Nursing Book Club
The Best Minds by Jonathan Rosen
A Story of Friendship, Madness, and the Tragedy of Good Intentions
The Best Minds is a revealing memoir about mental illness and the author’s friendship with Michael Laudor, whose long struggle with schizophrenia culminated in the murder of his pregnant girlfriend.
I found my copy shelved with the memoirs at my local bookstore, but it’s really two stories in one.
The first might be familiar if you’re old enough to remember the headlines: Michael Laudor, who seemingly overcame debilitating schizophrenia to become a Yale Law School graduate and mental health advocate, stabbed his pregnant fiancée to death during an episode.
Author Jonathan Rosen was Laudor’s childhood friend. They grew up together in an upscale neighborhood of Westchester, N.Y., and both went on to Yale University. Even when they were teenagers, Laudor was always the golden boy, but his success hit a big snag in his 20s, when he began to suffer from severe schizophrenia, leading to a lengthy psychiatric hospitalization.
After his release, Laudor applied to Yale Law School, whose dean was welcoming and encouraging, actually coming personally to help Laudor move into the dorm. The school later offered Laudor an associate position. His success story made the newspapers, and he started writing a memoir, which he optioned to director Ron Howard. Laudor also planned to marry his girlfriend Carrie Costello, whom he’d met as an undergraduate.
But tragically, in June 1998, he turned himself in after fatally stabbing Costello while in the throes of severe paranoid delusions. The court found him unfit to stand trial, so he was sent to a maximum-security psychiatric hospital. He is still there today.
No Simple Answers
In The Best Minds, Rosen describes his relationship with Laudor and his misgivings about a friend he didn’t fully understand or help.
He also tells another story, which is equally interesting: the history of how mental illness is treated and the shifting standards regarding custodial care.
Definitions of mental illness have changed through the centuries, as has the care offered. In 1963, President Kennedy signed the Community Mental Health Act, which wasintended to release patients from what had become rat-infested asylums, to seek care from community mental health centers in “more humane and therapeutic ways.”
That shift had unforeseen outcomes. Mental health was always underfunded; no cure for schizophrenia has been found; families and friends often find caring for patients an exhausting fulltime job; and some patients can become dangerous, even if they had previously been doing well.
There are no simple answers. As Rosen says, there is no going back to the previous system of housing patients in asylums, and yet the death of Carrie Costello shows that the utopian vision of community care is also imperfect. He hopes that his Pulitzer Prize finalist book can help to start new conversations on how we as a hopeful society can move forward.
The Best Minds: A Story of Friendship, Madness, and the Tragedy of Good Intentions, by Jonathan Rosen (Penguin Random House, 2023)
CHRISTINE CONTILLO, RN, BSN, PHN, is a public health nurse with more than 40 years of experience, ranging from infants to geriatrics.
In this Article: Mental and behavioral health
