Best Minds

Best Minds is a memoir about Michael Lauder, childhood friend of the author Jonathan Rosen, famous for overcoming schizophrenia and attending Yale Law School and infamous for murdering his pregnant girlfriend. It is also about mental illness and the way society perceived it in the late 20th century. When describing their joint childhoods, Rosen intersperses their hijinks with news stories of mentally ill criminals. When describing his time in graduate school getting a PhD in English, he notes the ways mental illness influenced the French post-structuralists. When describing Michael’s time in a New Rochelle group home, he deep dives the network (of idealistic psychiatrists) pushed community psychiatry as an alternative to mental hospitals. When Michael enters Yale Law School, Rosen describes the evolving ways the law has viewed mental illness.

The book is deeply critical of deinstitutionalization and a mental healthcare system that can only force Michael Lauder to be treated after a horrific act of violence, killing his girlfriend—nearly sawing off her head—but not before. Michael Lauder was passed between psychiatrists, psychologists, group homes, and institutions; many were concerned about his declining mental health. Yet none had the power to institutionalize him or force him to take antipsychotic medication. The abuses of mental asylums are well known but giving the mentally ill unlimited freedom when their disease prevents them from making rational decisions has not been a solution either.