Lecture Summary: Jonathan Rosen's 'The Best Minds'

hello everyone my name is Saint Rosenbaum I'm the creative director of The Forum on life culture and Society at turo University and welcome to the folks conversation series tonight's guest my old friend Jonathan Rosen and his newest book which has been receiving Raves well-deserved we're gonna get into it it's a fascinating Story the best Minds The Story of Friendship Madness and the tragedy of good intentions now let me tell you everyone this is here it is this is your summer read this is your summer book and I'll tell you why it's because this book is many things it's many kinds of books and you'll get you'll be able to read a number of different things in one book all summer for instance it's about this tragic murder that took place 25 years ago that what did grip the nation but perhaps has been forgotten about Michael Lauder who is a Yale law school graduate who had suffered from schizophrenia and mental illness uh a movie was being made about his his life by Ron Howard uh and and uh he had a book deal which he had not yet fulfilled and it was all about how he had overcome his against impossible odds his illness and then this horrible thing happened he had a delusion and he uh thought that his his fiancee pregnant with his child was a a robot or a wind-up doll and he stabbed her to death uh and uh and he is still institutionalized uh 25 years later guess what that movie never got made because they had a horrible Hollywood ending and you know what movie did get made instead by the same director uh A Beautiful Mind which is an incredible irony that we'll talk about uh the movie was originally the Michael Lauder film not the Beautiful Mind was at First supposed to be uh portrayed Michael was going to be portrayed by uh Leonardo DiCaprio then the project went over to Brad Pitt and that movie never got made you never got a chance to see that but instead you saw a beautiful mind this story took place 25 years ago and let me tell you why Jonathan wrote about this Michael Lauder who committed this crime was Jonathan rosen's best childhood friend from when he was 10 years old they grew up together they went to school together every day they were uh almost brotherly in affection they were competitors they both went to Yale College uh and they both wanted to be a novelists fiction writers they had this incredible commonality and Jonathan uh explores this story 25 years later and includes himself as part of the story because Jonathan Otherside from Michael Waters own Brothers no one knew Michael Lauder better than Jonathan Rosen but the book has more to it than that it's about childhood friendships and brotherly competition and the loyalties of the tight-knit community whether it's the law school or psychoanalyst psychiatrist that lived in New Rochelle where they grew up um it is about mental illness of course it's also about the public policy about what to do with mental illness because many people know who live in New York it's either school shootings or Subway murders we're seeing more and time and time again it's committed uh by people that have mental illnesses brain diseases and we just haven't quite figured out uh where to what to do about this and so this is not just about Mental Illness but about public policy surrounding uh mental illness guess what the book is also a thriller it's written in a style that it really even though you know what's going to happen it's written in a style that you're just waiting for and he you're in the hands of a master because Jonathan is himself a recognized award-winning novelist and in so many ways this book is also about him it's a literary Memoir by a professional Storyteller telling you his story in connection with this tragic story that took place 25 years ago from his best childhood friend as I said uh Jonathan is a recognized novelist in fact I know this I reviewed his first novel eats Apple for the Wall Street Journal uh he also wrote a joy comes in the morning uh he's also written non-fiction books the talmud in the internet was also award-winning he's written for the New York Times a New Yorker the Atlantic uh please welcome my friend Jonathan Rosen Jonathan welcome thank you so much Dane and thank you for that unoverwhelming introduction well it's well deserved my friend this book is really quite quite a remarkable achievement and I don't say this all the time um uh if you want to buy the book it's the link is in the chat box and by the end of this hour I assure you you'll probably want to buy the book uh if you're watching us live on YouTube welcome we always love having you make sure you come to folks.org to sign up for our email list you'll get more uh information about upcoming events and if you have a question for Jonathan you can leave it in the Q a box hopefully we'll get some time for that so Jonathan it does feel to me when you read this book it's so extremely well written so uh emotionally complex so psychologically complex that there is a bit of unfinished business here for you that there's a reason it's not just the anniversary of the killing of Michael's fiance Carrie Costello but that you yourself felt that you needed to go back and think about your childhood and think about your connection to Michael Lauder is there any truth to that that there was a compulsion for you to get to the story that you would never touched upon before by the way Jonathan I've known you a long time I never heard you talk about this well I I wouldn't say that I was avoiding talking about it but I was avoiding writing about it I spent many years not writing about it before I spent many years writing it um and it was never really even clear to me what I was avoiding and what I would be writing if I were to be writing and in a sense the book begins 50 years ago when I moved to New Rochelle and I realized that in order to write it I didn't want to write it backwards Michael was on the cover of the New York Post under a massive headline that said psycho if I had only seen that cover I would not have thought at all about him or understood him if I had only seen the article the New York Times published three years before that when he was jauntily leaning against a column at Yale law school and it described him as by all accounts a genius I wouldn't have understood him either but frankly those are the two polls of public discourse in a way and that's why you went backwards and I went backwards I also didn't want it to seem only like a tragic inevitability because many choices were made along the way interestingly painfully one of his mentors and he had extraordinary mentors at Yale Law School a couple of them had clerked for judges who had changed the laws regarding institutionalization when they were young so in the 50s and 60s so for them what happened was a reckoning as well and when I spoke to them I felt them Reckoning with this story but just to be clear so the audience sees what you're saying that these law professors worked on cases that dealt with mental illness and what we do with the mentally ill and the Reckoning that you're talking about is that many people ended up being taken out of psychiatric institutions and back into society and the outcome for that isn't just the tragic death of Kerry Costello but as I said earlier things that we're seeing in the broader culture of mass shootings school shootings Subway murders that the Reckoning is that we're coming to terms with some of those decisions is that what you're saying some of the actual policy decisions but before there were policy decisions there was an almost romantic understanding about what mental illness was and it was very painful and moving to discover that several of those professors despite the fact that they had as clerks written decisions you know for judges that really changed the laws but they didn't know anything about severe mental illness for them it was an extension of the civil rights movement and um in a way that's a very complicated analogy because um people who have severe mental illness should be treated with dignity and respect but they are not the same as people who are discriminated against because of the color of their skin and they viewed asylums almost as ghettos whose walls had to come down but here's the Paradox there Jonathan they're they finally learned met someone one of their prized students Michael Lauder and what they saw in their classroom also didn't quite reveal to them what could happen to someone with schizophrenia in other words they didn't imagine that there's one of their students was a murderer no and he wasn't a murderer in the sense that ultimately even when he stabbed to death the person he loved most in the world he was found not guilty of by reason of insanity because he could not tell the difference between what was real and what was not real but what was interesting is the degree to which they never really credited that condition or that state but uh it's complex in many ways because they saw him as brilliant it was a shock for me to discover that he couldn't really do the work and so Brilliance which had always been how people talked about Michael was a category separate from almost competence and and that's its own strange element but that's what good intentions means in the book title right in part it's what good intentions and what the tragedy of Good Intentions means um and one of his professors said to me afterwards he said I think it was a tragic inevitability and in a way I thought that that was not true I didn't want to write this story as if it was a tragic inevitability and I wanted to go back to the time when we were just two ten-year-old kids who lived on the same street I mean the books divided into four houses the house of first house is the house on Maryland Road that's the house I grew up in and it's also the house Michael grew up in we shared a very short Street um you know second house is the house of Law and there really is a was a Grand Mansion that these psychiatrists who were architects of communities right but and there really was a house of law I mean because it was Yale law school and a house of Psychiatry and then a house of Dreams which is movies but the the containers like those are not those are leaky containers and so even in our childhood our house on Maryland Road contained all of these possibilities where we dreamed about being a writer being smart was enormously important why I I was one of the problems or questions I asked myself why was it so important that we consider ourselves brilliant as if that would exempt you from all the Sorrows of the world well but but the title it gives away some of that the best Minds you know it's a very evocative title because it is at multiple meetings you know brainy bookish Jewish boys who are tall but aren't don't want to play in the NBA that's not what they're interested in they're interested in writing books particularly Fiction it's an unusual sharing of the interests for 10 year olds that they wanted to be authors both of your fathers were College professors right he was the perfect Playmate as Cynthia ozick had described um but at the same time and there is this book the book is almost a valentine to the human human brain you know it's it's a it's a it it it evokes the idea that it leads to human progress and upward Mobility a ticket to you know a gateway to happiness uh as if this is sort of the dream of the next you know the Jewish immigrants families that you grew up with uh but at the same time the book is also about this the failure of the human mind right it seems to have both that you have the celebration of the mind and then at some point the breakdown of the month and I think the best Minds although it's a line from Alan Ginsberg poem Howell um it there's also the experts the intellectual Elites who considered themselves the best Minds one of the epigraphs every chapter as an epigraph is quotes Kingman Brewster who is the president of Yale talking in the 60s about Urban renewal and what he said was uh we need to be our brothers thinkers Yale was untouched it's beautiful buildings remained uh intact but New Haven was a third plowed under because of this Grand dream they had right so you said Brothers um here's something from the book you say what was the connection between the smart gentle bookish boy I had known and the man who had murdered his pregnant fiancee and what was the connection between that man and me it's a great sentence in line because you did have a symbiotic relationship with him you were so much alike was there in the aftermathy it had one mental breakdown in his 20s and then yet another one in his 30s before this tragic tragedy it seems like the book your book is also introducing the idea that yes it's a genetic disease but but for the grace of God go I that you wonder you know how did how do I avoid this you even make mention in the book you know it's not contagious but if it was you would have had it but it seems like clearly the last 25 years as a novelist you must have been contemplating this could have been my story too I think it was a terror I had at the time because although we seemed as you quoted Cynthia ozick saying to me in a letter about him he was the that he was the ideal Playmate and my parents had literally moved to the neighborhood so I could meet someone like Michael um uh we were very different Michael um was brilliant he was a um he had a photographic memory he read a blistering speed in he would literally be reading paperbacks in school when things were going on he was blowing through them right yes he also read them all at the same time which is unusual he had stacks of books and he would open one I mean it was like a chain smoker lighting one book with the you know ashes of the previous one but he wouldn't finish one and then read the next one he would just open them up and and his fifth grade teacher confirmed all this for me but uh he did that because he'd read all the levels of the sras these these extremely boring reading material that we had but I though I didn't know it at the time I'm dyslexic I'm incredibly slow reader and so Michael's mind was all overtness you know he could recite whole passages from a book he had just read whereas I was always afraid I always had a sense of concealment that I was simultaneously bound up with this High literary calling but actually I read ex with such slowness that I always felt there was something wrong with my mind and my bar mitzvah which I write about is a great debacle which it was I forgot everything having committed it to memory without any comprehension whereas he could have memorized mine as well as his and so in a sense he was a touchstone of high mental functioning for me um and that made me invest something in him I think I measured myself against him but I also kind of counted on a certain reliable aspect of his mind I mean we were very competitive it wasn't always nice but it was simply a given for me and so this kid who lived across the street from me again his we always seemed like we were we're the same and everything always turned out to be different his father was a professor and my father was Professor his father professor of Economics born in Brooklyn he wore a leather bomber jacket he combed his hair back he was always pronouncing opinions at high decibel my father's parents were killed in the Holocaust my father liked to sit on the aisle he didn't like anyone in uniform including police officers I described sometimes Michael and I would see our fathers talking and my father would be walking backwards and Chuck his father would be walking forwards and I had a sister and Michael had two brothers he was the youngest in my family when I played Monopoly with my sister she would let me buy the colors I liked I would let her buy the colors she's like Michael's family there were these big brothers and if you didn't write your name on something it would disappear and someone was always yelling who ate my you know who drank my Dr Pepper and I I loved it because it had this kind of um I guess aggressive energy that I never encountered in other places I wouldn't have wanted to live there it was very it was loud chaotic it was like a darwinian scrimmage but in any case our fathers were professors but of a very different kind Michael's father was all forward movement I envied his having been he we were both born in America I almost said his having been born in America as if I'd inherited some provisional tentative foothold something I think you probably understand thing because you yourself are a child of survivors and you understand what that's like you absorb not some epigenetic information but simply an accurate sense that I was named for someone who was murdered right and and so and at the same time despite all the differences and despite this anomalousness of the situation I mean Michael in addition to being brilliant which wasn't an ordinary thing killed someone uh but I kept discovering in the 10 years I spent writing the book that he lived on this everyone's Street in some strange way so many people said to me the woman who was head of Nami which is the organization of support for families um poor people themselves who have uh mental illness said to me he was everyone's child um Ellen Sachs someone who became everything Michael was going to be she's up she went to Yale law school with schizophrenia although no one knew at the time she won a MacArthur award she wrote a best-selling Memoir she's a professor of law she wrote about Michael when I was reading her Memoir there was Michael in the back of her book he had that impact on people but I had one before to get back to something you just said about the two fathers being different and yet one of Michael's delusions was that his parents were uh hijacked essentially they were the people he were living with were actually Nazis uh right he didn't come from a world of the Holocaust like you and yet he believed at some point that the Nazis had invaded the bodies of his parents and he threatened to kill his parents because he believed they were imposters he went to the attic to try to search for the bodies of his parents yeah and when you visited him in the mental institution at Columbia Presbyterian and at the locked Ward I think he said to you at some point he was afraid that one of the doctors was either Joseph Mengele or somebody who was trying to pull out a portion of his brain so that to me is yes he was not a child of immigrants and yes the two of you were very different but even the delusions to me were very interesting that they were somehow they weren't they didn't arise from your friendship with Jonathan Rosen but he knew that world and he that perhaps in his own psychotic way his deepest darkest Illusions also reflected the nightmares of Robert Rosen your dad well what's interesting about that that's it's absolutely true I mean I often thought how ironic it was in a way because he he also thought he was being pursued by Nazis they were driving them off the streets um whereas you know if you grow up in a house like mine that's just another day at the office imaginatively but you know you're always preparing and wondering but but in a much larger way uh not to LEAP to the macrocosm but what I kept discovering is how much the Holocaust shadowed post-war America it changed Psychiatry it changed the way people saw institutions the the first pictures smuggled out of state hospitals by conscientious objectors doing alternate service uh in very understaffed State hospitals because half of the staff had been drafted they were mostly Quakers and Mennonites they discovered this horrifying scene of naked bodies crammed together they were run those pictures were run by Life Magazine just the way they ran pictures of liberated camps Irvin Goffman who wrote an enormously influential book called asylums published in like 1961 is a sociologist he likened State hospitals and two concentration camps to Total institutions the Milgram uh test you know where they asked people to shock someone was conducted in the basement at Lindsley Chittenden Hall at Yale where which was how's the English Department when I was there uh Milgram had written if I was still if I was living in Europe I would have been killed and he was essentially doing a test to find hidden eichmann's it was it was it was inspired during the Eichmann trial and it this had a tremendously distorting ass uh influence but everyone it turns out in some complex way was affected and it had real consequences uh for how you know because in a way Barracks are barracks concentration camps were horrific but they were horrific for very specific reasons so so I I want to get to this other idea because I have a novelist who wrote This Book which makes this even more interesting and it's not only a novice who wrote this book but it's a novelist who's written Eaves apple and other works who picks up on the idea like Kafka that illness is very alluring uh Tom Ashman news knows this Franz Kafka knows this from the Hunger Artist you and I come from a very similar World eats Apple if you haven't read eats Apple my uh Jonathan's first novel it's a terrific novel that you think is about anorexia but it's not it's not it's really about illness and and the Allure of it and so cheers Jonathan Rosen yet again years many years later with a real story this time and I just want to talk to you about as speaking as a novelist and the author of this book because there is something about Madness uh that is very alluring uh I remember you may remember this um you mentioned the movie shine in the book several times and you may remember the first thing I ever did for the New York Times I wrote about chime and I remember I talked to the director and I said to him you know you you seem to be all over the map about what caused this concert Prodigy to have a mental breakdown and exhibit the scientist schizophrenia uh and he's and so in the movie it's like if you've seen the movie The Audience uh you know it it looks like it was brought about by playing the Rachmaninoff five that the playing the music did it and uh and it also there's a thought that his father was a holocaust Survivor may have abused him uh but but so I said to him I said you you'd think that he got schizophrenia from playing music right and he said I'll never forget this and I think I quoted he said he said there is something irresistible for the artists to think that someone goes too far and can't come back that genius takes you so far and you can't actually return and what I remember most about it is that to help God the piana's sister lived in Israel and I interviewed her and she said you're gonna love this if you didn't remember it she said because this is true of Michael this is ridiculous my mother's family had schizophrenia this is a genetic illness that ran in my family this has nothing to do with music this has nothing to do with the Holocaust it happens to do with genetic sickness so maybe you can you this is something you've explored in so many different ways that that that Madness itself sickness itself is alluring and it's I think one of the reasons people will be drawn to this book it's alluring it's also useful in a terrible way because the one group of people that never helps are the people afflicted by it but the Asylum was treated like the Central Bank you could borrow any metaphor from it and uh even to start with Freud who didn't treat people with severe mental illness but who bestowed on everyone the the the concept of the Psychopathology of everyday life so everyday life became defined as a form of illness it was a great gift to psychiatrists because and if you could you know if if like if everyone is ill suffering from the Psychopathology of everyday life then you can heal the well it's a lot easier also right then yes and you can have an office like a chiropractor or a dentist and have normal hours instead of being an alienist presiding over a huge Hospital filled with people who have an illness this for which in the 50s until the 50s there was nothing there are no cures but there were at least there weren't even antipsychotic drugs and so the other thing about that that's so strange is that um although for I didn't think it didn't work with people with uh psychosis he believed everyone was made sick for the same reason and so in a sense if you had it a little bit you would be neurotic a lot you would be psychotic and that meant that when they released people from State hospitals instead of creating what was promised community centers to care for the severely ill they called them Community Mental Health Centers and we still live in a world that has redefined mental illness first of all simply as a big fungible generic term that everyone suffers from at one time or another and it's not to diminish the pain of people's mental suffering but there are a handful of severe illnesses where you are truly Afflicted so those things and that is what Michael had yes he had a point but what we're saying is Michael as you said he's he had like a physical ailment his he had brain disease that's right but it seemed almost into some people a kind of as if there were sort of Glamor to it in a way um and that was also very complicated I mean uh so that that's why I'm sorry but um please get to this point too didn't it also infect universities with literary theory that right that this is it's not just Freud and the psychoanalytic Community to decide it to open up shops and so the even Woody Allen movies joked about everybody being in therapy and everyone's in therapy so it became part of the culture in the 70s of course everyone has a therapist and everyone's neurotic and everyone has to go be treated by but if everyone is ill nobody is ill right exactly so but also universities also also helped to glorify the universities and the culture itself I mean one of the things I say is that antipsychotic medication which was finally uh discovered accidentally like most psychiatric medication was made available in like 1954. that was the same year LSD was also made available to psychiatrists and you know in one hand they you had a drug for suppressing delusions and hallucinations and on the other hand you had a drug for inducing them and the one that induced them was called Mind expanding and if that is how we evaluate broadened Consciousness heightened awareness then who on Earth would wish to take something that suppressed uh um delusions when Aldous Huxley is takes masculine and writes you know the doors of perception yeah um he's given a little bit by a psychiatrist who's been using masculine he thinks to teach students of Psychiatry what it feels like to be delusional and Huxley writes that um his trip was his hallucinations were like the best parts of schizophrenia as if there were you know good parts and bad parts and so and and that kept happening and then when I was a graduate student in English literature in the 80s for some reason you couldn't be a student of literature without reading Foucault and you had to read Madness and civilization and Foucault was essentially arraying himself against the enlightenment the Age of Reason and what is the opposite of reason it's unreason it's Madness as if it's the universal solvent that will open all the locks and the gates but it's more than that it's a con he has a conspiracy theory that Madness and asylums were invented by the Enlightenment and that the only reason anyone is ever deemed ill and put an asylum is because they're different and it's the way the state and power others you demonizes you and locks you away and so if that is the case and there is no uh it's only about power then there is no illness there is only a socially constructed idea of illness and again how on Earth could that help someone who requires medication and who may like Michael at certain times be so sick he doesn't think he's sick and indeed thinks those people trying to help him are trying to kill him or Nazis and it's an inversion of the order of the world it dilutes the significance the magnitude of illness right it basically says to Michael you're really just like everyone else and if they're not these are people that also would like to they would like some of the delusions that you have you know that everybody would almost like you know Envy the delusions you're having and I was I want to go back to this you know speaking to Jonathan Rosen the novelist you know the two of you wanted to be fiction writers and the novelist reimagines a world imagines a world and the person with who's suffering from mental illness it's if they're schizophrenic is suffering from delusions which are also imaginary and I wonder whether in writing this there's such a strange connection between the the the Alchemy of the artist and maybe that's why they're such an Allure uh uh from the artistic Community right and you know we know this we hear you know Vincent van Gogh we're we're constantly being told about the relationship between Madness and genius right so then it's not a surprise that we oh yes of course Michael Lauder was often referred to as a genius of course he was also Madden he was also had mental illness as if again it romanticizes it is as if to say delusions and the imagination emerge emanate from the same portion of the brain so what's really the difference between a novelist and someone who's suffering from psycho you know psycho problems well you know it's interesting when uh my mother used to tell me this story and my mother is a writer um that when James Joyce whose daughter was became was diagnosed with schizophrenia consulted young he said to young as any father might you know I also use words in creative ways and novel ways and it's almost you know he didn't use the term word salad but that is that term of just almost musical Association rather than sense and Jung said uh to Joyce you are diving to the bottom of a river and she is sinking um wow and but in a way having heard that story from my mother are you saying because you said something earlier does that mean Jung understood this in ways that Freud didn't I don't know because Jung actually also thought Joyce was mentally ill but um he he he may have understood that um but I I don't I don't really know but I don't think he all but he also but it seems like he understood the gravity of what the child is suffering from versus what the novelist says well this is sort of what I do anyway and saying believe you don't you don't do what she does um but I guess another strange element is like are both wanting to be writers is not and is is that um you know in in my house growing up literature was kind of how you tested reality if reality conformed to fiction it was real your reality tested in Reverse even when my mother who died in her late 90s um had forgotten many things if when I would help her out of a taxi and into a wheelchair she would say punch me up Judy which is something Mr smallweed says in Bleak House exactly and it was all and you could see even that it was just a sense of rightness restored literature validated and had formulated this experience but but what I wanted to say is that was so strange in the course of my writing the book and researching it is that literature had had been stolen and turned into medicine I mean the idea Freud's idea that you know a Greek myth makes you ill and that somehow organizing your story will make you well made perfect sense to a whole generation of literature loving intellectuals as if only and and I you know there's that sense when you read a novel if there's a first person narrative you think well everything is going to be okay but I remember feeling very cheated it was a Faulkner novel maybe it was light in August where somehow you're in the thoughts of a character but he's horribly killed and you feel that's I don't understand he was telling the story and the only other person the the another case in which there's a set of false expectations about what stories can do is pointed out by Lawrence Langer who wrote a book about Holocaust testimonies he studied the testimony I remember the old video archives yeah yeah yeah and one of the things he says is family members will often urge someone who has survived to tell the story tell the story and when they do the expectation is it will bring relief and it does not in fact it brings hatred of themselves or shame or Agony and it's not just remembered pain it's because maybe they've done things that they loathe and it's the idea that a story would bestow relief or order the world in a way uh that um somehow saves you from it is something again I grew up with and had to unlearn and I had to keep untelling Stories the New York Times when they wrote their laudatory uh no pun intended a profile of Michael they allowed they allowed him to dictate the terms of the story and you can feel them aliding on we actually talk a little about that this is I'm jumping again no I'm sorry but what all I meant to say was I was just that everybody was using this idea that if you formulate something perhaps reality will follow right we live in an age where that is very much true I want to come back to that I want to I will do it now I'm going to definitely come back to what you just said about the New York Times profile in the way they let him dictate the terms of the story I just want to give you another anecdote that you can take on the road with you which was the same discovery that Langer saw was also discovered in the Truth and Reconciliation Commission in South Africa which believed the premise is that we can all only reconcile if we can tell the truth of what happened and we need to incentivize victims to tell everyone what happened to them and what they didn't count on is you can't let someone testify for eight hours about Horrors and then send them home without a mental health profession you can't expect them to feel relieved from that if anything they're going to walk away with much greater pain grief loss and mourning and that was a discovery that they never anticipated it was all based on isn't it just better instead of punishing people just let the story come out and the truths come out but one of the things I just want to say one of the things I'm ashamed about now is I realize that Michael was going to be telling his story and I didn't I didn't stop to think he can't that's not his story it's not something you conquer and it's not a narrative and I only just thought wow he got all this money he's going to tell a story and he had a hardship but then he'll tell overcoming it that was always the formula in a sense and everyone thought I believe believe that Hollywood was going to make his movie so how so it was going to have a happy ending one of his professors said to me at the end don't blame Hollywood he said if Hollywood's to blame we all are meaning Hollywood's in the business of Happy Endings what business did Yale law school have imagining an uh the story different from how it was that I I've left ahead again yeah no no because I can't stay in one house but you know what I mean but there it is because I myself always grew up imagining that it would be not something you do in the writing isn't something you do out of the fullness of your experience but something you do that almost spares you from it and that's an unwholesome way of thinking altogether so so let me just before we get to something else love you since we're already in that in this subject something you intimated before and this little Yale law professor said it as well about Michael telling the story of the New York Times or Michael having a chance to tell a story either through the book or the movie which was something that comes up a couple times in the book that is very profound and I I want to make sure people know this is happening because it's very important it's where you read Michael's quotes where he talks about why as it's speaking as an advocate for people with schizophrenia to say that the stigma of of of people suffering from this disease that they're violent is a stigma and it's wrong and that I myself am not violent and you actually in several parts of the book are taken aback by that because you actually know that's not exactly true it's a nice way to tell the story Michael but there were intimations that there was violence in the same way that you said the professor said look at the hubris that we had at Yale law school so overlook this man's disease and do everything possible with a feel-good ending that this is all going to work out great and we we can congratulate ourselves as Yale law school we can congratulate ourselves for what we did and now we have to look back 25 years and say yeah but look what happened from that sickness look at what was taken away and I want to get back to that because you noted that as if to say wait a minute Michael that's not true don't tell the New York Times that you're not violent you could be well it was very specific and of course I was reading it very carefully and he had not he had been told um not to tell anyone that he had schizophrenia when he was applying for law school do you want to be a law professor and he didn't the first time around but he hadn't done the things you need to do to get hired so he hadn't you know right right um and it had only a very brief disastrous summer at a law firm and so then he as he said came out in in as a flaming schizophrenic is how he put it in the times um and it was very courageous but then he spoke to the reporter about how he was asked if because he described himself as having paranoid schizophrenia if he was ever violent and he he simply said to the reporter it's a very hurtful um stereotype and I it is a very hurtful stereotype but I knew that when Michael had been hospitalized as you mentioned he thought his parents were replicas identical replicas Nazi replicas of his actual parents and so he had armed himself with a kitchen knife and to say the question of violence it's simply he did not know what was real and he was defending himself and but that or arming himself in case he was attacked but that is already a very different place to be in and his mother who was terrified of what I kept remembering was the terror his parents felt and how my mother who communicated it to me also because she talked to his mother how it was it's like a horror movie where you close the door you lock it behind you and someone you're it's his horror movie people he loved who raised him are are monsters are and and so and and and it's a reciprocal fear as well and so it simply it was it was an unchallenged thing and so it was he spoke it away and it was not a service to him in the same way he would report his delusions to his professors and they all he didn't report all of them he but he would tell them the story it was very heroic story and it was and that when he woke up his bed was on fire and his father would talk him through the Flames but they would tell each other that story and they all told it to me now whether that I mean whether many other things happened or that was just the story that served for all the others at one point he told the dean um this morning I thought my bed was on fire and I thought you were the devil and when the dean reported this to his daughter who was training to be a psychiatrist and working with mentally ill homeless people she said dad you have no idea what you're talking about because he was saying it's I didn't realize how neurotic and he had come out of that world of psychoanalytic language and thinking where everything is on a Continuum how neurotic people with schizophrenia could be and she said dad you have no idea what you're talking about and so they simply didn't meaning that they said that they didn't take him seriously they didn't understand the consequences of someone suffering through those delusions that this is not just merely an anecdote an interesting story but that we're really dealing with a very sick person and we have no idea what could happen since we're in custody where custodians of a very sick person and it's not because he comes in and entertains us with these very interesting delusions but that maybe there's something we're missing that we that through our good intentions that we don't anticipate that might happen yes which doesn't mean of course that stigma isn't real and it doesn't mean it isn't terrible but doesn't wait does it mean though I'm sorry does it mean that in your mind Yale law school well this oh I don't know how to answer that except to say two things one is the doctors who recommended that he work at something um on that they considered mentally untaxing when he was still in a halfway house uh was not a permanent sentence to do something beneath him but he always told but he had because he had already gotten into Yale law school which he had applied to before his psychotic break but he would always say why would I bag groceries or work at Macy's if I could be a Yale loss Professor but one of his professors said to me and and one who was a very good Mentor to him and kind said to me I never thought he would be come a Yale law professor because he couldn't do the work I thought he would be someone who had been to Yale law school and could then be an advocate for people with schizophrenia right so here's Michael saying why would I do this when I could be a Yale law when I could be a Yale lawyer that was the phrase being a lawyer was why he went there and the people accommodating him didn't share with him their sense that he actually could not and so their accommodation of him which was an act of kindness was actually creating a gap between reality and his perception of it that wasn't the product of his illness it was the product of an accommodation that almost seemed to believe that if we act like it so it will become so and at what point would he notice you know and also Michael in this set in this sense this kid was always the Golden Boy so he would never think that I couldn't become what I want to become right and why would he not think that he was limited by his disease yeah the professors might think he's limited but he wouldn't but this makes me think of something else I really want to talk about because both of you wanted the same career path as writers seems to me Jonathan there are two major breakdowns of your childhood friend and they're both related to failures about writing they're both interestingly related the actual mental breakdowns the first was Michael Lauder who it always is the best of the best is being rejected for every short story to the rights he's Plastering his walls with rejections and that in the the aftermath of that there's a breakdown and the second one that ultimately leads to the the death of his fiancee is that he can't seem to write the book he was paid six hundred thousand dollars to write for the same reason he couldn't do the work at Yale and so when you use the word stressors you know I wonder whether that's the idea which was that maybe Macy's was the better job that putting this kind of pressure on an unmedicated man is going to lead to unbelievable stress and delusions well he was when he was medicated he still wasn't able presumably to do the work but he was people did genuinely didn't know he was ill um but it is the case that it would have been much better and uh for him to be in a low stress Place initially Ironically in a sense Yale was as close to an Old-Fashioned Asylum it was a walled Community with a green interior he said as much in the times which was a very interesting way of putting it he said it's the most you know it's the best mental health facility care facility in the country um but the implication there of course is that everybody is in the same situation but there was no place for him to go really and um and that's part of the problem also but it is the case that destigmatization is also something that can only come by acknowledging the the reality of his illness I mean it was an enormous Advance the very Enlightenment that for Foucault is is the nightmare period um that you instead of being seen as demonically possessed or instead of your illness being judged a character flaw you are you're seen as someone who has an illness like diabetes like any other illness for which actually there are very successful um no not cures but treatments not for everyone some people are resistant to the medication and that it's unpleasant I well believe um it's just that it's um to the the the fear that even acknowledging that it is in fact something other than the same as everything is part of the problem I kept discovering and encountering you know we live in a culture where discrimination used to have two kinds of meanings to make a distinction and to make a distinction and use that distinction to demean or oppress somebody but now even making the distinction is often seen or people fear that it might imply that they are doing something um inappropriate whereas life is all about the distinctions it and they're not permanent distinctions when I take this I am this way later I might not need to do that you know but people were busy making blanket statements um and that also did not in the end help him in in any way so in reading your book on the public policy piece because all of us are now concerned when we're talking about gun control school shootings this issue you know this book is very timely because it forces us to take a real hard look at mental illness and what we should do about it so for instance there's a community the psychoanalysts of Westchester who were his friends and community and they believed that the asylums the mental institutions were bad and that they believed that they should be deed institutionalized and in the end these community health centers either didn't materialize or didn't work but I don't I wonder whether you're of two minds there there's a conflict their intention on the one hand you want people to experience the freedom human autonomy not to be put away for life in an institution uh you want to give them a choice but if you give them the choice they may be a danger to society similarly if you give people the choice to medicate or not medicate they may be a danger to society so how what in your mind you know I mean frankly Jonathan I think you should testify in front of Congress after writing this book I think you'd have some interesting things to say so why don't you tell us what would you say to Congress Mr Rosen you know your book has a lot of interesting ideas but what would you say should we make more hospitals should we get more beds should we hire more psychiatrists should we mandate should we make it so that we can require people to stay in the hospital even against their will should we force them to take meds well those are all the right questions but they're not again blanket statements it's really important to know that there's a tiny percent there's a small percentage of people with severe mental illnesses and though of that percentage there's a sub-fraction of people who do not think of themselves as ill as a symptom of their illness are unresponsive to medication or refuse to take it so it's important not to think that there's a grand group of people within all of that there are people far better schooled in this than I am to speak yes there need to be more hospital beds Medicaid perversely doesn't cover people in state long-term care psychiatric hospitals in other words I'm sorry if you're in a state hospital or a long-term care regardless of your age and you're you don't get that's not covered right but that's and everyone understands that needs to be fixed but there was a time the the this is again a little piece of history but one worth knowing State hospitals had grown into a a terrible State they were overcrowded understaffed medication did come along in the 50s but the people who dreamed of community Psychiatry wanted it to be federally funded the states had been helping and caring for people with psychiatric disorders for over a hundred years but the Temptation in these were psychoanalysts not people who worked with the severely ill to turn State hospitals into the best deal that had to be torn down rather than preserved and reformed is part of the problem they would have become much smaller they were already becoming much smaller when Ronald Reagan who vowed to shut down all the state hospitals in California became governor in 68 they were half empty already and so in a way they were there was an organic movement but the fantasy that this would be a whole new project you start with the year zero and the year zero where community Mental Health Centers but they were not catering to everyone was an aspect of the problem and the thing that brought this home to me was reading a memoir by a young by a Sakai he was then a young psychologist who ran the community mental health program in Baltimore in inner city Baltimore and they were very idealistic they thought mental illness was caused by poverty by marginalization by oppression by racism and they had only a handful of beds and all their efforts they thought should go to helping ordinary people living under hard Urban conditions but there were people just as oppressed and just as marginalized who had the misfortune of having a son or a sister or a father who had a psychotic break and what did they do he says well we avoided that group and the group released from hospitals they called the cops and so you see it being set up in this at that very moment that idealistic moment being severely ill is being criminalized and then they were taken if they were lucky first to jail where you're living in Terror because you're unmedicated and you have to sit for 24 hours if you're lucky you'll be admitted maybe to a state hospital but the laws all changed because the civil liberties sort of mental illness uh bar with also not knowing the reality of people who are severely ill saw it only as a civil liberties issue and slammed the door behind everyone and so what has to be acknowledged is the nature of illness as it affects people who are too ill to care for themselves and don't know they're ill the only thing I'd say is my friend had had resources if you look at this world and say who is likely to have resources um and he killed someone he shouldn't have killed Jordan Neely someone we're all talking about did not have resources in a sense although we had the city's resources um and he was killed and shouldn't have been killed and the the hole that affected both of them is the same hole and it is if I give it you know if you give when people used to ask me what's your policy recommendation it was like with Soldier knitson said don't lie don't pretend it's something it isn't as a way of imagining you can alter the reality and spare people's feelings have a conversation don't tell people what it is but be open to the possibility that there are terrible illnesses for which there may be remedies and the more we talk about it we hope the better they'll be but start that way because otherwise if you say as Thomas says is the anti-psychiatrist said when I was in an undergraduate and a woman froze to death in a box it would have been cruel to bring her to the hospital because mental illness is a myth and he defended her right to die there because he felt he was defending his own civil liberties that was actually exploiting someone who did not know what she was doing as her daughter came forward and spoke about and she could have been helped and wasn't and so it's only callousness to make a virtue of it is worse stepping over the person is one thing bad enough but to pretend that it's an exalted state or a choice when it isn't is is to invert reality and and that I think is a Dreadful thing so start that way that's all I'd say and then get people and I can tell you who they are who do know what policies need to be changed not to spend more money on fewer people but but the book that does such a wonderful job of identifying different categories of where the same conclusion is being made that we shouldn't be interfering with someone's personal freedom that that you know eat mental illness is not really it doesn't really exist right people who ignore the problem and don't understand the magnitude of the suffering and the illness itself it is just an endless parade in the book of seeing what you just described when I visited Michael in a locked Ward it and I was a graduate student I knew the second I saw him that he was not suffering from a socially constructed constructed disorder that he had that some that he had an illness and that is a piece of it and I also knew or feared and now I really know that people who thought they were honoring his autonomy were in fact denying it and his roommate in college a wonderful guy who died young before I could talk to him with left three young children on his deathbed wept for Carrie and said all we did was worry that Michael was being treated fairly and being given his due and we forgot about her and um I didn't want to forget about her in the book and I worked very hard to make her present because there are real consequences uh to everyone's choices and they're good intentions not all good intentions are bad but the ones built on hopeful fantasies are um there's a there's a revelation in the book uh toward the end and it made me also wonder whether it was also part of the impulse in writing it which is that you know you know you're not a doctor you're not you know you're you're just you know this was your friend your childhood friend and apparently you did speak to him a few days before he killed Kerry and this happened with a number of other people where he just said something you know intimated something or gave someone a look and people just got a sense the shutter a feeling that was the policewoman in Cornell and Ithaca you know they got a sense that something is not right and maybe you can just you know tell us what Michael said on that last call well it was a couple of weeks before he killed Carrie and we talked periodically we had sometimes we would agree to get together but we didn't and I probably have hoped or more than half hoped we wouldn't but we were talking and suddenly abruptly he said I have to go now I'm having thoughts I shouldn't be having and so I got off the phone and I put it out of my mind and I am ashamed of that of course I what I what would I have done what I've run you know because in fact a crisis intervention team the week before he killed Carrie had come to the door and Michael had answered the door and taking the card and thanked them and sent them on their way and said he would call but he was charismatic and convincing and it was very hard to know that you're not in the presence of a very sick man but I'm ashamed in front of myself for having accepted uh something that was not right and when I actually spoke about it um at the talk I gave at the Jewish Museum someone came up to me who said she had the exact same experience right as well she she was friends with his family and she had spoken to him and she felt why didn't I do something many many people the world of aftermath is very different from the world before before we say goodnight to the audience his editor had also the same experience he apparently took a train up to see him uh and at some point Michael just said it's time for you to go and the mood changed everything changed and there became a moment where the editor was be felt fearful that that this was a different guy who opened the door and welcomed me in from the guy I'm about to leave uh before we say goodnight to Jonathan Rosen I think we've got a couple just quick announcements we've got a upcoming event of course go to the chat box so you can get the link to buy it as I said this should be your summer read um it's a phenomenal book and as I said it's a book that covers so much territory and does and it's told in such an engaging compelling compulsive read don't miss don't miss this book for the summer uh we have an upcoming event there we go our annual law of the land at 92nd Street y uh where we go over in the most uh with civilians we basically go over the big cases of the Supreme Court for the year uh it tends to be one of the more popular things that we do uh and we have journalists you can see in the middle there's Adam Lochte from The New York Times on the far right is Dalia from Slate and it's sort of a sort of a raucous hour of talking about what the Supreme Court did uh see yep uh if you haven't signed up yet for receiving information about folks please go to polks.org and artists and tell sign up for email list and of course if you enjoyed today tonight and all of our other programs we always want you to be among your favorite Charities Jonathan uh we've been friends for a very long time I think it's important that I point out for anyone watching who thinks that I have any value as a non-fiction writer of essays and reviews this man discovered me I wrote my very first book review for Jonathan and I remembered when he assigned it to me how excited I was and I was especially excited when I finished my first assignment I was already in my 30s I wasn't a kid and I will never forget coming home and open to playing the answering machine where Jonathan said I really like what you wrote I hope you'll keep writing for us and Jonathan I cannot tell you how important that was at that time and I I tell people all the time you you got me started as a non-fiction writer and I'm very beholden to you your words of encouragement you were always a great writer a terrific editor and friend but I trusted you if you've wanted me to keep doing it maybe I would maybe I should have left that Wall Street law firm and continue to be writing so thank you my friend thank you so much for having me and circling back to that time and and to being here with me now I'm really grateful Jonathan I was very touched by this book it's I felt like I knew you more and better in different ways it's a very revealing very brave book and I hope people will read it and talk about it because they should Jonathan uh good luck on the on the book tours I'm Thane Rosenbaum for folks until next time good night thank you good night

hello everyone my name is Saint Rosenbaum I&#39;m the creative director of The Forum on life culture and Society at turo University and welcome to the folks conversation series tonight&#39;s guest my old friend Jonathan Rosen and his newest book which has been receiving Raves well-deserved we&#39;re gonna get into it it&#39;s a fascinating Story the best Minds The Story of Friendship Madness and the tragedy of good intentions now let me tell you everyone this is here it is this is your summer read this is your summer book and I&#39;ll tell you why it&#39;s because this book is many things it&#39;s many kinds of books and you&#39;ll get you&#39;ll be able to read a number of different things in one book all summer for instance it&#39;s about this tragic murder that took place 25 years ago that what did grip the nation but perhaps has been forgotten about Michael Lauder who is a Yale law school graduate who had suffered from schizophrenia and mental illness uh a movie was being made about his his life by Ron Howard uh and and uh he had a book deal which he had not yet fulfilled and it was all about how he had overcome his against impossible odds his illness and then this horrible thing happened he had a delusion and he uh thought that his his fiancee pregnant with his child was a a robot or a wind-up doll and he stabbed her to death uh and uh and he is still institutionalized uh 25 years later guess what that movie never got made because they had a horrible Hollywood ending and you know what movie did get made instead by the same director uh A Beautiful Mind which is an incredible irony that we&#39;ll talk about uh the movie was originally the Michael Lauder film not the Beautiful Mind was at First supposed to be uh portrayed Michael was going to be portrayed by uh Leonardo DiCaprio then the project went over to Brad Pitt and that movie never got made you never got a chance to see that but instead you saw a beautiful mind this story took place 25 years ago and let me tell you why Jonathan wrote about this Michael Lauder who committed this crime was Jonathan rosen&#39;s best childhood friend from when he was 10 years old they grew up together they went to school together every day they were uh almost brotherly in affection they were competitors they both went to Yale College uh and they both wanted to be a novelists fiction writers they had this incredible commonality and Jonathan uh explores this story 25 years later and includes himself as part of the story because Jonathan Otherside from Michael Waters own Brothers no one knew Michael Lauder better than Jonathan Rosen but the book has more to it than that it&#39;s about childhood friendships and brotherly competition and the loyalties of the tight-knit community whether it&#39;s the law school or psychoanalyst psychiatrist that lived in New Rochelle where they grew up um it is about mental illness of course it&#39;s also about the public policy about what to do with mental illness because many people know who live in New York it&#39;s either school shootings or Subway murders we&#39;re seeing more and time and time again it&#39;s committed uh by people that have mental illnesses brain diseases and we just haven&#39;t quite figured out uh where to what to do about this and so this is not just about Mental Illness but about public policy surrounding uh mental illness guess what the book is also a thriller it&#39;s written in a style that it really even though you know what&#39;s going to happen it&#39;s written in a style that you&#39;re just waiting for and he you&#39;re in the hands of a master because Jonathan is himself a recognized award-winning novelist and in so many ways this book is also about him it&#39;s a literary Memoir by a professional Storyteller telling you his story in connection with this tragic story that took place 25 years ago from his best childhood friend as I said uh Jonathan is a recognized novelist in fact I know this I reviewed his first novel eats Apple for the Wall Street Journal uh he also wrote a joy comes in the morning uh he&#39;s also written non-fiction books the talmud in the internet was also award-winning he&#39;s written for the New York Times a New Yorker the Atlantic uh please welcome my friend Jonathan Rosen Jonathan welcome thank you so much Dane and thank you for that unoverwhelming introduction well it&#39;s well deserved my friend this book is really quite quite a remarkable achievement and I don&#39;t say this all the time um uh if you want to buy the book it&#39;s the link is in the chat box and by the end of this hour I assure you you&#39;ll probably want to buy the book uh if you&#39;re watching us live on YouTube welcome we always love having you make sure you come to folks.org to sign up for our email list you&#39;ll get more uh information about upcoming events and if you have a question for Jonathan you can leave it in the Q a box hopefully we&#39;ll get some time for that so Jonathan it does feel to me when you read this book it&#39;s so extremely well written so uh emotionally complex so psychologically complex that there is a bit of unfinished business here for you that there&#39;s a reason it&#39;s not just the anniversary of the killing of Michael&#39;s fiance Carrie Costello but that you yourself felt that you needed to go back and think about your childhood and think about your connection to Michael Lauder is there any truth to that that there was a compulsion for you to get to the story that you would never touched upon before by the way Jonathan I&#39;ve known you a long time I never heard you talk about this well I I wouldn&#39;t say that I was avoiding talking about it but I was avoiding writing about it I spent many years not writing about it before I spent many years writing it um and it was never really even clear to me what I was avoiding and what I would be writing if I were to be writing and in a sense the book begins 50 years ago when I moved to New Rochelle and I realized that in order to write it I didn&#39;t want to write it backwards Michael was on the cover of the New York Post under a massive headline that said psycho if I had only seen that cover I would not have thought at all about him or understood him if I had only seen the article the New York Times published three years before that when he was jauntily leaning against a column at Yale law school and it described him as by all accounts a genius I wouldn&#39;t have understood him either but frankly those are the two polls of public discourse in a way and that&#39;s why you went backwards and I went backwards I also didn&#39;t want it to seem only like a tragic inevitability because many choices were made along the way interestingly painfully one of his mentors and he had extraordinary mentors at Yale Law School a couple of them had clerked for judges who had changed the laws regarding institutionalization when they were young so in the 50s and 60s so for them what happened was a reckoning as well and when I spoke to them I felt them Reckoning with this story but just to be clear so the audience sees what you&#39;re saying that these law professors worked on cases that dealt with mental illness and what we do with the mentally ill and the Reckoning that you&#39;re talking about is that many people ended up being taken out of psychiatric institutions and back into society and the outcome for that isn&#39;t just the tragic death of Kerry Costello but as I said earlier things that we&#39;re seeing in the broader culture of mass shootings school shootings Subway murders that the Reckoning is that we&#39;re coming to terms with some of those decisions is that what you&#39;re saying some of the actual policy decisions but before there were policy decisions there was an almost romantic understanding about what mental illness was and it was very painful and moving to discover that several of those professors despite the fact that they had as clerks written decisions you know for judges that really changed the laws but they didn&#39;t know anything about severe mental illness for them it was an extension of the civil rights movement and um in a way that&#39;s a very complicated analogy because um people who have severe mental illness should be treated with dignity and respect but they are not the same as people who are discriminated against because of the color of their skin and they viewed asylums almost as ghettos whose walls had to come down but here&#39;s the Paradox there Jonathan they&#39;re they finally learned met someone one of their prized students Michael Lauder and what they saw in their classroom also didn&#39;t quite reveal to them what could happen to someone with schizophrenia in other words they didn&#39;t imagine that there&#39;s one of their students was a murderer no and he wasn&#39;t a murderer in the sense that ultimately even when he stabbed to death the person he loved most in the world he was found not guilty of by reason of insanity because he could not tell the difference between what was real and what was not real but what was interesting is the degree to which they never really credited that condition or that state but uh it&#39;s complex in many ways because they saw him as brilliant it was a shock for me to discover that he couldn&#39;t really do the work and so Brilliance which had always been how people talked about Michael was a category separate from almost competence and and that&#39;s its own strange element but that&#39;s what good intentions means in the book title right in part it&#39;s what good intentions and what the tragedy of Good Intentions means um and one of his professors said to me afterwards he said I think it was a tragic inevitability and in a way I thought that that was not true I didn&#39;t want to write this story as if it was a tragic inevitability and I wanted to go back to the time when we were just two ten-year-old kids who lived on the same street I mean the books divided into four houses the house of first house is the house on Maryland Road that&#39;s the house I grew up in and it&#39;s also the house Michael grew up in we shared a very short Street um you know second house is the house of Law and there really is a was a Grand Mansion that these psychiatrists who were architects of communities right but and there really was a house of law I mean because it was Yale law school and a house of Psychiatry and then a house of Dreams which is movies but the the containers like those are not those are leaky containers and so even in our childhood our house on Maryland Road contained all of these possibilities where we dreamed about being a writer being smart was enormously important why I I was one of the problems or questions I asked myself why was it so important that we consider ourselves brilliant as if that would exempt you from all the Sorrows of the world well but but the title it gives away some of that the best Minds you know it&#39;s a very evocative title because it is at multiple meetings you know brainy bookish Jewish boys who are tall but aren&#39;t don&#39;t want to play in the NBA that&#39;s not what they&#39;re interested in they&#39;re interested in writing books particularly Fiction it&#39;s an unusual sharing of the interests for 10 year olds that they wanted to be authors both of your fathers were College professors right he was the perfect Playmate as Cynthia ozick had described um but at the same time and there is this book the book is almost a valentine to the human human brain you know it&#39;s it&#39;s a it&#39;s a it it it evokes the idea that it leads to human progress and upward Mobility a ticket to you know a gateway to happiness uh as if this is sort of the dream of the next you know the Jewish immigrants families that you grew up with uh but at the same time the book is also about this the failure of the human mind right it seems to have both that you have the celebration of the mind and then at some point the breakdown of the month and I think the best Minds although it&#39;s a line from Alan Ginsberg poem Howell um it there&#39;s also the experts the intellectual Elites who considered themselves the best Minds one of the epigraphs every chapter as an epigraph is quotes Kingman Brewster who is the president of Yale talking in the 60s about Urban renewal and what he said was uh we need to be our brothers thinkers Yale was untouched it&#39;s beautiful buildings remained uh intact but New Haven was a third plowed under because of this Grand dream they had right so you said Brothers um here&#39;s something from the book you say what was the connection between the smart gentle bookish boy I had known and the man who had murdered his pregnant fiancee and what was the connection between that man and me it&#39;s a great sentence in line because you did have a symbiotic relationship with him you were so much alike was there in the aftermathy it had one mental breakdown in his 20s and then yet another one in his 30s before this tragic tragedy it seems like the book your book is also introducing the idea that yes it&#39;s a genetic disease but but for the grace of God go I that you wonder you know how did how do I avoid this you even make mention in the book you know it&#39;s not contagious but if it was you would have had it but it seems like clearly the last 25 years as a novelist you must have been contemplating this could have been my story too I think it was a terror I had at the time because although we seemed as you quoted Cynthia ozick saying to me in a letter about him he was the that he was the ideal Playmate and my parents had literally moved to the neighborhood so I could meet someone like Michael um uh we were very different Michael um was brilliant he was a um he had a photographic memory he read a blistering speed in he would literally be reading paperbacks in school when things were going on he was blowing through them right yes he also read them all at the same time which is unusual he had stacks of books and he would open one I mean it was like a chain smoker lighting one book with the you know ashes of the previous one but he wouldn&#39;t finish one and then read the next one he would just open them up and and his fifth grade teacher confirmed all this for me but uh he did that because he&#39;d read all the levels of the sras these these extremely boring reading material that we had but I though I didn&#39;t know it at the time I&#39;m dyslexic I&#39;m incredibly slow reader and so Michael&#39;s mind was all overtness you know he could recite whole passages from a book he had just read whereas I was always afraid I always had a sense of concealment that I was simultaneously bound up with this High literary calling but actually I read ex with such slowness that I always felt there was something wrong with my mind and my bar mitzvah which I write about is a great debacle which it was I forgot everything having committed it to memory without any comprehension whereas he could have memorized mine as well as his and so in a sense he was a touchstone of high mental functioning for me um and that made me invest something in him I think I measured myself against him but I also kind of counted on a certain reliable aspect of his mind I mean we were very competitive it wasn&#39;t always nice but it was simply a given for me and so this kid who lived across the street from me again his we always seemed like we were we&#39;re the same and everything always turned out to be different his father was a professor and my father was Professor his father professor of Economics born in Brooklyn he wore a leather bomber jacket he combed his hair back he was always pronouncing opinions at high decibel my father&#39;s parents were killed in the Holocaust my father liked to sit on the aisle he didn&#39;t like anyone in uniform including police officers I described sometimes Michael and I would see our fathers talking and my father would be walking backwards and Chuck his father would be walking forwards and I had a sister and Michael had two brothers he was the youngest in my family when I played Monopoly with my sister she would let me buy the colors I liked I would let her buy the colors she&#39;s like Michael&#39;s family there were these big brothers and if you didn&#39;t write your name on something it would disappear and someone was always yelling who ate my you know who drank my Dr Pepper and I I loved it because it had this kind of um I guess aggressive energy that I never encountered in other places I wouldn&#39;t have wanted to live there it was very it was loud chaotic it was like a darwinian scrimmage but in any case our fathers were professors but of a very different kind Michael&#39;s father was all forward movement I envied his having been he we were both born in America I almost said his having been born in America as if I&#39;d inherited some provisional tentative foothold something I think you probably understand thing because you yourself are a child of survivors and you understand what that&#39;s like you absorb not some epigenetic information but simply an accurate sense that I was named for someone who was murdered right and and so and at the same time despite all the differences and despite this anomalousness of the situation I mean Michael in addition to being brilliant which wasn&#39;t an ordinary thing killed someone uh but I kept discovering in the 10 years I spent writing the book that he lived on this everyone&#39;s Street in some strange way so many people said to me the woman who was head of Nami which is the organization of support for families um poor people themselves who have uh mental illness said to me he was everyone&#39;s child um Ellen Sachs someone who became everything Michael was going to be she&#39;s up she went to Yale law school with schizophrenia although no one knew at the time she won a MacArthur award she wrote a best-selling Memoir she&#39;s a professor of law she wrote about Michael when I was reading her Memoir there was Michael in the back of her book he had that impact on people but I had one before to get back to something you just said about the two fathers being different and yet one of Michael&#39;s delusions was that his parents were uh hijacked essentially they were the people he were living with were actually Nazis uh right he didn&#39;t come from a world of the Holocaust like you and yet he believed at some point that the Nazis had invaded the bodies of his parents and he threatened to kill his parents because he believed they were imposters he went to the attic to try to search for the bodies of his parents yeah and when you visited him in the mental institution at Columbia Presbyterian and at the locked Ward I think he said to you at some point he was afraid that one of the doctors was either Joseph Mengele or somebody who was trying to pull out a portion of his brain so that to me is yes he was not a child of immigrants and yes the two of you were very different but even the delusions to me were very interesting that they were somehow they weren&#39;t they didn&#39;t arise from your friendship with Jonathan Rosen but he knew that world and he that perhaps in his own psychotic way his deepest darkest Illusions also reflected the nightmares of Robert Rosen your dad well what&#39;s interesting about that that&#39;s it&#39;s absolutely true I mean I often thought how ironic it was in a way because he he also thought he was being pursued by Nazis they were driving them off the streets um whereas you know if you grow up in a house like mine that&#39;s just another day at the office imaginatively but you know you&#39;re always preparing and wondering but but in a much larger way uh not to LEAP to the macrocosm but what I kept discovering is how much the Holocaust shadowed post-war America it changed Psychiatry it changed the way people saw institutions the the first pictures smuggled out of state hospitals by conscientious objectors doing alternate service uh in very understaffed State hospitals because half of the staff had been drafted they were mostly Quakers and Mennonites they discovered this horrifying scene of naked bodies crammed together they were run those pictures were run by Life Magazine just the way they ran pictures of liberated camps Irvin Goffman who wrote an enormously influential book called asylums published in like 1961 is a sociologist he likened State hospitals and two concentration camps to Total institutions the Milgram uh test you know where they asked people to shock someone was conducted in the basement at Lindsley Chittenden Hall at Yale where which was how&#39;s the English Department when I was there uh Milgram had written if I was still if I was living in Europe I would have been killed and he was essentially doing a test to find hidden eichmann&#39;s it was it was it was inspired during the Eichmann trial and it this had a tremendously distorting ass uh influence but everyone it turns out in some complex way was affected and it had real consequences uh for how you know because in a way Barracks are barracks concentration camps were horrific but they were horrific for very specific reasons so so I I want to get to this other idea because I have a novelist who wrote This Book which makes this even more interesting and it&#39;s not only a novice who wrote this book but it&#39;s a novelist who&#39;s written Eaves apple and other works who picks up on the idea like Kafka that illness is very alluring uh Tom Ashman news knows this Franz Kafka knows this from the Hunger Artist you and I come from a very similar World eats Apple if you haven&#39;t read eats Apple my uh Jonathan&#39;s first novel it&#39;s a terrific novel that you think is about anorexia but it&#39;s not it&#39;s not it&#39;s really about illness and and the Allure of it and so cheers Jonathan Rosen yet again years many years later with a real story this time and I just want to talk to you about as speaking as a novelist and the author of this book because there is something about Madness uh that is very alluring uh I remember you may remember this um you mentioned the movie shine in the book several times and you may remember the first thing I ever did for the New York Times I wrote about chime and I remember I talked to the director and I said to him you know you you seem to be all over the map about what caused this concert Prodigy to have a mental breakdown and exhibit the scientist schizophrenia uh and he&#39;s and so in the movie it&#39;s like if you&#39;ve seen the movie The Audience uh you know it it looks like it was brought about by playing the Rachmaninoff five that the playing the music did it and uh and it also there&#39;s a thought that his father was a holocaust Survivor may have abused him uh but but so I said to him I said you you&#39;d think that he got schizophrenia from playing music right and he said I&#39;ll never forget this and I think I quoted he said he said there is something irresistible for the artists to think that someone goes too far and can&#39;t come back that genius takes you so far and you can&#39;t actually return and what I remember most about it is that to help God the piana&#39;s sister lived in Israel and I interviewed her and she said you&#39;re gonna love this if you didn&#39;t remember it she said because this is true of Michael this is ridiculous my mother&#39;s family had schizophrenia this is a genetic illness that ran in my family this has nothing to do with music this has nothing to do with the Holocaust it happens to do with genetic sickness so maybe you can you this is something you&#39;ve explored in so many different ways that that that Madness itself sickness itself is alluring and it&#39;s I think one of the reasons people will be drawn to this book it&#39;s alluring it&#39;s also useful in a terrible way because the one group of people that never helps are the people afflicted by it but the Asylum was treated like the Central Bank you could borrow any metaphor from it and uh even to start with Freud who didn&#39;t treat people with severe mental illness but who bestowed on everyone the the the concept of the Psychopathology of everyday life so everyday life became defined as a form of illness it was a great gift to psychiatrists because and if you could you know if if like if everyone is ill suffering from the Psychopathology of everyday life then you can heal the well it&#39;s a lot easier also right then yes and you can have an office like a chiropractor or a dentist and have normal hours instead of being an alienist presiding over a huge Hospital filled with people who have an illness this for which in the 50s until the 50s there was nothing there are no cures but there were at least there weren&#39;t even antipsychotic drugs and so the other thing about that that&#39;s so strange is that um although for I didn&#39;t think it didn&#39;t work with people with uh psychosis he believed everyone was made sick for the same reason and so in a sense if you had it a little bit you would be neurotic a lot you would be psychotic and that meant that when they released people from State hospitals instead of creating what was promised community centers to care for the severely ill they called them Community Mental Health Centers and we still live in a world that has redefined mental illness first of all simply as a big fungible generic term that everyone suffers from at one time or another and it&#39;s not to diminish the pain of people&#39;s mental suffering but there are a handful of severe illnesses where you are truly Afflicted so those things and that is what Michael had yes he had a point but what we&#39;re saying is Michael as you said he&#39;s he had like a physical ailment his he had brain disease that&#39;s right but it seemed almost into some people a kind of as if there were sort of Glamor to it in a way um and that was also very complicated I mean uh so that that&#39;s why I&#39;m sorry but um please get to this point too didn&#39;t it also infect universities with literary theory that right that this is it&#39;s not just Freud and the psychoanalytic Community to decide it to open up shops and so the even Woody Allen movies joked about everybody being in therapy and everyone&#39;s in therapy so it became part of the culture in the 70s of course everyone has a therapist and everyone&#39;s neurotic and everyone has to go be treated by but if everyone is ill nobody is ill right exactly so but also universities also also helped to glorify the universities and the culture itself I mean one of the things I say is that antipsychotic medication which was finally uh discovered accidentally like most psychiatric medication was made available in like 1954. that was the same year LSD was also made available to psychiatrists and you know in one hand they you had a drug for suppressing delusions and hallucinations and on the other hand you had a drug for inducing them and the one that induced them was called Mind expanding and if that is how we evaluate broadened Consciousness heightened awareness then who on Earth would wish to take something that suppressed uh um delusions when Aldous Huxley is takes masculine and writes you know the doors of perception yeah um he&#39;s given a little bit by a psychiatrist who&#39;s been using masculine he thinks to teach students of Psychiatry what it feels like to be delusional and Huxley writes that um his trip was his hallucinations were like the best parts of schizophrenia as if there were you know good parts and bad parts and so and and that kept happening and then when I was a graduate student in English literature in the 80s for some reason you couldn&#39;t be a student of literature without reading Foucault and you had to read Madness and civilization and Foucault was essentially arraying himself against the enlightenment the Age of Reason and what is the opposite of reason it&#39;s unreason it&#39;s Madness as if it&#39;s the universal solvent that will open all the locks and the gates but it&#39;s more than that it&#39;s a con he has a conspiracy theory that Madness and asylums were invented by the Enlightenment and that the only reason anyone is ever deemed ill and put an asylum is because they&#39;re different and it&#39;s the way the state and power others you demonizes you and locks you away and so if that is the case and there is no uh it&#39;s only about power then there is no illness there is only a socially constructed idea of illness and again how on Earth could that help someone who requires medication and who may like Michael at certain times be so sick he doesn&#39;t think he&#39;s sick and indeed thinks those people trying to help him are trying to kill him or Nazis and it&#39;s an inversion of the order of the world it dilutes the significance the magnitude of illness right it basically says to Michael you&#39;re really just like everyone else and if they&#39;re not these are people that also would like to they would like some of the delusions that you have you know that everybody would almost like you know Envy the delusions you&#39;re having and I was I want to go back to this you know speaking to Jonathan Rosen the novelist you know the two of you wanted to be fiction writers and the novelist reimagines a world imagines a world and the person with who&#39;s suffering from mental illness it&#39;s if they&#39;re schizophrenic is suffering from delusions which are also imaginary and I wonder whether in writing this there&#39;s such a strange connection between the the the Alchemy of the artist and maybe that&#39;s why they&#39;re such an Allure uh uh from the artistic Community right and you know we know this we hear you know Vincent van Gogh we&#39;re we&#39;re constantly being told about the relationship between Madness and genius right so then it&#39;s not a surprise that we oh yes of course Michael Lauder was often referred to as a genius of course he was also Madden he was also had mental illness as if again it romanticizes it is as if to say delusions and the imagination emerge emanate from the same portion of the brain so what&#39;s really the difference between a novelist and someone who&#39;s suffering from psycho you know psycho problems well you know it&#39;s interesting when uh my mother used to tell me this story and my mother is a writer um that when James Joyce whose daughter was became was diagnosed with schizophrenia consulted young he said to young as any father might you know I also use words in creative ways and novel ways and it&#39;s almost you know he didn&#39;t use the term word salad but that is that term of just almost musical Association rather than sense and Jung said uh to Joyce you are diving to the bottom of a river and she is sinking um wow and but in a way having heard that story from my mother are you saying because you said something earlier does that mean Jung understood this in ways that Freud didn&#39;t I don&#39;t know because Jung actually also thought Joyce was mentally ill but um he he he may have understood that um but I I don&#39;t I don&#39;t really know but I don&#39;t think he all but he also but it seems like he understood the gravity of what the child is suffering from versus what the novelist says well this is sort of what I do anyway and saying believe you don&#39;t you don&#39;t do what she does um but I guess another strange element is like are both wanting to be writers is not and is is that um you know in in my house growing up literature was kind of how you tested reality if reality conformed to fiction it was real your reality tested in Reverse even when my mother who died in her late 90s um had forgotten many things if when I would help her out of a taxi and into a wheelchair she would say punch me up Judy which is something Mr smallweed says in Bleak House exactly and it was all and you could see even that it was just a sense of rightness restored literature validated and had formulated this experience but but what I wanted to say is that was so strange in the course of my writing the book and researching it is that literature had had been stolen and turned into medicine I mean the idea Freud&#39;s idea that you know a Greek myth makes you ill and that somehow organizing your story will make you well made perfect sense to a whole generation of literature loving intellectuals as if only and and I you know there&#39;s that sense when you read a novel if there&#39;s a first person narrative you think well everything is going to be okay but I remember feeling very cheated it was a Faulkner novel maybe it was light in August where somehow you&#39;re in the thoughts of a character but he&#39;s horribly killed and you feel that&#39;s I don&#39;t understand he was telling the story and the only other person the the another case in which there&#39;s a set of false expectations about what stories can do is pointed out by Lawrence Langer who wrote a book about Holocaust testimonies he studied the testimony I remember the old video archives yeah yeah yeah and one of the things he says is family members will often urge someone who has survived to tell the story tell the story and when they do the expectation is it will bring relief and it does not in fact it brings hatred of themselves or shame or Agony and it&#39;s not just remembered pain it&#39;s because maybe they&#39;ve done things that they loathe and it&#39;s the idea that a story would bestow relief or order the world in a way uh that um somehow saves you from it is something again I grew up with and had to unlearn and I had to keep untelling Stories the New York Times when they wrote their laudatory uh no pun intended a profile of Michael they allowed they allowed him to dictate the terms of the story and you can feel them aliding on we actually talk a little about that this is I&#39;m jumping again no I&#39;m sorry but what all I meant to say was I was just that everybody was using this idea that if you formulate something perhaps reality will follow right we live in an age where that is very much true I want to come back to that I want to I will do it now I&#39;m going to definitely come back to what you just said about the New York Times profile in the way they let him dictate the terms of the story I just want to give you another anecdote that you can take on the road with you which was the same discovery that Langer saw was also discovered in the Truth and Reconciliation Commission in South Africa which believed the premise is that we can all only reconcile if we can tell the truth of what happened and we need to incentivize victims to tell everyone what happened to them and what they didn&#39;t count on is you can&#39;t let someone testify for eight hours about Horrors and then send them home without a mental health profession you can&#39;t expect them to feel relieved from that if anything they&#39;re going to walk away with much greater pain grief loss and mourning and that was a discovery that they never anticipated it was all based on isn&#39;t it just better instead of punishing people just let the story come out and the truths come out but one of the things I just want to say one of the things I&#39;m ashamed about now is I realize that Michael was going to be telling his story and I didn&#39;t I didn&#39;t stop to think he can&#39;t that&#39;s not his story it&#39;s not something you conquer and it&#39;s not a narrative and I only just thought wow he got all this money he&#39;s going to tell a story and he had a hardship but then he&#39;ll tell overcoming it that was always the formula in a sense and everyone thought I believe believe that Hollywood was going to make his movie so how so it was going to have a happy ending one of his professors said to me at the end don&#39;t blame Hollywood he said if Hollywood&#39;s to blame we all are meaning Hollywood&#39;s in the business of Happy Endings what business did Yale law school have imagining an uh the story different from how it was that I I&#39;ve left ahead again yeah no no because I can&#39;t stay in one house but you know what I mean but there it is because I myself always grew up imagining that it would be not something you do in the writing isn&#39;t something you do out of the fullness of your experience but something you do that almost spares you from it and that&#39;s an unwholesome way of thinking altogether so so let me just before we get to something else love you since we&#39;re already in that in this subject something you intimated before and this little Yale law professor said it as well about Michael telling the story of the New York Times or Michael having a chance to tell a story either through the book or the movie which was something that comes up a couple times in the book that is very profound and I I want to make sure people know this is happening because it&#39;s very important it&#39;s where you read Michael&#39;s quotes where he talks about why as it&#39;s speaking as an advocate for people with schizophrenia to say that the stigma of of of people suffering from this disease that they&#39;re violent is a stigma and it&#39;s wrong and that I myself am not violent and you actually in several parts of the book are taken aback by that because you actually know that&#39;s not exactly true it&#39;s a nice way to tell the story Michael but there were intimations that there was violence in the same way that you said the professor said look at the hubris that we had at Yale law school so overlook this man&#39;s disease and do everything possible with a feel-good ending that this is all going to work out great and we we can congratulate ourselves as Yale law school we can congratulate ourselves for what we did and now we have to look back 25 years and say yeah but look what happened from that sickness look at what was taken away and I want to get back to that because you noted that as if to say wait a minute Michael that&#39;s not true don&#39;t tell the New York Times that you&#39;re not violent you could be well it was very specific and of course I was reading it very carefully and he had not he had been told um not to tell anyone that he had schizophrenia when he was applying for law school do you want to be a law professor and he didn&#39;t the first time around but he hadn&#39;t done the things you need to do to get hired so he hadn&#39;t you know right right um and it had only a very brief disastrous summer at a law firm and so then he as he said came out in in as a flaming schizophrenic is how he put it in the times um and it was very courageous but then he spoke to the reporter about how he was asked if because he described himself as having paranoid schizophrenia if he was ever violent and he he simply said to the reporter it&#39;s a very hurtful um stereotype and I it is a very hurtful stereotype but I knew that when Michael had been hospitalized as you mentioned he thought his parents were replicas identical replicas Nazi replicas of his actual parents and so he had armed himself with a kitchen knife and to say the question of violence it&#39;s simply he did not know what was real and he was defending himself and but that or arming himself in case he was attacked but that is already a very different place to be in and his mother who was terrified of what I kept remembering was the terror his parents felt and how my mother who communicated it to me also because she talked to his mother how it was it&#39;s like a horror movie where you close the door you lock it behind you and someone you&#39;re it&#39;s his horror movie people he loved who raised him are are monsters are and and so and and and it&#39;s a reciprocal fear as well and so it simply it was it was an unchallenged thing and so it was he spoke it away and it was not a service to him in the same way he would report his delusions to his professors and they all he didn&#39;t report all of them he but he would tell them the story it was very heroic story and it was and that when he woke up his bed was on fire and his father would talk him through the Flames but they would tell each other that story and they all told it to me now whether that I mean whether many other things happened or that was just the story that served for all the others at one point he told the dean um this morning I thought my bed was on fire and I thought you were the devil and when the dean reported this to his daughter who was training to be a psychiatrist and working with mentally ill homeless people she said dad you have no idea what you&#39;re talking about because he was saying it&#39;s I didn&#39;t realize how neurotic and he had come out of that world of psychoanalytic language and thinking where everything is on a Continuum how neurotic people with schizophrenia could be and she said dad you have no idea what you&#39;re talking about and so they simply didn&#39;t meaning that they said that they didn&#39;t take him seriously they didn&#39;t understand the consequences of someone suffering through those delusions that this is not just merely an anecdote an interesting story but that we&#39;re really dealing with a very sick person and we have no idea what could happen since we&#39;re in custody where custodians of a very sick person and it&#39;s not because he comes in and entertains us with these very interesting delusions but that maybe there&#39;s something we&#39;re missing that we that through our good intentions that we don&#39;t anticipate that might happen yes which doesn&#39;t mean of course that stigma isn&#39;t real and it doesn&#39;t mean it isn&#39;t terrible but doesn&#39;t wait does it mean though I&#39;m sorry does it mean that in your mind Yale law school well this oh I don&#39;t know how to answer that except to say two things one is the doctors who recommended that he work at something um on that they considered mentally untaxing when he was still in a halfway house uh was not a permanent sentence to do something beneath him but he always told but he had because he had already gotten into Yale law school which he had applied to before his psychotic break but he would always say why would I bag groceries or work at Macy&#39;s if I could be a Yale loss Professor but one of his professors said to me and and one who was a very good Mentor to him and kind said to me I never thought he would be come a Yale law professor because he couldn&#39;t do the work I thought he would be someone who had been to Yale law school and could then be an advocate for people with schizophrenia right so here&#39;s Michael saying why would I do this when I could be a Yale law when I could be a Yale lawyer that was the phrase being a lawyer was why he went there and the people accommodating him didn&#39;t share with him their sense that he actually could not and so their accommodation of him which was an act of kindness was actually creating a gap between reality and his perception of it that wasn&#39;t the product of his illness it was the product of an accommodation that almost seemed to believe that if we act like it so it will become so and at what point would he notice you know and also Michael in this set in this sense this kid was always the Golden Boy so he would never think that I couldn&#39;t become what I want to become right and why would he not think that he was limited by his disease yeah the professors might think he&#39;s limited but he wouldn&#39;t but this makes me think of something else I really want to talk about because both of you wanted the same career path as writers seems to me Jonathan there are two major breakdowns of your childhood friend and they&#39;re both related to failures about writing they&#39;re both interestingly related the actual mental breakdowns the first was Michael Lauder who it always is the best of the best is being rejected for every short story to the rights he&#39;s Plastering his walls with rejections and that in the the aftermath of that there&#39;s a breakdown and the second one that ultimately leads to the the death of his fiancee is that he can&#39;t seem to write the book he was paid six hundred thousand dollars to write for the same reason he couldn&#39;t do the work at Yale and so when you use the word stressors you know I wonder whether that&#39;s the idea which was that maybe Macy&#39;s was the better job that putting this kind of pressure on an unmedicated man is going to lead to unbelievable stress and delusions well he was when he was medicated he still wasn&#39;t able presumably to do the work but he was people did genuinely didn&#39;t know he was ill um but it is the case that it would have been much better and uh for him to be in a low stress Place initially Ironically in a sense Yale was as close to an Old-Fashioned Asylum it was a walled Community with a green interior he said as much in the times which was a very interesting way of putting it he said it&#39;s the most you know it&#39;s the best mental health facility care facility in the country um but the implication there of course is that everybody is in the same situation but there was no place for him to go really and um and that&#39;s part of the problem also but it is the case that destigmatization is also something that can only come by acknowledging the the reality of his illness I mean it was an enormous Advance the very Enlightenment that for Foucault is is the nightmare period um that you instead of being seen as demonically possessed or instead of your illness being judged a character flaw you are you&#39;re seen as someone who has an illness like diabetes like any other illness for which actually there are very successful um no not cures but treatments not for everyone some people are resistant to the medication and that it&#39;s unpleasant I well believe um it&#39;s just that it&#39;s um to the the the fear that even acknowledging that it is in fact something other than the same as everything is part of the problem I kept discovering and encountering you know we live in a culture where discrimination used to have two kinds of meanings to make a distinction and to make a distinction and use that distinction to demean or oppress somebody but now even making the distinction is often seen or people fear that it might imply that they are doing something um inappropriate whereas life is all about the distinctions it and they&#39;re not permanent distinctions when I take this I am this way later I might not need to do that you know but people were busy making blanket statements um and that also did not in the end help him in in any way so in reading your book on the public policy piece because all of us are now concerned when we&#39;re talking about gun control school shootings this issue you know this book is very timely because it forces us to take a real hard look at mental illness and what we should do about it so for instance there&#39;s a community the psychoanalysts of Westchester who were his friends and community and they believed that the asylums the mental institutions were bad and that they believed that they should be deed institutionalized and in the end these community health centers either didn&#39;t materialize or didn&#39;t work but I don&#39;t I wonder whether you&#39;re of two minds there there&#39;s a conflict their intention on the one hand you want people to experience the freedom human autonomy not to be put away for life in an institution uh you want to give them a choice but if you give them the choice they may be a danger to society similarly if you give people the choice to medicate or not medicate they may be a danger to society so how what in your mind you know I mean frankly Jonathan I think you should testify in front of Congress after writing this book I think you&#39;d have some interesting things to say so why don&#39;t you tell us what would you say to Congress Mr Rosen you know your book has a lot of interesting ideas but what would you say should we make more hospitals should we get more beds should we hire more psychiatrists should we mandate should we make it so that we can require people to stay in the hospital even against their will should we force them to take meds well those are all the right questions but they&#39;re not again blanket statements it&#39;s really important to know that there&#39;s a tiny percent there&#39;s a small percentage of people with severe mental illnesses and though of that percentage there&#39;s a sub-fraction of people who do not think of themselves as ill as a symptom of their illness are unresponsive to medication or refuse to take it so it&#39;s important not to think that there&#39;s a grand group of people within all of that there are people far better schooled in this than I am to speak yes there need to be more hospital beds Medicaid perversely doesn&#39;t cover people in state long-term care psychiatric hospitals in other words I&#39;m sorry if you&#39;re in a state hospital or a long-term care regardless of your age and you&#39;re you don&#39;t get that&#39;s not covered right but that&#39;s and everyone understands that needs to be fixed but there was a time the the this is again a little piece of history but one worth knowing State hospitals had grown into a a terrible State they were overcrowded understaffed medication did come along in the 50s but the people who dreamed of community Psychiatry wanted it to be federally funded the states had been helping and caring for people with psychiatric disorders for over a hundred years but the Temptation in these were psychoanalysts not people who worked with the severely ill to turn State hospitals into the best deal that had to be torn down rather than preserved and reformed is part of the problem they would have become much smaller they were already becoming much smaller when Ronald Reagan who vowed to shut down all the state hospitals in California became governor in 68 they were half empty already and so in a way they were there was an organic movement but the fantasy that this would be a whole new project you start with the year zero and the year zero where community Mental Health Centers but they were not catering to everyone was an aspect of the problem and the thing that brought this home to me was reading a memoir by a young by a Sakai he was then a young psychologist who ran the community mental health program in Baltimore in inner city Baltimore and they were very idealistic they thought mental illness was caused by poverty by marginalization by oppression by racism and they had only a handful of beds and all their efforts they thought should go to helping ordinary people living under hard Urban conditions but there were people just as oppressed and just as marginalized who had the misfortune of having a son or a sister or a father who had a psychotic break and what did they do he says well we avoided that group and the group released from hospitals they called the cops and so you see it being set up in this at that very moment that idealistic moment being severely ill is being criminalized and then they were taken if they were lucky first to jail where you&#39;re living in Terror because you&#39;re unmedicated and you have to sit for 24 hours if you&#39;re lucky you&#39;ll be admitted maybe to a state hospital but the laws all changed because the civil liberties sort of mental illness uh bar with also not knowing the reality of people who are severely ill saw it only as a civil liberties issue and slammed the door behind everyone and so what has to be acknowledged is the nature of illness as it affects people who are too ill to care for themselves and don&#39;t know they&#39;re ill the only thing I&#39;d say is my friend had had resources if you look at this world and say who is likely to have resources um and he killed someone he shouldn&#39;t have killed Jordan Neely someone we&#39;re all talking about did not have resources in a sense although we had the city&#39;s resources um and he was killed and shouldn&#39;t have been killed and the the hole that affected both of them is the same hole and it is if I give it you know if you give when people used to ask me what&#39;s your policy recommendation it was like with Soldier knitson said don&#39;t lie don&#39;t pretend it&#39;s something it isn&#39;t as a way of imagining you can alter the reality and spare people&#39;s feelings have a conversation don&#39;t tell people what it is but be open to the possibility that there are terrible illnesses for which there may be remedies and the more we talk about it we hope the better they&#39;ll be but start that way because otherwise if you say as Thomas says is the anti-psychiatrist said when I was in an undergraduate and a woman froze to death in a box it would have been cruel to bring her to the hospital because mental illness is a myth and he defended her right to die there because he felt he was defending his own civil liberties that was actually exploiting someone who did not know what she was doing as her daughter came forward and spoke about and she could have been helped and wasn&#39;t and so it&#39;s only callousness to make a virtue of it is worse stepping over the person is one thing bad enough but to pretend that it&#39;s an exalted state or a choice when it isn&#39;t is is to invert reality and and that I think is a Dreadful thing so start that way that&#39;s all I&#39;d say and then get people and I can tell you who they are who do know what policies need to be changed not to spend more money on fewer people but but the book that does such a wonderful job of identifying different categories of where the same conclusion is being made that we shouldn&#39;t be interfering with someone&#39;s personal freedom that that you know eat mental illness is not really it doesn&#39;t really exist right people who ignore the problem and don&#39;t understand the magnitude of the suffering and the illness itself it is just an endless parade in the book of seeing what you just described when I visited Michael in a locked Ward it and I was a graduate student I knew the second I saw him that he was not suffering from a socially constructed constructed disorder that he had that some that he had an illness and that is a piece of it and I also knew or feared and now I really know that people who thought they were honoring his autonomy were in fact denying it and his roommate in college a wonderful guy who died young before I could talk to him with left three young children on his deathbed wept for Carrie and said all we did was worry that Michael was being treated fairly and being given his due and we forgot about her and um I didn&#39;t want to forget about her in the book and I worked very hard to make her present because there are real consequences uh to everyone&#39;s choices and they&#39;re good intentions not all good intentions are bad but the ones built on hopeful fantasies are um there&#39;s a there&#39;s a revelation in the book uh toward the end and it made me also wonder whether it was also part of the impulse in writing it which is that you know you know you&#39;re not a doctor you&#39;re not you know you&#39;re you&#39;re just you know this was your friend your childhood friend and apparently you did speak to him a few days before he killed Kerry and this happened with a number of other people where he just said something you know intimated something or gave someone a look and people just got a sense the shutter a feeling that was the policewoman in Cornell and Ithaca you know they got a sense that something is not right and maybe you can just you know tell us what Michael said on that last call well it was a couple of weeks before he killed Carrie and we talked periodically we had sometimes we would agree to get together but we didn&#39;t and I probably have hoped or more than half hoped we wouldn&#39;t but we were talking and suddenly abruptly he said I have to go now I&#39;m having thoughts I shouldn&#39;t be having and so I got off the phone and I put it out of my mind and I am ashamed of that of course I what I what would I have done what I&#39;ve run you know because in fact a crisis intervention team the week before he killed Carrie had come to the door and Michael had answered the door and taking the card and thanked them and sent them on their way and said he would call but he was charismatic and convincing and it was very hard to know that you&#39;re not in the presence of a very sick man but I&#39;m ashamed in front of myself for having accepted uh something that was not right and when I actually spoke about it um at the talk I gave at the Jewish Museum someone came up to me who said she had the exact same experience right as well she she was friends with his family and she had spoken to him and she felt why didn&#39;t I do something many many people the world of aftermath is very different from the world before before we say goodnight to the audience his editor had also the same experience he apparently took a train up to see him uh and at some point Michael just said it&#39;s time for you to go and the mood changed everything changed and there became a moment where the editor was be felt fearful that that this was a different guy who opened the door and welcomed me in from the guy I&#39;m about to leave uh before we say goodnight to Jonathan Rosen I think we&#39;ve got a couple just quick announcements we&#39;ve got a upcoming event of course go to the chat box so you can get the link to buy it as I said this should be your summer read um it&#39;s a phenomenal book and as I said it&#39;s a book that covers so much territory and does and it&#39;s told in such an engaging compelling compulsive read don&#39;t miss don&#39;t miss this book for the summer uh we have an upcoming event there we go our annual law of the land at 92nd Street y uh where we go over in the most uh with civilians we basically go over the big cases of the Supreme Court for the year uh it tends to be one of the more popular things that we do uh and we have journalists you can see in the middle there&#39;s Adam Lochte from The New York Times on the far right is Dalia from Slate and it&#39;s sort of a sort of a raucous hour of talking about what the Supreme Court did uh see yep uh if you haven&#39;t signed up yet for receiving information about folks please go to polks.org and artists and tell sign up for email list and of course if you enjoyed today tonight and all of our other programs we always want you to be among your favorite Charities Jonathan uh we&#39;ve been friends for a very long time I think it&#39;s important that I point out for anyone watching who thinks that I have any value as a non-fiction writer of essays and reviews this man discovered me I wrote my very first book review for Jonathan and I remembered when he assigned it to me how excited I was and I was especially excited when I finished my first assignment I was already in my 30s I wasn&#39;t a kid and I will never forget coming home and open to playing the answering machine where Jonathan said I really like what you wrote I hope you&#39;ll keep writing for us and Jonathan I cannot tell you how important that was at that time and I I tell people all the time you you got me started as a non-fiction writer and I&#39;m very beholden to you your words of encouragement you were always a great writer a terrific editor and friend but I trusted you if you&#39;ve wanted me to keep doing it maybe I would maybe I should have left that Wall Street law firm and continue to be writing so thank you my friend thank you so much for having me and circling back to that time and and to being here with me now I&#39;m really grateful Jonathan I was very touched by this book it&#39;s I felt like I knew you more and better in different ways it&#39;s a very revealing very brave book and I hope people will read it and talk about it because they should Jonathan uh good luck on the on the book tours I&#39;m Thane Rosenbaum for folks until next time good night thank you good night

Transcript for:Lecture Summary: Jonathan Rosen's 'The Best Minds'

Transcript for:
Lecture Summary: Jonathan Rosen's 'The Best Minds'