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

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4.2 • 727 Ratings

🗓️ 17 July 2024

⏱️ 56 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

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 Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

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0:30.2	From KQED.
0:31.2	Thank you. From KQED in San Francisco, I'm Nina Kim. Jonathan Rosen's book, The Best Minds, has received attention and acclaim since it came out last year, a New York Times 10 best of the year, a finalist for the 24 Pulitzer Prize.
1:00.6	It's Rosen's account of his friendship with Michael Lauder, who gained fame for being a Yale Law School graduate with schizophrenia, then made headlines for murder.
1:10.6	Through Lauder's descent to a maximum security psychiatric hospital, Rosen reveals the
1:14.4	failures of deinstitutionalization, despite good intentions.
1:18.3	We'll talk to him about reckoning with the making of our modern mental health care
1:21.5	system, the obligations of childhood friends, and their response to his book.
1:26.7	Join us. Welcome to Forum. I'm Mina Kim.
1:35.4	In his memoir called The Best Minds, Jonathan Rosen says his childhood and that of his best friend
1:41.5	Michael Lauders was shaped by the belief that being smart was your ticket,
1:46.4	that your brain, he writes, is your rocket ship, and that simply as a matter of course,
1:51.1	you're going to climb inside and blast off.
1:54.5	Rosen and Lauder made it to Yale, aspired to be writers, and in Laudder's case, went on to graduate
1:59.9	from Yale Law School when he was profiled by the New York Times in 1995 as a brilliant schizophrenic.
	...

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