The Best Minds by Jonathan Rosen

The subtitle of this is :A Story Of Friendship, Madness, And THe Tragedy Of Good Intentions. Once again, a book about mental illness that is well received and well reviewed but that I flat out did not like. Reviews describe it as examining the nature of madness but all that it examines is one man, Michael, who has an exceptional intellect and who also has schizophrenia; his outcome and course of illness is unlike the average person with psychotic illness and not one generalizable conclusion can be drawn from this example. If you are looking for a better book on this subject, check out Elyn Saks' book The Center Cannot Hold. The other aspect of this book that I find annoying is that there is nothing said about treatment. The treatment for schizophrenia has changed substantially since the time described in Hidden Valley Road. The prospect for living without hallucinations is better than it has ever been, but it does require that the patient be compliant with medications and the overall treatment plan, and that often involves the psychotic persons family and friends. Schizophrenia is not an illness that is easily navigable alone, and there is little if any information on that aspect of Michael's life. Then finally, this book perpetuates the myth that people with schizophrenia are violent. After every mass shooting there is an outcry that we need more mental health resources. That is certainly the case, but irrelevant to the situation at hand. No amount of mental health resources will prevent mass shootings until the access to guns is limited. To be helped by a mental health professional you have to want to be helped, and it requires a lot of work on the part of the patient who wants to kill people to get better, and that describes very few of the men who take an assault weapon into a public place. It is true that some people with schizophrenia are violent, but the numbers are few, and no greater than what is seen in the population as a whole. Unfortunately, the public perception of the prevalence of this and the reality are miles apart, and this book pours gasoline on that fallacy. I wish it were written more as a memoir and less as an analysis of what happened and what went wrong. As it stands, I cannot recommend it, although it is well written, I will give it that.