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

Michael quits Bain and returns to New Rochelle to become a writer. He works as a part-time telemarketer and plays guitar at a bookstore called Riverrun in the evening. Michael believes that his parents’ phone has been tapped by his former employers. He also claims that musicians from Riverrun have been following him home. Worried about his behavior, his mother, Ruth, worries Michael may be involved in a cult. The potential danger of cults was recently highlighted by the Jonestown mass murder-suicide.

Michael spends a lot of time at the Gatsby House with Jane Ferber. Jane is well-known for taking in people struggling with mental illness. As well as working at a mental health center, Jane heads “the Network.” She and the rest of the Network developed their ideology in the 1960s. They believe that patients should be freed from prison-like state psychiatric institutions and provided with treatment in the community.

The Network’s goal was in line with the aims of President Kennedy’s 1963 Community Mental Health Act. However, the unintended result of this legislation was that many psychiatric hospitals closed while too few community mental health centers were opened. Consequently, psychiatric patients became stuck in a “revolving door” process. After short hospital stays, they would be released and then readmitted. The crisis in mental healthcare was exacerbated by the 1967 Lanterman-Petris-Short Act, which prohibited the forcible treatment of mentally ill individuals unless they were a threat to themselves or other people. Families of acutely ill patients increasingly had to call the police.

In California, Jonathan consults a therapist about his panic attacks. The therapist claims that the brain’s frontal lobes are the cause of all anxiety. The human brain has evolved to simultaneously worry about the past and the future when, in ancient man, it was only tuned to present dangers. Jonathan has biofeedback therapy, learning relaxation techniques, and visualization.

Jonathan enjoys living in California, which was once the counterculture hub. The novelist Aldous Huxley famously settled in California in the 1950s, where he explored mysticism and “chemically altered states” (157). Interested in the concept that humans use only 10% of their brains, Huxley wondered if drugs could unlock this unused potential. Consequently, the author volunteered as a guinea pig for tests of the “psychometric” drug mescaline, which was believed to mimic the effects of schizophrenic psychosis. In The Doors of Perception (1954), Huxley described the hallucinatory effects of mescaline in mystical terms, claiming it opened up a new realm of consciousness, offering the most pleasurable aspects of psychosis. He defined the experience as “going sane.” Huxley’s influence led to an increasing perception of schizophrenia as “a psychedelic rather than a psychiatric disorder and even a form of enlightenment” (160).

Huxley’s ideas about “Human Potentialities” influenced Michael Murphy and Dick Price, who founded the Esalen Institute in Big Sur, California. Dick Price had a mental health crisis at Stanford and also saw psychosis as a journey toward enlightenment. Price believed the time he spent medicated in a psychiatric hospital had unnecessarily obstructed his spiritual development. The Esalen Institute was created as the antidote to psychiatric hospitals, normalizing psychosis to the point where it was no longer perceived as an illness.

In the 1950s, the Beat Generation writers also influenced the way mental illness was perceived. Several members of this artistic community had spent time in psychiatric hospitals, including Jack Kerouac, William S. Burroughs, and Allen Ginsberg. The authors frequently celebrated madness in their work, presenting psychosis as a reaction to the pressures to conform in a sick society.

Jo-Ann continues to be flattered by Michael’s interest in her. However, she is also wary of his intensity. One day, he has a convulsion but refuses to discuss it. Jo-Ann reconciles with a former boyfriend and travels to Germany to perform at a music festival. Michael also travels to Europe and unexpectedly turns up in Kiel, where Jo-Ann is performing. He tells Jo-Ann he needs to be near her to write.

Traveling to Switzerland, Michael works on a spy novel and begins to see his characters in the street. Michael has already received many rejection letters for short stories sent to magazines. He feels under pressure to finish his novel as he has promised his father that he will apply for law school.

Jonathan is writing a collection of short stories as part of his studies. His father is experiencing memory lapses due to Parkinson’s disease and warns Jonathan that writing “destroys everything.” Michael returns to New Rochelle and asks Jonathan to read his short stories. He also asks his friend to get the opinion of his mother. Ruth refuses to read the stories and is annoyed when Michael approaches her writer friend Cynthia with the same request. Jonathan finds Michael’s stories disturbing and violent. They have a distinctive style, but Jonathan cannot decide if they are “terrible” or “great.” Nevertheless, Jonathan feels Michael is overtaking him in the battle to become a writer. He has no idea that his friend believes Nazis are following him. Michael is still obsessed with Jo-Ann and phones her repeatedly until her boyfriend orders him to stop.

Michael stays at the Gatsby House as his father wants him to move out. He shares a room with Josh Ferber, who is depressed. Michael takes a baseball bat to bed and often paces the room at night. For her son’s sake, Jane Ferber decides that Michael should return home. She refers him to her friend Murray, a psychiatrist.

The author observes that the Network’s belief in community care chimed with the situation psychiatric hospitals found themselves in at the time. Due to a lack of capacity and legal restraints, state psychiatric institutions also wanted to keep patients out of hospitals. The case of Mrs. Cruz, who had paranoid schizophrenia, typified the treatment of mental illness. Mrs. Cruz had previously stabbed her husband and told hospital staff she planned to kill her five-year-old son. Recognizing her as a homicide risk, Jane Ferber and her team followed the process of the “crisis intervention guide.” Mrs. Cruz was given the option of hospitalization or alternatively agreeing not to kill her son.

Jonathan moves to New York City to be close to his girlfriend Mychal, who is training to be a rabbi. He begins his dissertation but is disillusioned with literary academia. The emphasis on poststructuralist critics like Derrida and Foucault detracts from his enjoyment of the subject. A text frequently discussed at Berkeley is Michel Foucault’s Madness and Civilization. Foucault argued that madness was a “social construct” created in the 17th century to demonize those who failed to conform to convention. The critic perceived all institutions as tools of oppression, including literature. Foucault also dismissed AIDS as a social construct despite eventually dying from the disease.

Jonathan’s parents call to tell him Michael is in a private psychiatric hospital. Ruth Laudor called the police, as Michael was convinced his parents were Nazis and had armed himself with a kitchen knife. Jonathan calls Michael, who reveals he burned the novel he was writing on his parents’ driveway. Jonathan promises to visit.

Michael is diagnosed with paranoid schizophrenia and claims that the hospital’s doctors are planning to remove part of his brain without anesthesia. Nevertheless, Jonathan struggles to believe his friend’s condition is as severe as it seems. Michael tells Jonathan to bring a tape recorder, camera, and The Literary Guide to the Bible wrapped in a brown paper bag when he visits. Jonathan prepares these items, but Mychal points out that the request for a tape recorder and camera is part of Michael’s delusions. Jonathan takes only the book and omits the paper bag. Jonathan dreams about Michael hanging on to his leg and biting him as he tries to get away.

When Jonathan visits the hospital, Michael, who was previously skeptical about religion, wears an Orthodox Jewish kippah. He is drugged and moves and speaks slowly. Michael tells Jonathan that the top seven law schools accepted him and he has deferred his place at Yale for a year. During his psychosis, Michael believed his parents were “surgically altered Nazis” who intended to kill him. Jonathan is surprised to learn that this delusion, combined with Michael arming himself with a kitchen knife, was not enough to have him committed. Michael’s parents had to convince him to voluntarily agree to treatment at the hospital.

During one visit, Michael and Jonathan read the Bible together. Choosing the story of Cain and Abel, Michael is preoccupied with why God accepts Abel’s offering but not Cain’s. He hints that he believes God is punishing him for his sins. Jonathan is relieved when it is time to leave.

Much of the literary theory Jonathan encounters draws on “metaphors of mental illness” (220). One example is Capitalism and Schizophrenia by Félix Guattari. Guattari argued that capitalist societies caused schizophrenia, and the disease was a form of revolution. The French philosopher and psychoanalyst contributed to the belief that antipsychotic medication was a tool of oppression. In The Wretched of the Earth, psychiatrist Frantz Fanon suggested that helping psychiatric patients adapt to society was a mistake, as it reinforced “colonial oppression.” Fanon suggested that the violence of madness was healing and a vital force in fighting for Algerian independence.

Despite praising the liberating effects of mental illness, both authors used antipsychotic drugs on their patients. They omitted this and other psychiatric facts from their books, fearing that they would weaken their theoretical arguments. After witnessing Michael’s deterioration, Jonathan realizes that literary metaphors bear no relation to the reality of mental illness.

Michael spends eight months in the psychiatric hospital. He still experiences hallucinations but has learned to separate them from reality like a split-screen TV. For those close to Michael, it is hard to identify when he first became ill. This is mainly because Michael always speaks convincingly, even when describing unlikely events. For example, he persuaded his parents to assist him in installing phone debugging devices. Jonathan finds Michael’s distress painful to observe. With no career prospects, Michael feels his former achievements have been erased.

Michael moves into Futura House, a halfway house for people with mental illnesses. He feels patronized and demeaned by the basic vocational skills taught there. Schizophrenia affects Michael’s attention span, working memory, executive function, and ability to recognize he is ill. He blames his cognitive impairment on the medication and not the disease.

Michael’s psychiatrists advise him to give up writing. They suggest he should initially take a low-stress job, such as working as a cashier at Macy’s. Chuck takes Michael to Macy’s, where they observe customers speaking rudely to the clerks. Michael is horrified, and Chuck concludes that his son should take up his deferred place at Yale Law School. Guido Calabresi, the dean of Yale Law School, honors Michael’s deferral despite his change in circumstances.

In this chapter, the author highlights how Michael’s stay at the halfway house demonstrates the problem of long-term care for people with schizophrenia. Most end up alternating between hospitals, “transitional housing,” and living with relatives. Many families are not equipped to take care of loved ones with severe mental illnesses.

Rosen describes how the process of deinstitutionalization became swept up in the civil rights movement. Psychiatric hospitals were viewed as segregating mentally ill people from the rest of society and violating their human rights. However, the consequences of treating people with schizophrenia like everyone else were illustrated in cases like that of Joyce Brown. Joyce, a Black woman, lived on the streets and often covered herself with excrement, exposed herself to passersby, and set money on fire. A court ordered Joyce’s release from a psychiatric hospital, stating her former actions signaled the assertion of her “independence.” However, her relatives criticized the ruling as inherently racist, suggesting that allowing Joyce to publicly behave this was a violation of her right to dignity and care.