The Best Minds is a coruscating indictment of psychiatric services for psychotic patients in the US. It is also a moving and shocking account of the trajectory of Jonathan Rosen’s childhood best friend, Michael Laudor, struck in his youth by schizophrenia, and whose starry ascent through Yale law school to spokesman for stigmatised patients with psychosis plummeted dramatically when he relapsed, with catastrophic results.
Schizophrenia is terrifying for the sufferer, characterised as it is by a distortion of reality brought about through paranoid delusions and auditory hallucinations. Those who wrinkle their noses and sneer ‘crazy’ need only gently press their closed eyelids to experience transient visual hallucinations of flashing lights. Now imagine instead if that flash were a constant stream of voices telling you that people were trying to kill you, and a conviction that you were being monitored and about to be harmed.
Rosen, who has suffered from anxiety himself, evidently has huge empathy for those with mental illness.
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