Jonathan Rosen on His Childhood Best Friend’s Schizophrenia and the ‘Tragedy of Good Intentions’

KQED's Forum

Jonathan Rosen’s memoir “The Best Minds: A Story of Friendship, Madness, and the Tragedy of Good Intentions” was a 2024 Pulitzer Prize finalist and named a Top 10 Best Book of the Year by the New York Times, the Wall Street Journal, the Atlantic and Slate. It tells the story of Rosen’s childhood friendship with Michael Laudor, their teenage competition and years spent together at Yale, where Laudor stands out as a genius and academic superstar. After Laudor is diagnosed with schizophrenia, he seems poised to be “exceptional” in this way as well — successfully navigating his illness while transitioning from a locked psychiatric ward to Yale Law School. But his path with schizophrenia isn’t linear, and a violent crime he commits thrusts dominant narratives about mental health and the gaps in our healthcare system into the limelight. We’ll talk with Rosen about those gaps, how “good intentions” failed to provide a meaningful replacement for deinstitutionalization and the evolution of how we talk about schizophrenia.

Guests:

Jonathan Rosen, author, "The Best Minds: A Story of Friendship, Madness, and the Tragedy of Good Intentions" - which was a 2024 Pulitzer Prize Finalist in Memoir or Autobiography and named a Top 10 Best Book of the Year by The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, The Atlantic and Slate