“Six Schizophrenic Brothers” wants to be sincere, but fails

Given the proliferation of true crime and serial killer docushows nowadays, their style has become a bit ingrained: the dramatic opening title sequence, the cliffhanger crime hints, the stock footage and talking heads, the suspenseful musical cues.

Given their subject matter, these sorts of techniques work well for elevating shock and giving the story an air of deception and intrigue. But when you try to take a situation like a family falling victim to schizophrenia and try to push that square peg of truth into the round hole of true crime documentary, the subject matter and style soundly butt heads.

Created by Lee Phillips, the four-part series investigates the poor Galvin family, a mother, father and 12 children. But gradually, six of the sons develop schizophrenia, and with most of their diagnoses occurring during the 1970s, medicine and society are not ready to help them in a very meaningful way. Trauma, abuse, suicide and even murder follow the Galvins all the way up to the present day as family bonds are stretched and in some cases even broken.

The narrative is interesting as the remaining Galvin children speak honestly about growing up in difficult circumstances and how their lives are impacted even now. The true hero of the story, Mary, is actually not given enough screentime, her trauma and perseverance commendable especially as her siblings fail to look after the most afflicted of them.

But the entire docuseries is framed as if it were a true crime narrative, an eyeball-rolling miscarriage of perspective. Yes, the brothers behave abhorrently and crime occurs, but lumping these poor, sick men stylistically with the like of John Wayne Gacy, Ted Bundy and Ed Gein feels in incredibly poor taste. There’s dramatic cliffhanger scenes of sons dying, splashy SFX cracks across family photographs even reenactments of demonic worship and withered murder. But the story ultimately feels sad, not horrific: a sad mother and father buried under the stress of taking care of their kids, sad siblings who just want to lead normal lives but are constantly burdened with wild abuse at home, sad sons with such promising lives ahead of them cut down due to mental illness.

The story is not of crime, but of mental illness. Framing it as anything otherwise feels exploitative. The series should have been focused on the mentally ill, how the Galvin family tried to cope, the history of schizophrenia and the attempts to figure out why it affected the Galvins so much. Some of this is hinted at throughout the series, but it feels in service to, rather than the main fulcrum, of a larger plot.

I hope the Galvins don’t feel taken advantage of and can actually get some measure of peace from the journey of filming and sharing. But for the viewer, the slanted perspective does a disservice to the treatment of mental illness.