Stopping Schizophrenia Before It Starts
For the people considered too far gone, was recovery ever possible? The latest research — and innovative strategies — are offering hope.
One night in the early 1960s, when he was about 17, a high school football star and all-state wrestler named Donald Galvin smashed 10 dishes to pieces — all at once, while standing in front of the kitchen sink.
His father wrote it off. So did his mother. Donald was a teenager, moody. It was the ’60s. Other kids were doing worse.
But Donald knew there was something wrong. He’d known for a while. He knew that being a star on the football field and having a friendship with another person were two very different things. Sometimes, he would say later, he thought of people as kind of like IBM cards he sorted through his own computer for information he could use. He knew that made him unusual. Increasingly often, he seemed completely oblivious — a stranger to his own motivations and actions. Something was happening, and he couldn’t figure out what. More than anything else, he was afraid.
Almost a decade later, in June 1970, a few weeks shy of his 25th birthday, Donald Galvin was arrested by police after trying to harm not just himself but his young wife. He was held in a city jail…
