Victoria Costello

Psychology and Health Author

Watch the BAY SUNDAY TV interview CBS-5 San Francisco
The links between teen pot use and psychosis...read more

A brother's suicide and the lies his family told ...read more

The road to an ancient Celtic Site and to my grandfather's ancestral home in Galway, part of the story I tell in A Lethal Inheritance

My science memoir in progress

October 21, 2009

Tags: Mental illness, recovery, memoir

Back from a research and exploratory trip to the UK and Ireland this June and July, with a new title and focus for my science memoir.

I got fabulous cooperation from geneticists and neuroscientists at Kings College, London's Institute of Psychiatry. In their work with schizophrenic kids, and I mean 9 to 12 year olds in London's African and Caribbean immigrant enclaves, I saw where the cutting edge in mental health research and treatment presently lays.

But the stars aligned after I reached Galway, the native home of my grandfather whose suspicius death in 1913 set me off on this "journey" to trace the roots and tentacles of madness spanning from my grandfather to my sons, his great grandsons.

With insights born of this trip I've reframed my question to this: how are tragedies and emotional traumas carried across generations and how can they be stopped and healed in the present?

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The New Stuff

A Lethal Inheritance, A Mother Uncovers the Science Behind Three Generations of Mental Illness
Every family has secrets; only some secrets are lethal. In A Lethal Inheritance, I recount how the mental unraveling of my 17 year old son Alex compels my look back into our family history for clues to his condition, eventually tying Alex’s descent into hallucinations and months of shoeless wandering on the streets of Los Angeles to his great grandfather’s suicide on a New York City railroad track in 1913. I use my journalism skills to search out and assemble the startling new neuroscience that explains how clusters of mental illness traverse families such as ours; findings that the clinicians I meet are using to identify and reverse early signs of inherited depression in patients as young as five and psychosis in nine to 12 year olds.