Michael Laudor had it all—a tall, good-looking 25 year old, a summa cum laude, PBK graduate of Yale, and a high paying job with Bain Consultants.  Then he began to have hallucinations, hear voices, and spiral downward into the madness of schizophrenia.  The author had been his best friend since they were 9 growing up on the same street in New Rochelle and going to school with him from 4th grade through Yale. But as Rosen went off to Berkeley to get a PhD in English, Laudor was hospitalized convinced that his parents had been killed by Nazi robots which were now coming for him.  A hospitalization, medication, a dedicated and hard driving father, and a Yale Law School Dean and several faculty members committed to his success were enough to get Laudor stabilized and eventually graduated from Yale Law.  A New York Times article about him in 1995 led to book and movie contracts (he was to be played originally by Leo Decaprio and then by Brad Pitt), and it appeared that Michael was going to succeed in his ambitions despite his major mental illness, when it all fell apart.

I won’t spoil the ending but I had the feeling all along that this would not end well and to say it did not would be an understatement of cosmic proportions.  Suffice it to say that at the age of 61, Laudor remains at the Mid-Hudson Forensic Psychotherapy Center, a high-security, locked facility, where he was sent in 1998 being deemed unfit to stand trial for murder.

Rosen has gone on to a successful career as a writer and editor, and after years of struggling to understand his best friend’s life and how he fit into it, he wrote this book.  It’s a detailed and moving account of Laudor’s achievements as well as his disease and tragic end.  It’s also a condemnation of the mental health services in America.  Rosen traces the history of psychiatry and mental health care from the nightmare days of ‘insane asylums’ through the failed dreams of community mental health and the deinstitutionalization movement of the 1970’s, and the current disastrous lack of services for people with severe mental illness.  The interplay between psychiatry and the law, the need to provide medication and safety to those with mental illness while respecting their autonomy, and the tension between independence and care are all discussed with rigor and sympathy.

This is a terrific book, deserving of its selection by the NYT as one of the five best non-fiction volumes of 2023.  It’s not easy to read about the tragedy of Michael Laudor, his family, his fiancee, and his friends, but it’s important to do so.  One can’t help but wonder how this story could have had a different ending if only….