The Best Minds blends memoir, biography, and social commentary in a way that reminded me of The Short and Tragic Life of Robert Peace. Like that book, The Best Minds traces the life of a man who overcomes adversity to achieve success at Yale before his demons inevitably come to claim him. Both books were written by friends of the protagonist, at least partly as a means of coming to terms with the tragedies.
Michael Lauder was a charismatic and brilliant young man who graduated summa cum laude from Yale in three years. Not long after college he suffered a psychotic break and was diagnosed with schizophrenia. Nonetheless, he completed Yale Law School and became an advocate for the mentally ill. Ron Howard's production company started developing a film based on his life, with the theme of removing the stigma from schizophrenia. But then Michael murdered his pregnant girlfriend.
While telling the story of his childhood friendship with Michael, Rosen subtly notes the cultural changes taking place in our understanding of mental illness. The Beats popularized the idea that madness is a reasonable response to the oppression of the wider culture; Michel Foucault presented mental illness as a construction of the powerful; Derrida and the deconstructionists used mental illness as a metaphor for all "texts"; the de-institutionalization movement promoted community care over hospitalization. Unfortunately, the idea that mental illness is controllable combined with the lack of a viable community care network lead to our current situation where people get hospitalized only for being (potentially) violent rather than for being sick.
I appreciated Rosen's well-rounded assessment of the difficulties in knowing the right things to do. He clearly believes we've strayed too far in honoring the rights of severely ill people (whose denial of any problem is a symptom), but he also recognizes that it may be impossible to tell when a person's delusions are truly disabling or dangerous.
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