Welcome back to the re-education. Today's show is an interview only with the great Jonathan Rosen, his new book, The Best Minds, a story of friendship madness, and the tragedy of good intention, is a page turner.

And our discussion today focuses on kind of the history of how madness has been treated in America since the 19th century.

It is a terrific conversation. Please stay tuned.

Well, reeducation listeners, we have a real treat. One of my favorite writers and a friend, Jonathan Rosen, his new memoir, and it's much more than a memoir. It's a memoir in history called The Best Minds is a must read. And we are going to talk today about the idea of madness and how this concept of madness or insanity has evolved in our society over the last hundred years or so.

So Jonathan, with that, thank you so much for coming on the reeducation.

It's been a long time coming.

I've wanted you on for a while.

Really glad to be here.

So I want to start with one of the things I loved about your book is that you unpack some of the intellectual conceits that led to major policy changes.

So I want to start with how did we treat mental illness in our country, say, in 1950?

And how did that change over the 20 years between, say, 1950 and 1970?

So 1950 is an interesting time to start because that was a transitional moment.

There were asylums.

It's worth pausing to say that asylums were created in the 19th century as a wonderful act of reform

because before they were built, people who were mentally ill were shoved into basements and chained

to walls and to get the devil out of them. And people like Dorothea Dix, who was an amazing

Protestant reformer, not a reformer of Protestantism, but a Christian reformer whose father was alcoholic and maybe homeless for a time, went around to every state in the union and persuaded the governor that a civilization worthy of the name needs a place where people can be

sheltered from the storm.

And so it's the reason why that's important as a small backstory is because before that happened,

what were really snake pits were the places people were shoved or kept or discarded when there were no places for them and it was seen

as a moral failing. There was no concept of it being an illness. Now, there were no cures, but what

was offered was called moral care. And these were beautiful places. They were built like libraries

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