distribution of documentarian Frederick Wiseman’s film Titicut Follies, an exposé of the inhuman conditions at that state’s Bridgewater State Hospital, filled with images of inmates stripped naked, force-fed, and bullied by the people who were supposed to be keeping them safe. In Colorado, the very large state mental hospital in Pueblo, about an hour’s drive from Hidden Valley Road, was best known for treating schizophrenia with insulin shock therapy and a powerful drug called Thorazine. Don and Mimi would have to exhaust virtually every other option on the table before agreeing to send Donald to a place like that. A state hospital like Pueblo was for hopeless cases, not healthy young men like their son.
There was an alternative to the brutal public institutions, but that alternative also was hardly attractive to Mimi. The psychoanalytic approach advocated by Frieda Fromm-Reichmann and others held sway at the Colorado Psychiatric Hospital in Denver, part of the university system. This hospital was steeped in the teaching of schizophrenia as a psychosocial disorder, focusing on the “psychodynamic” origins of mental illness—the schizophrenogenic mother. Mimi and Don may not have known the particulars of this approach—how a psychoanalyst would want to know exactly how Donald was raised, and if there was something they could have done differently—but they understood the threshold they would be crossing by sending their son to a mental hospital of any kind.
Again, they thought, were things really so far gone? After all, it seemed clear that 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. The American Psychiatric Association had published the first edition of the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders, or DSM, fourteen years earlier. The definition of schizophrenia was about three pages long, and included the subtypes originally proposed by Eugen Bleuler—hebephrenic, catatonic, paranoid, and simple schizophrenia—and added five more: schizoaffective, childhood, residual, chronic undifferentiated, and acute undifferentiated. The definition was roundly panned: In 1956, one prominent psychiatrist, Ivan Bennett, called the DSM’s definition of schizophrenia “a wastebasket diagnostic classification,” preferring instead to focus on what drugs might be helpful in treating the symptoms. Since then, the DSM has changed its description of schizophrenia with each successive edition, often tailoring it to the prevailing style of treatment. The second edition of the DSM, published in 1968, added “acute schizophrenia,” characterized by hallucinations and delusions and nothing else. But there would continue to be no consensus on what schizophrenia actually was. A single illness, or a syndrome? Inherited, or acquired through trauma? Don and Mimi understood that for people in their son’s shoes, whether you even had schizophrenia or not often depended on the priorities of the institution where you were being examined.
There was no talk of prevention. There was very little discussion of a cure. But one thing seemed true: If they admitted Donald to anything resembling a mental hospital, the only certainties were shame and disgrace, and the end of Donald’s college education, and the tainting of Don’s career, and a stain on the family’s position in the community, and finally the end of the chance for their other eleven children to have respectable, normal lives.
Which was why, for Mimi and Don, the most sensible—or at least the most realistic—decision was to hope, somehow, that things would get better on their own. The more they thought about it, the more they decided to be optimistic. Why couldn’t he move on from Marilee, find his footing again, move out of that fruit cellar and into the dorms, and get better? They needed to believe that he could. And so they searched for someone they knew and trusted to treat Donald—who could help him through this crisis, get him back to college, put him back on track.
Their obvious first stop, they thought, was back to the hospital at the Air Force Academy, where the Galvin family was well known, and where they hoped to be able to help guide the process to a good outcome. This time, Donald was examined by Major Lawrence Smith, a physician who knew the Galvins well. He had been at the Academy since 1960, overlapping with Don for three years, and he had followed young Donald’s football career.