The Best Minds is the true story of the lifelong friendship between the author, Jonathan Rosen, and Michael Laudor.  To an extent, as children and young adults, Rosen lives in his brilliant friend’s shadow.  While both attend Yale, it is Laudor who graduates summa cum laude in three years.  Laudor applies and is admitted to all the top law schools, and, at twenty-four, seems to be destined for great things.  Then, a switch flips. His parents have been replaced by Nazis, or so he claims.  He roams the house with a kitchen knife.  His mother locks herself in the bathroom and calls the police.  Rosen gets a call.  His friend is in a psychiatric hospital. He has been diagnosed with Paranoid Schizophrenia.  

After being stabilized on antipsychotics, Laudor is discharged to a halfway house and begins to attend a day hospital.  “Painfully aware of where he had been and where he ought to be” (p.243), he is advised to get a job as a cashier at Macy’s. Instead, he makes the extraordinary decision to matriculate at Yale Law School, whose acceptance he has deferred. At school, he wakes up every morning believing his room is on fire, “paralyzed with fear until his father called and told him the flames weren’t real” (p.277). Incredibly, with the encouragement of the dean and faculty, who “create a day hospital” (p.262) for Laudor and his classmates who read, edit, and type his work, he manages to graduate.   

Laudor looks for a job, but determined to be open about his illness, seems unemployable. Nevertheless, he is in a unique position to be a powerful advocate.  He is interviewed by the New York Times and is portrayed in glowing terms in a widely circulated article. There are bidding wars among several publishers for a book he is to write.  Leonardo DiCaprio expresses interest in playing him in a film. He receives a large advance which obviates the need for employment. For the director of the National Alliance on Mental Illness (NAMI) this is the perfect “opportunity to give the world a positive image of someone with serious mental illness” (p.406).