The Best Minds: A Story of Friendship, Madness, and the Tragedy of Good Intentions

“Failing to complete one rite of passage kept me from participating in others, compounding the feeling of ineptitude while Michael raced ahead, in tune with the spirit of the age even as he marched to his own drummer.”

The author highlights The Dynamics of Friendship as he describes his feelings of inferiority in comparison to Michael. Jonathan’s disastrous bar mitzvah is just one of many incidents where he feels outperformed by his friend. While the relationship is one of competitive rivalry, Jonathan never feels like the winner.

“But the fact that I had found him spectating hung over us both, and our different fates and fortunes divided us.”

The Dynamics of Friendship is again illustrated as a childhood incident causes a rift between Jonathan and Michael. Michael’s decision to watch Jonathan being beaten up from a distance instead of coming to his aid creates unspoken tension in the relationship.

“We carried the world of each other’s childhood in our pockets like a kryptonite pebble, a fragment of the home planet.”

Jonathan and Michael drift apart as they get older but retain a profound bond rooted in the shared experiences of their childhood. The author figuratively compares this bond to a piece of rock from Superman’s home planet that they carry at all times.

“Michael had been the hare to my tortoise for so long that part of me still attributed to him all his old powers and motivations. Even now I half assumed he’d only stretched out for a nap and would be up and running again soon.”

Here, the author describes his difficulty in processing the effects of Michael’s mental illness. Drawing on the symbolism of the tortoise and the hare (See: Symbols & Motifs), he explains that his relative slowness compared to Michael’s brilliance has been the constant dynamic of their friendship. Despite Jonathan’s shock at Michael’s dramatically altered state in the hospital, he struggles to believe the condition is permanent.

“Michael had always been dazzlingly logical and he still almost was, except that his formidable intellect was in the employ of an irrational idea.”

Exploring The Nature and Impact of Mental Illness, Rosen describes how Michael’s extreme intelligence is channeled into his paranoid delusions. His exceptional reasoning skills mean that friends and family are sometimes convinced by his implausible claims.

“The woman who brought him pills wasn’t Nurse Ratched, and he wasn’t Randle McMurphy locked up for being a wiseass. He was in a hospital because he was ill.”

Here, the author addresses misleading cultural Attitudes Toward Mental Illness, as embodied in Ken Kesey’s 1962 novel One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest. Rosen points out the disparity between Kesey’s portrayal of psychiatric hospitals and their patients and the reality, as experienced by Michael.

“Michael had gotten sick amid the ruins of a demolished system. The wall dividing many things—including the asylum and the street—had come down while we were growing up. So had the distinction between severe mental illness and what Freud called ‘the psychotherapy of everyday life.’”

Rosen explains how the peak of Michael’s mental illness coincides with the systematic failings of America’s mental healthcare system. While many psychiatric hospitals close, there are few treatment facilities to replace them. The author suggests this situation is exacerbated by pervasive ideologies that serve to minimize the symptoms of severe mental illness.

“I didn’t want to be my brother’s keeper. Even before I said goodbye, part of me was already on the far side of the heavy door, racing for home.”

The author uses the Biblical motif of Cain and Abel to acknowledge his selfish urge to abandon Michael when he falls seriously ill (See: Symbols & Motifs). Like Cain, he does not want the responsibility of being his “brother’s keeper.” His eagerness to get away from the psychiatric hospital illustrates The Nature and Impact of Mental Illness on friends and loved ones.

“At some point it became impossible to ignore the way a metaphorical version of mental illness had been institutionalized in academic life at the same moment that people who suffered from actual psychotic disorders were being released from hospitals and forgotten, as if the university and the asylum had organized a sort of exchange program.”

Here Rosen explores the correlation between cultural Attitudes Toward Mental Illness and the deterioration of mental health treatment. The author suggests that the frequent use of “madness as a metaphor” in academic theory contributed to downplaying the severe symptoms of serious mental illnesses.

“Hardest of all was to realize that the answers of a moment could not substitute for the slow, hard, complicated, and imperfect work of providing daily practical care for patients whose rights had finally been recognized but whose illness could itself seem like a violation of their reason and will.”

Here, the author contrasts society’s desire for a straightforward cure for mental illness and the realities of treating it. He suggests that while enforced medication can seem like a violation of human rights, severe mental illnesses often deprive individuals of their ability to assess their own needs.

“I felt sympathy, aversion, affection, and fear in unfamiliar and shifting combinations. His collar was half-up and half-down. I wanted to smooth it all down for him, or lift up the other half, but did neither.”

Exploring The Nature and Impact of Mental Illness, Rosen describes the uncomfortable mix of emotions Michael’s illness evokes in him. The author admits that as well as feeling love and pity for his friend, he is also afraid of him. His urge to adjust Michael’s collar expresses the desire to comfort his friend but an uncertainty about how to do so.

“He had studied economics with a winner of the Nobel Prize and was being told how to make a budget and balance his checkbook. That he couldn’t concentrate long enough to do either only made the assumption that he did not know how all the more painful.”

Here, The Nature and Impact of Mental Illness on Michael is illustrated. His experiences at a halfway house after leaving the hospital bring home the downward trajectory of his life. While Michael’s cognitive functioning is severely impaired, he feels demeaned and infantilized by the basic life skills taught there.

“The young man had needed psychiatric help but had received legal help. Now he needed legal help. Perhaps in jail he would receive psychiatric help.”

Rosen exposes the dark ironies of the mental healthcare system through the case of a young man who was released from involuntary hospitalization after well-intentioned legal intervention. Once freed, the young man burned down his family’s trailer, killing his parents and brother. The example highlights the risks of prioritizing liberty over psychiatric needs.

“Good news could wreak as much havoc as misfortune, and a new job could prove as destabilizing as the failure to find one.”

Examining The Nature and Impact of Mental Illness, the text outlines why Michael’s meteoric success ultimately contributes to a second mental health crisis. Rosen explains that both negative and positive events can exacerbate the symptoms of paranoid schizophrenia.

“One problem, perhaps, was that Michael was a story before he had become a writer. Even when he appeared to be the narrator, other people were telling his tale.”

Rosen describes how Michael loses control of his narrative in more ways than one. His illness means his life’s direction is taken out of his hands. Meanwhile, Hollywood’s version of his life threatens to become the story that defines him. Michael’s inability to write his memoir reflects the pressure he feels to get his narrative right.

“To bust stigma, you had to be honest about the actual illness; otherwise, someone would harness it to a lawn mower.”

Here, the author addresses Attitudes Toward Mental Health. Referring to an advertisement for a “schizophrenic lawnmower,” Rosen argues that misleading representations of mental illness (whether positive or negative) all contribute to society’s miscomprehension of the subject.

“To see Michael looking out from the far side of that black-and-white tabloid window like the Son of Sam, or anyone else we were never supposed to be, was shocking.”

Throughout the text, the author highlights how people with mental illnesses who commit violent crimes are portrayed in the press. Here, he compares the way tabloids demonize Michael after he kills Carrie to stories about the Son of Sam during their childhood. The comparison highlights the theme of Attitudes Toward Mental Illness.

“Michael’s assault on Ellen Brewer had rewired her brain with a single punch, inducing PTSD, a mental illness, though a treatable one, which caused her to see his furious face on an endless nightmare loop.”

When Michael kills Carrie, his actions are shown to cause trauma to a wide circle of individuals. One of them is Officer Ellen Brewer who experiences post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) and significant injuries after Michael attacks her. Officer Brewer’s long-lasting symptoms demonstrate The Nature and Impact of Mental Illness.

“Years before, Michael had run away and left me to get pummeled. Now it was my turn. I was already running, and had, in fact, been running for a long time.”

A pivotal incident in Jonathan and Michael’s childhood friendship occurs when Jonathan is beaten up and Michael runs away. Jonathan feels betrayed and loses trust in Michael. Later in life, this dynamic is reversed as Jonathan metaphorically runs away from Michael’s mental illness.

“Now that he’d killed the person he loved most in the world, and would live forever on the far side of tragedy, it was no longer necessary to prove that he was an imminent danger to himself or others to get the care and medication he needed. The state, eager to have him fit to stand trial for murder, would provide him with both.”

Here, Rosen highlights the flaws in the mental healthcare system that contribute to Michael’s fate. While Michael is clearly experiencing psychosis before killing Carrie, an assessment that he is not imminently dangerous means he is not hospitalized. The author emphasizes the irony of a system that offers treatment only after the worst happens.

“His illness was torn repeatedly from its medical context by overheated tabloid prose, but it had long been distorted by premodern ideas of demonic possession, postmodern ideas of social construction, Sigmund Freud’s metaphors, Joseph Campbell’s mythology, and Michel Foucault’s obsessions with power and control.”

Here, the author examines cultural Attitudes Toward Mental Health and how they contribute to public misunderstanding of the condition. Rosen acknowledges that tabloid newspapers play a part in spreading misinformation. However, he also points to academic philosophies that often trivialize the severity of diseases such as paranoid schizophrenia.

“Were the extravagant measures of meritocratic success that Michael and I had always striven for really the markers of ‘victory’ over a debilitating thought disorder, as if Yale and Hollywood certified mental health? Did they matter more than the extraordinary strength needed to take slow steps along an uncertain path, enduring treatments that were always trade-offs, never cures, which made the struggle all the more courageous because the journey never ended and the battle was never won.”

Rosen interrogates the markers of “success” in American society as he considers Michael’s rise and fall. Presenting Michael’s daily battle with incurable paranoid schizophrenia as a heroic journey, he suggests that this endurance is more impressive than his friend’s academic success or fame. Examining The Nature and Impact of Mental Illness, the author conveys the day-to-day effects of such conditions that are rarely represented.

“Michael had gone from being an exemplar to a cautionary tale. He could not go back to being the first, but could he perhaps be both?”

In the aftermath of Carrie’s death, discussions take place about whether the movie of Michael’s life can still be made. The author points out that in scrapping the project, movie executives reject the opportunity to portray the realities of mental illness in an honest way. Rosen’s book attempts to redress this failure.