Jonathan Rosen’s The Best Minds traces his Yale-bound friend Michael’s descent into schizophrenia, fueled by 1960s romanticization of madness and JFK’s asylum closures, which left severely ill patients abandoned. Michael’s murder of his fiancée after halting medication exposes how media—like A Beautiful Mind—and academia distorted his story for drama, while Freud’s psychoanalysis pathologized normal life. Rosen rejects Foucault’s social construct theory, arguing schizophrenia stems from organic brain disease, and critiques liberal policies like bussing as detached experiments. His memoir rejects postmodern detachment, framing intelligence as a hollow idol, and questions whether atheism itself may be a narrative divorced from reality. [Automatically generated summary]
Hey everyone, it's Andrew Clavin and this is this week's interview.
My guest today is Jonathan Rosen.
He's the author of a remarkable and remarkably good book called The Best Minds, A Story of Friendship, Madness, and the Tragedy of Good Intentions.
I read it on my device, so I don't have the actual copy of the book, but I have the cover in there.
This book is riveting.
It's a personal story, a memoir of a tragic friendship, but it's also a dramatic study, not just of one of the greatest policy blunders in American social history, but also the philosophy underlying it.
So it's not just a book of a big story.
It's also a very deep story.
Weirdly, that's not why I read the book.
I read it because my wife gave it to me because she said this author grew up in a suburb and a milieu exactly like the one you grew up in, except 10 years different.
So it was kind of almost like a social experiment reading this story about a guy growing up in my world except 10 years later.
So it was kind of like an episode of some TV show where you move through time.
Just fascinating.
I want to talk to him about all these things.
Jonathan, thank you so much for coming on.
Thanks for having me.
So to begin with, could you tell people as much of this story as you want to tell them to get them to read the book?
It really is a remarkable story and kind of unique if you can just explain it to them.
Sure.
Of course, it took me 10 years to write it, so I'll try to be shorter than that.
Shorter than that, yes, please.
The very short version is that my best friend from childhood, who lived on my very short street, who I met when I was 10, and who competed with me and I competed with him for everything, was very brilliant, graduated Yale in three years, then had a psychotic break.
And despite that, and despite a diagnosis of schizophrenia, had already applied to Yale Law School, was accepted, really embraced by a group of professors who became his mentors.
He couldn't get hired, but the Times did a big story about him because he decided to come out as what he called a flaming schizophrenic.
And the result of that profile of Michael was that Hollywood bought his story for a million and a half dollars.
A publisher bought the proposal for a memoir for a great deal of money as well.
And he became a kind of heroic figure, but then he stopped taking his medication and he killed his fiancé.
And it ended tragically.
And the reason why, I guess, it sounds as if I'm giving away the whole arc of the story, and I suppose I am, but the reason I don't mind is because the story really unfolds against the backdrop of that tragedy.
And although I knew what had happened, it felt almost like a murder mystery.
All these things about which I knew nothing, public policy, the mood of the culture in the 60s that produced attitudes that led to policies, all of these things kept building as I went back to understand how this had happened.
And one of the kind of tragic ironies that you hint at at the book, you don't quite say it, is the film, A Beautiful Mind, was sort of carted in to replace this man's story when this man's story became too tragic for Hollywood.
Yes, that's right.
Brad Pitt was going to play Michael in a movie that Ron Howard was going to direct the month, and they were about to start filming, and then he killed Carrie in June, and that month of 1998, and that month, Ron, Vanity Fair, excerpted a piece of A Beautiful Mind, and they bought that book instead.
The filmmaker, a very good filmmaker, who had written the screenplay, kept thinking he could salvage the film somehow and kept trying to rewrite the ending.
But there was no way that tragic ending would gratify the requirements of a Hollywood story.
Yeah, but it even sounded as if they stole the way they told the story of A Beautiful Mind from the original screenwriter of this story.
Well, the insight that the guy who wrote the screenplay, Chris Giralmo, had had was that movies, in a way, by making imaginary things look real, because they are real as far as the movie audience is concerned, are no different from perfectly believable hallucinations.
And they weren't going to tell the viewer what was real and what wasn't.
So it would only dawn on you as improbable and impossible things were happening that something was out of sync and you would be in the position of the person having a psychotic break.
And an aspect of that I think was retained in the film.
It doesn't mean that it was necessarily his origin, although there are magazine pieces devoted to the dispute.
So the story, and it's such a tragic and even shocking story of this young man who grows up and he's obviously just brilliant.
It's not that uncommon with schizophrenia, isn't it?
It seems to me I've heard a lot of stories of top students, number one in their class, really ahead of everyone else, who go into this nightmare world helplessly.
It's something that seems to strike highly intelligent people sometimes.
I think we're very aware of it when that happens.
And I'm not entirely sure whether or not that is in fact the case, because there are many people living ordinary lives who have psychotic breaks and who, in fact, battle back and live ordinary, heroic, but extraordinarily heroic lives.
Part of the problem or the challenge of the book is that there's so much romantic, there was such a romantic embrace of the idea of madness, especially in the 60s, when many of the policies that changed the laws that helped create the system that failed Michael when he most needed it, that they really elevated madness to a sort of a higher plane of being.
And I think we're accustomed to thinking that there's something connected even between creativity and mental illness.
Now, there may well be, but schizophrenia has what are also called negative symptoms, where it's very difficult to motivate yourself, to make sense of anything, to articulate anything.
Nobody looks at such a person and thinks, oh, to be gifted with that transcendent vision.
It's only when people are in a sort of manic state or in a state where they're in a hyper-associative mode.
And so it's actually part of the confusion from which I think we all suffer now is what we actually mean when we talk about mental illness and how we understand it and how we use it.
I was shocked and horrified by how useful it has proven over the years to people.
I don't mean those who have it.
I mean those who do not have it.
Expand on this a little bit because obviously the idea, you know, Shakespeare talks about the poet and the lover and the madman, that they're all connected.
But really, when we, I think it is centered on Michel Foucault, who basically declares that madness is just a social construct that the powerful use to exclude people.
Where did this come from?
I mean, how did how did and how did it catch on?
Why was it so useful to respond to what you were saying?
Why was that so useful?
Yeah, well, it's been useful for lots of reasons.
Yes, Michel Foucault looms large, and a kind of painful irony is that I was a grad student at Berkeley when Michael had his first psychotic break and when I went to visit him in the hospital.
And for some reason, you couldn't study literature without reading Foucault's Madness in Civilization, which sees mental illness as entirely a social construct devised by the state as a way of oppressing, alienating, and othering people who can then be locked away forever.
And, you know, while there are plenty of abuses, the idea that mental illness is non-existent except for its utility to an oppressive state is an extreme version of reality.
That's false.
So I spent 30 seconds visiting Michael, and I understood that he was not suffering from a social construction.
So in a weird way, so much of what dominated literary criticism at the time I was attempting to get a PhD in it was based on not just distortions of reality, but inversions of it.
And so that was only one of those things that long after the fact I began to realize was part of the whole structure that I had to kind of break apart.
But why is it so useful?
Well, for one thing, for Foucault's, he was at odds.
He was making war on the age of reason.
And the age of reason was the whole Enlightenment.
And the Enlightenment was the whole modern project.
And for him, what's the opposite of reason?
Well, it's unreason.
And so madness, in addition to being a negative label that can be given to anyone who doesn't conform, for him, it was really anyone who makes sense, anyone who is subject to the laws almost of nature, of empirical reality.
And it's an extraordinarily powerful tool because you can, once you're saying people are only identifying you as ill so they can destroy you, then there really can be no medicine.
And that's one reason.
I'll just quickly say one other thing, which is that I realized that long before that, Freud's idea of the psychopathology of everyday life meant that everyday life is a form of psychopathology.
He thought everyone was made mentally ill for the same reasons, whether you had schizophrenia or what he would call neurosis.
It was all childhood repression.
And so since everyone was made sick for the same reason, although he did not treat people with psychosis, he felt he could derive principles from people who were psychotic the way he derived principles from dreams.
But once you've defined everyday life as psychopathological, instead of being a psychiatrist and what was called an alienist, really, in a giant rural psychiatric hospital, you could treat ordinary people because they formerly, people formerly known as well were now ill.
And instead of living with patients who were incurable, the origins of whose illness were unknown, you could have an office like a dentist or a podiatrist.
You could have regular hours.
You could send your kid to private school.
And so a whole, and this is especially the American branch of psychiatry, which grew very powerful after the Second World War, was able to really install itself as the dominant mode of psychiatry.
So when people spoke of psychiatry, they really meant psychoanalysis, which wasn't subject to empirical testing, which was a kind of applied mythology, which was very appealing, of course, because stories are wonderful.
It's just the idea that they are the thing making you sick and they are the thing that will help you fall short when you're dealing with someone who has an organic brain disease, as Michael did.
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Why Care Disappeared00:04:34
You know, you mentioned the scene, one of my favorite scenes in the book when you first go in and visit your friend and you immediately see, it was kind of like watching the Wizard of Oz and having Dorothy step out of the black and white house of theory into the colorful world of reality.
And yet these theories had powerful political effects.
I mean, basically, the asylum system, which was broken, which was difficult, which did create snake pit-like environments, but did give people somewhere to go, was shut down by Kennedy, I believe it was, by John F. Kennedy, leaving these people with no care whatsoever.
Well, that's what was so painful.
And the way you put it is correct.
They had fallen into terrible state, but people didn't allow themselves to remember why they had been created in the 19th century.
And, you know, they were created in the 19th century by people like Dorothea Dix, who was a Protestant, religiously motivated reformer who saw people living on the street or locked in basements, chained to the wall, beaten because it was still believed, even in the 19th century, that people who were psychotic were somehow possessed.
And she went around and persuaded the governor of every state that no civilization worthy of the name could allow people to die on the street like that.
And her own father had been homeless, I think mentally ill, certainly alcoholic.
And these were real reforms.
The places that were built were light, they were airy.
It was called moral care because there were no cures.
And unfortunately, what began to happen is America changed.
They grew radically overcrowded.
People with dementia who didn't, people didn't used to live that long.
Suddenly, many older people were there, and they really were declining in a one-way direction.
And we had two world wars, which filled those places even more.
But it was the first, it was the most, it was the starkest illustration for me of how the impulse to tear something down rather than reform it can be so very destructive.
And Foucault was useful in my understanding this as well, because the villain in Madness and Civilization is the reforming psychiatrist of the 18th century in France who famously broke the chains from his prisoners.
Foucault sees that as an insidious liberalizing that allow that makes it harder to tear down.
Whereas simply declaring the whole place as an institution like the Bastille, leveling it and starting at year zero and building something called community mental health centers, the very name tells you that they were no longer built to care for people with severe mental illness.
They were built to care for everyone.
And so Kennedy set in motion what should have been a humane and was driven by humane motivations movement to replace what he called cold custodial care with the warm embrace of the community.
It's just that from the beginning, those community mental health centers avoided taking the sickest people.
And since there were legitimate definitions of illness that allowed you to care for anyone, especially because people thought, well, poverty causes mental illness and marginalization causes mental illness.
And so suddenly the war on poverty, which actually funded some of the first community mental health centers, could almost be seen as a war on mental illness.
An environmental definition of the causes of all mental illness was so ingrained that they thought, well, if we eliminate poverty, we'll eliminate mental illness.
And Kennedy himself spoke of a cure and a prevention.
There were no preventions and there were no cures.
But it was another lesson.
I mean, I'm sorry to keep talking.
I know I should pause because really it's a human story.
But the idea that you can abuse a mental health policy, a public health policy, by saying everyone needs treatment because by treating the well, you're preventing them from becoming severely ill is a justification for a gigantic program.
And in fact, it ignored the sickest people who we still ignore.
This is the reason there's so many people on the streets.
I believe it's the reason there's all these shootings.
I mean, almost everybody who commits one of these mass shootings has some kind of mental illness.
The book, again, is called The Best Minds, A Story of Friendship, Madness, and the Tragedy of Good Intentions.
The Stories We Live By00:15:13
One of the things that I was fascinated by, now, I'm not going to ask you about your politics.
It's not a political book, but in the acknowledgments are many people I know.
You worked with Seth Lipsky, who is an excellent publisher of a, I would say, moderately conservative newspaper.
Even so much of your life and mine have this weird intersection.
Even Jane Rosenman, who was your friend's editor, was one of my first editors too, a lovely woman.
This book, though, in some ways, dismantles the entire theoretical structure that underlies a lot of, let's call it the far left's proposals in the world.
It dismantles postmodernism.
It dismantles post-structuralism.
dismantles all these things by putting them next to reality and showing that reality is utterly different.
And yet the reviews you got are spectacular, wonderful reviews, and they're well-deserved.
Just to read a couple, if I've got one.
Yeah, there it is.
You know, the New York Times says brave and nuanced, the best mind is thoughtfully built, deeply sourced indictment of a society that prioritized profit.
Basically, these mainstream, or as I would call them, left-wing venues give you wonderful, glowing reviews.
And no one seems to notice that you have utterly dissected the theoretical underpinning of what they believe on their op-ed sections.
Did that strike you as strange, or was that something that you were not expecting?
How do you feel that came about?
You know, it's a very interesting question, of course.
And I think that part of the part of the challenge of the book, really, was to embody everything almost as if I were writing a novel.
And I think that that is something to do with how the book has been received.
And it was much harder in a way.
My editor said to me, you know, you should write it like a novel.
That doesn't mean invent anything.
I didn't invent anything.
But it meant that I had to imagine my way back.
And I begin in childhood for a reason, so that I wasn't looking back at something that seemed like a tragic inevitability, which is what one of Michael's professors called it after the fact.
But that it was simply the being inside of each of those moments.
And that made it unfold more as if it were actually happening.
And when you live inside of a story, the folly is both not easier to excuse, but easier to understand.
And most people don't say, God, these conditions are repulsive and horrible.
They think, look at these photographs in Life magazine of psychiatric patients.
They look just like the photographs of liberated concentration camp victims that Life magazine ran a month before.
And so the impulse is to sort of work these things out.
And I think the other reason, partly, is that all the things we really do value, like autonomy and free choice, I value them very much, are challenged by certain forms of very severe illness.
And so it is, you're in a very dark and complex area, if you know what I mean.
And so I'm not really sure why that's an answer to your question, except that, how can I say this?
So many people were trying to honor Michael's autonomy that they discounted his illness.
And I think a lot of people, including me, could identify with that desire.
When the New York Times wrote a profile of Michael, they allowed him entirely to dictate the language and the terms of his illness and the story.
So that when he said it was a terrible insult and a hateful stereotype when potential employers asked him if he ever became violent, nobody wondered what it might mean if you indeed had paranoid schizophrenia and weren't medicated to think as he did that his parents were Nazi replicas of his real parents.
I knew when I read the story, well, he'd been hospitalized the first time because he was patrolling the house with a kitchen knife.
And so suddenly it's not about saying people with mental illness are violent.
It's about saying if you don't think reality is real, and then you can actually quite rationally act on that misperception and do something dreadful.
And the consequences of that are easy to understand when you're inside of an unfolding story.
And so when the, and also because people I interviewed were part of the reckoning.
One of Michael's law professors said to me at the end, and this is the professors knew he couldn't do the work.
They understood he was brilliant.
They identified with him, and yet they knew he could not do the work.
And so they were falsifying the very nature of what the project, of his being there was.
One of them said to me, if I'd spent more time, less time thinking what a great place Yale Law School was for taking Michael, and more time wondering what was going on inside of his mind, I might have behaved differently.
And another professor said to me, a very eminent professor of constitutional law, said, if, don't blame Hollywood.
He said, if Hollywood is to blame, we all are.
He said, Yale Law School gave the story to the Times.
The Times gave the story to Yale, to Hollywood.
And what he meant by that is Hollywood is in the business of manufacturing happy endings.
But what were we doing thinking that by altering the representation of reality, we would really change reality?
What was a newspaper doing thinking that it was honoring him by eliding the very thing that made it such a difficult and intractable illness when that elision actually created a false reality that made the tragedy all the more likely?
And so, you know, I think my hope is that the answer to your question is simply that it's more like a play, you know, I mean, in that way, that, and all are punished, you know, as the guy says at the end of Romeo and Juliet.
The way I actually think about it, to be honest, is at the end of King Lear, you know, he gives away his kingdom, but he still wants to be king, which is kind of what it's like to hope everyone else will keep treating you like you're a pretend reality.
But at the end, the sanest thing he says is the saddest because he's holding his daughter and she's dead.
He says, I know when one is dead and when one lives and she is dead as earth.
A second later, he's mad again.
Oh, I think she's breathing.
Bring me a feather.
And then he dies.
But we know what it means when someone is not in his right mind.
For all we talk about multiple narratives and endless subjectivities, we do know.
And people knew.
And confronting the consequences of the lie is part of, I think, the force of the story, which I myself felt because I participated in it.
So, yeah, I did.
I had to dismantle my own world that produced me, by the way, for myself, which was excruciating.
You know, I was just, that's the next thing I was going to mention because the fact that you grew up in New Rochelle or grew up in Greatneck.
And one of the things that struck me is that there used to be a comedy show on television, a comedy series called The Dick Van Dyke Show, which was written by some people who had worked with my father, who was in show business.
He was a DJ.
And it was based on someone who lived in my neighborhood, but it was set in New Rochelle because they felt basically that New Rochelle and Greatneck could be interchanged culturally.
And that was the feeling that I got as I was reading your story, that, oh, this could have been the world that I grew up in, except you were 10 years younger than I am.
And the thing that struck me is the major difference is that theoretical constructs that have now become embedded in the consciousness of the clericy of the intellectual classes were far stronger in the world that you lived in than in the world that I lived in.
And one of the examples is bussing the idea that you would bring black kids from poor neighborhoods into richer neighborhoods and somehow that was just going to solve the decades and centuries of segregation and bigotry.
You're very incredibly honest and open about your own dealings with anxiety and with your own problems.
You tell a story in which you are brutally set on by a group of black kids who just attack you for no reason whatsoever.
Do you feel that you, I mean, it's part of the whole idea of the book in some ways, whether you meant it or not, to show people living in a world that's being governed by theories that have nothing to do with the reality they're living in.
Do you feel that your own life has been marked by these theories in the way that it seemed that it was to me, or is that just something that I was imposing on the narrative?
I'm sure they've been marked by those theories.
And in a sense, the challenge of the book was that I was telling a tragic story, but I also had to untell a lot of stories and a lot of assumptions.
And Michael and I both wanted to be writers.
Stories are wonderful.
My mother was a writer.
The idea, if you could say something well, it meant you had somehow triumphed over chaos.
And the sentence, it's not like the victors wrote history.
Writing history meant you were the victor, because that's how powerful stories were.
That's a very seductive idea.
But when it is applied beyond the realm of art or literature, something goes terribly wrong.
And I think that what you're, yes, that were many theories.
And I think one of them was also, it's late in the program to bring this up, but a liberal experiment often without God behind the principles that you thought you were living by.
And so even among Michael's professors, his very madness, I can't help think, sometimes excited them as if it were proximity to a kind of faith they had excluded from their lives and would never have accepted in a more conventional form.
And so he seemed, people continually described him as a rabbi, a mystic, and as if the aura of otherness was automatically taken for something transcendent.
And I guess I just, I feel like stories are great, but when they were used by Freud, for example, to say that there was a Greek myth making you ill and that a narrative exposition of your childhood would release it was disastrous because ultimately it didn't draw you closer.
You know, I love a quote from Yeats when he says, the chief end of art, art's not the chief end of life, but an accident that happens in the course of your search for reality.
And so the stories themselves aren't the end in themselves.
We all thought when Michael sold his book that by telling the story of his troubles, it meant they were over.
And everyone seemed to believe that.
But it's not an illness that you conquer in that way, although the dean of the law schools quoted in the Times as saying, he's a young man who's conquered his illness.
The myth, the story of the hero's journey, which I love and is deeply seductive.
And Joseph Campbell lived in Rochelle till his house burned down, is not always the one that operates.
And it's important in the sense that all minds are not beautiful, and do they have to be for us to credit them?
And some of that is also bound up with the obsession with intelligence in the world that I grew up in, as if it was going to inoculate you against reality.
And I think some of that is a heritage of a world that saw the measurable mind taking the place of the soul.
And so people's worth wasn't an inalienable thing that they were received by being born, being made by God, but it was something that you could quantify.
And all those horrible Supreme Court tests in the 20, you know, cases in the 20s when they sterilized Carrie Buck, three generations of imbeciles.
We were scrambling to succeed, but it wasn't even like being smart was going to be an instrument that would lead to something.
It was the goal in itself, the way a story was, the goal in itself.
And I hope I wasn't trying to expound on anything overt.
I backed into everything.
I knew nothing about anything, only even the feeling of this childhood story that kept affecting me.
But I do keep finding that it exposed the rawest nerves, let's say, and the greatest fallacies.
You know, we're going to have to end here, but you've raised actually an amazing idea that, you know, one of the things I couldn't help noticing is that my memoir of my growing up in this Jewish neighborhood is the memoir of a conversion to Christianity.
You have continued in the Jewish tradition working for a Jewish pay.
You married a rabbi, which that may be taking Judaism a little too far, but still, you know, I think you have introduced the idea that atheism itself may be a theory, a story, and a theory that doesn't fit with reality.
And maybe that that is the ultimate tragedy that we're acting in a false narrative in a world that just simply does not work that way.
But it's a paradoxical point simply because we have to use our reason to come to this seemingly irrational conclusion.
I didn't mean to cut you off, especially because I think you were going to mention the name of my book again.
Yes.
It is The Best Minds, A Story of Friendship, Madness, and the Tragedy of Good Intentions.
Not just a deep read, but also a good read, a very tragic but riveting story.
Jonathan, thanks so much for coming on.
I would love to talk to you again.
I hope you'll come back.
Thank you.
Thank you very much.
This was great.
Really interesting interview, really interesting book, The Best Minds, A Story of Friendship, Madness, and the Tragedy of Good Intentions.