Author chronicles a friend’s descent into madness, and society’s failure to save him
In ‘The Best Minds,’ Jonathan Rosen examines how shifts in perception of mental illness and its treatment contributed to schizophrenic man killing his fiancée in a psychotic rage
Jonathan Rosen’s childhood best friend Michael Laudor had always been brilliant. He read amazingly fast and had a photographic memory. In middle and high school he effortlessly achieved top grades, and he breezed through Yale undergrad in just three years. Even after exhibiting paranoia, undergoing a psychotic break, and being diagnosed with schizophrenia in his early 20s, he graduated from Yale Law School.
This tale of triumph against all odds was picked up by The New York Times and literary agents offered Laudor book deals. Hollywood director Ron Howard optioned the film rights and Brad Pitt was lined up to star.
Then, in a June 1998 headline-grabbing event Laudor, aged 35, brutally killed his pregnant fiancée Caroline Costello during a psychotic episode.
It was a horrifying act that was extremely difficult for Rosen to process, and it took many years until he felt ready to delve into the story.
In his skillfully written new book, “The Best Minds: A Story of Friendship, Madness, and the Tragedy of Good Intentions,” Rosen combines memoir with extensive journalistic research and reporting to piece together the circumstances by which Laudor went from golden boy to inmate in a secure forensic psychiatric center to this day.
It meant going back to his childhood when he and his friend dreamed of becoming writers. Both were talented and smart and they were competitive, with Rosen (hampered by learning disabilities and anxiety) always feeling that he was the tortoise to his friend’s hare.
“We used to think of our minds as our ‘inner rocket ships’ that would take us anywhere we wanted in life,” Rosen told The Times of Israel.
“But then Michael lost his mind and did this terrible thing,” Rosen said.
In a recent conversation from his home in New York, Rosen, author of four other books and a former editor at The Forward and Nextbook, said there was no way for him to approach the story other than to take readers back to Mereland Road in New Rochelle, NY.
That was where he and Laudor grew up as neighbors, both Jewish with professor fathers (Rosen’s was a Holocaust survivor). Rosen’s mother was a writer and best friends with acclaimed author Cynthia Ozick, who also lived in town.
By the time Rosen was ready and had figured out how to write the story, he realized it would have to be very different from how it had already been told, notably through the tabloid press. Part of his work would be to counteract those sensational accounts.
As he began writing, the backbone of Rosen’s narrative took form, and it was from his own — and not his mentally ill murderer friend’s — perspective.
“I decided to go back to a time before any of those things had happened, but to charge the book with the consciousness of how it unfolds so that it takes place against the dark backdrop of what is to come but preserves the spontaneity of life unfolding,” Rosen said.
“I wanted to allow people to experience with me what it was like to simply be present,” he said.
Rosen shared that his editor was very helpful by encouraging him to write “The Best Minds” in the way one might write a novel — “not by making things up, but by imagining your way, almost feelingly into every situation.”
The author shows that what happened to his childhood best friend was a product of how changing philosophical, cultural, economic, social, and legal approaches to mental illness conspired against him.
In the second half of the 20th century, the mentally ill were being deinstitutionalized and shifted to community-based care. This didn’t necessarily mean it was the best option for all sick individuals, or that there were sufficient infrastructure and resources available. Laudor was fortunate in that he had a familial and communal safety net that prevented him from ending up homeless on the streets like so many others.
Some individuals with schizophrenia Rosen interviewed have led good, normal lives. However, community-based care did not prove sufficient for Laudor. Although he made it through law school with accommodations put in place by professors and administrators with the best moral intentions, he could not work as an attorney or professor after that. The pressures of writing a memoir (which he never managed to do) were too much for him. He stopped taking his medication, but there wasn’t anything anyone could do — including the woman he loved and who was devoted to him.
Laudor had the support of a group of psychiatrists and psychologists who as Rosen said, “were the products and creators of [the mental healthcare] world at the time.”
In retrospect, their approach failed him. He didn’t need his schizophrenia to be perceived as a cultural metaphor for the problems and power imbalances in capitalist society, as philosopher Michel Foucault posited. Nor was his mental illness a myth or an elevated spiritual state, as some suggested.
He did not benefit from being seen as the person he was before he fell ill, the young man who could do anything he put his mind to. His mind was no longer the same, and he could therefore no longer be the same as he had been. Only one professional within the circle of those caring for him was willing to fully admit this, but her voice was drowned out by the others.
“Going into this, I was so ignorant about mental illness not only as a medical reality but as an irresistible metaphor woven into the backdrop of our childhood, what the 60s and 70s had wrought… The idea that a cultural mood had been translated into policies, and policies become law, and the law further influenced the culture which led to other laws. These were vast systems which I never thought about,” Rosen said.
“It was hard enough to have to think about neuroscience, but I had no idea about the interaction of culture, law, policy, and psychiatry — and how they all married at a certain point,” he said.
Rosen noted that at times the story seemed like a murder mystery as he tried to distinguish exactly who or what was at fault for what happened to Laudor and his fiancée Carrie. There were so many contributing elements to tease apart, understand, and weigh.
“But at a certain moment, blame ceased, and anger ceased to be a driving force. I had all those emotions, but enough time had passed,” he said.
Still, his readers are left contemplating the catastrophe that resulted from the system’s betrayal not only of Laudor, but also of Carrie.
“People thought they were honoring his autonomy, but they were betraying it and were leaving him to his illness and sacrificing her,” Rosen said.
Rosen writes about visiting Laudor in the locked forensic psychiatric facility (he was found mentally unfit to stand trial). However, the author has never interviewed his childhood friend, who still has not internalized the fact that he murdered his beloved.
“Because it would have been a false assent or permission. I did tell him that I was writing about our lives, but he did not acknowledge that he had killed Carrie, or even that she was dead, so in a sense, that was more for my sake,” he said.
“I never thought that he had an explanation that he was going to give me or anything like that. And, so when I visited, it was just to be there,” he added.
One comes away from “The Best Minds” with the sense that it is ultimately about Rosen’s attempt to come to terms with the fact that he dodged a bullet that hit Laudor and that his inner struggles and competitiveness blinded him to what was befalling his friend.
“Instead of simply accepting myself enough to notice what was really happening around me, I allowed myself to always feel like the tortoise and turned him into the hare no matter what,” Rosen said.
“The hare had run off a cliff and I was still trying to catch him.”
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